Review of 'The Salt of the Earth' by Josef Wittlin

I really enjoyed this book about the outbreak of WW1 from the perspective of a single, not-very-bright, Polish-Ruthenian man. It covers his life history before the outbreak of war, his feelings for the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the process by which he is conscripted and then taken away for basic training at a garrison town in Hungary. It's beautifully written, and it introduces lots of fantastic detail about Ruthenia, the natural landscape, farming, and an ethnic group I'd never heard of before (hutnuls).

Most of the time I was reading it I was comparing it to Von Rezzori, whose writing - about the neighbouring region of the Bukovina - I love.

It's a bit Schweik-like...our main character is a bit simple (though not also shrewd like Schweik), and there's a lot of journeying, and there is some lampooning of the bureaucratic absurdities of the army. The tone is as much tragic as comic, though, which I rather preferred...I've never really got into Schweik.

It's impossible not to comment on the tone of the writing about Jews, of which there is rather a lot. Jews are ever-present in the story, and they are described in lots of detail, as weak, crafty, and somewhat physically repulsive. It's not a very vicious portrayal - it's almost like the way a not-very-nasty anti-black racist would talk about Africans as physical specimens. It just goes with the territory; Jews were part of the social landscape in Galicia and Ruthenia (and the empire), and the stereotype of Jews was part of the mental landscape - again, hard not to think of Von Rezzori's Memoirs of An Antisemite. From time to time it made me feel uncomfortable. Afterwards, I learned that Josef Wittlin was a baptized Jew who identified as Jewish and wrote Jewish-Polish poetry in the interwar years. Go figure.