John Hughes
speaker
199 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 4 Jun
John Hughes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yes, indeed.
Many listeners, if they know Roth at all, they will probably think of him as an Austrian author, but his origins were far from Austria as we know it today.
As you said, born in Brody, which at the time of his birth was in Galicia, which was the largest
the northernmost province in Austria-Hungary, the Habsburg Empire.
Galicia, as you mentioned, occupies a fairly large area which falls now within southeast Poland and the west of Ukraine.
And if you look up
Brody on the map today, you'll see it's there in the west of Ukraine, maybe 100 kilometres or so east of Lviv or Lemberg, as it was known in Roth's time in German.
But in the year of Roth's birth, 1894, Brody was very much a border town.
It was right on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, close to the border with Russia.
And because of that, it had flourished as a sort of trading centre for the previous century or so.
And, you know, perhaps as a consequence of that, it was quite a mixed community, multi-ethnic, multilingual, multicultural.
Roth himself was born to a German-speaking Jewish family and so grew up speaking one of the languages of Empire High, High German.
But he would have been very familiar with the sound of Polish, Yiddish, Ukrainian, Russian also during his childhood.
And I think he also had a working knowledge of all of those languages.
languages.
Despite that, I think Roth had felt that Brodie was quite a provincial place.
He spent his childhood often wishing he could get away, even though later in life it became so important to him and in his work.
He was brought up by a single mother, who by all accounts was quite protective, overprotective even.
He never knew his father, who had abandoned the family when Roth was quite young.
In later life, Roth tended to fabricate fantastical stories about this absent father.
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