Joseph Roth

"[Keiron] Pim had read one of Roth’s works years before — a book called The Wandering Jews, in which Roth returns to his Galician homeland to describe the 'wonder-rabbis' and the Jewish believers who flocked to them. As he began to read more, he seized on Roth’s urgency and intensity, which he compares to a 'double espresso.' He seized too on the way that Roth’s voice seems to reach across decades to pull readers into his vivid scenes, and on Roth’s renewed relevance as an outraged witness to the rise of tyranny. From exile, in 1934, Roth wrote, in a furious statement as applicable now as it was then: 'The epoch-making discovery of modern dictatorships is the invention of the loud lie, based on the psychologically correct assumption that people will believe a shout when they doubt speech.'"