Joseph Roth s final novella, The Leviathan, concerns a shtetl s finest coral merchant and how his dream of seeing the sea for the first time materializes at a terrible cost.

Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was the great elegist of the cosmopolitan culture that flourished in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He published several books and articles before his untimely death at the age of 44. Roth's writing has been admired by J. M. Coetzee, Jeffrey Eugenides, Elie Wiesel, and Nadine Gordimer, among many others.