They were images of a regular life, of Leon having escaped his origins. There is “no harder lot than that of the Eastern Jew newly arrived in Vienna,” Joseph Roth wrote of the interwar years, yet Leon created a life among those Jews who had “their feet safely pushed under desks in the First District,” the ones that had “gone ‘native.’ ” Seemingly on the up, he occupied a position between the desk sitters and the Ostenjuden, politically active, a reader of the socialist Neue Freie Presse (New Free Press), and a supporter of the progressive Social Democrats, a party distinct from the Christian
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