Weights and Measures, Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth's novels happen on the fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where people live by accident, almost; they hadn't meant to come here, or were on their way somewhere else. In Weights and Measures, Anselm Eibenschütz, formerly of the eleventh artillery regiment, is sent to a small municipality next to the Russian border as Inspector of Weights and Measures. He wanted to stay in the army but his wife, also accidental, wouldn't hear of it. 

The Inspector spends much of his time in a border tavern frequented by vagrants, thieves and Russian deserters who drink mead and 99% schnapps, which is illegal, and eat sausage, horseradish and plates of salted peas, occasionally bursting into songs that, far from celebrating their new freedom, bewail instead their lost country, as they drink themselves into a stupor. 'Ja lubyl tibia', is their favourite. 

I googled the song and found a rendition by Alexandra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEZ3WCYCxCc. Here, suddenly, was the music, the hopelessness and diffuse yearning of my forbears, I recognised all the shifts in pace, the scoops of emotion; the border country of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was pulled back from its remoteness into my rarely revived sense of origin. 

I read most of the book in a single day, in refuge from bad weather and insomnia, sinking slowly with Anselm Eibenschütz into the decay of his marriage, the vanity of his job, his infatuation with Euphemia, the gypsy girl, his decline into drink and eventual death.

Joseph Roth died of drink, in Paris, in his forties. He writes with a warm cynicism. Of the origins of the wiliest character in the story, Leibusch Jadlowker, owner of the border tavern, he says:

Rumour had it that Jadlowker had fled from Odessa because he had slain a man with a sugar-loaf. As a matter of fact it was hardly a rumour, it was almost a truth.

This is where a life is lived, between rumour and truth, in countries whose borders are permanently in a state of deliquescence. Anselm Eibenschütz wishes he'd never left the cavalry. The order of the army is such that one doesn't have to face the central void. Whereas the Inspector of Weights and Measures constantly faces the fact that no one's weights and measures are correct. The central void is everywhere.