"La leyenda del santo bebedor", legado y testamento de Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth concluded The Legend of the Holy Drinker two weeks before he died in Paris, drunk and stateless. Written between the fall of 1938 and the spring of 1939, his last nouvelle is considered the legacy and testament of his innermost thought, but, as with the rest of his work, it has often been read exclusively within the Western canon, ignoring its undeniable inscription in the European Jewish tradition. The researcher Berta Ares Yáñez explores in this illuminating essay the topos, symbols, metaphors and literary motifs that characterize the work of Roth, prophet of modernity, in the light of the literature of the Eastern shetl and Lurianic mysticism, and thus reconciles it with what Hannah Arendt called the "hidden tradition" to refer to texts whose understanding cannot be referred to the canon with which Europe has explained itself.