'A Very Peculiar Sorrow Attacks Me'

The feuilleton is an attractively flexible form, part journalism, part essay, that has seldom successfully crossed the Atlantic. The name is derived from the French feuillet, meaning the leaf of a book. Though spawned in France, the feuilleton achieved mastery among German-language writers, specifically Austrian, more specifically Viennese, even more specifically Jewish. Among its most accomplished practitioners are Alfred Polgar, Karl Kraus, Peter Altenberg and Egon Friedell. Clive James described the feuilleton as “a demanding genre that reached a high state of development in Vienna.” A minor literary critic named Hitler snuffed out the tradition, which has never fully recovered. Another practitioner, better known in the Anglophone world (thanks largely to the translations of Michael Hofmann), is the great novelist Joseph Roth, author of The Radetzky March (1932). On October 31, 1926, in the Frankfurter Zeitung, Roth published “How does it look in the Russian street?” (trans.…