Hotel Savoy (in Ukrainian)

A gigantic hotel in an industrial Central European city, very much like Łódź, a few years after the end of World War I. A temporary shelter for a diverse array of fates, desperately trying to find meaning in times when “the world had dislocated its joints.” In Joseph Roth’s work, this hotel emerges as a collective metaphor for the entire ravaged postwar Europe. Hundreds of thousands of disillusioned returning soldiers, the surge of communist ideas, pervasive moral bankruptcy — the surface of the new life was suddenly overrun by all sorts of riffraff: currency traders, pimps, speculators, swindlers. This is the backdrop against which the author masterfully paints the intimate world of his sensitive and refined talent — with its sense of alienation and unfulfilled love.