The Border, with aspects of the private life of its writer, Joseph Roth. It will never be known under what circumstances he conceived any one of the book’s chapters. Bringing forth such an investigation could have, in some way, clarified certain problematic aspects of the tale that do not seem at all clear from even a literary perspective or a mystical point of view. It is only known that Roth worked on this text constantly, as he gave shape to other books; and that many of the abrupt changes in narration were attributable to reasons of a personal nature… that he even left many of the most significant pages lost for good. The fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the writer’s wanderings through Europe, his adaptation to the prevailing German culture in Vienna, the rise of National Socialism, his uncontrollable alcoholism and his final condition as a poor and desperate refugee in Paris — a circumstance that ultimately brings him to a type of suicide — become a kind of unattainable key to the story. Maybe this is why the author narrates, at this point, a truly extraordinary event, that for many holds a relationship to the Jewish Sephirot, that is, to the sphere of divine emanations, in which the creative power of God unfolds. It has already been mentioned that Jacob Pliniak has acquired a plot of land on a lake; that he has constructed, with the help of his spiritual brother, a house where he lives with Julia, his wife, and Rose, his wife’s daughter whom he loves as if she were his own. It is also known that Jacob Pliniak has become a type of rabbi in a community characterized by its members’ slow and steady abandonment of their religion. Despite all of that, at this time he continues developing his personal ideas about water and the body. Thus he continues bathing himself, fully clothed, at unsuspected moments, soaking his feet in trays for hours upon hours, placing his hands in containers of salt water until his skin prunes up. The out of the ordinary fact described by Joseph Roth occurs when Jacob Pliniak submerges in the lake to carry out his daily ritual ablutions. Instants later he returns to the surface, having transformed into his own daughter. But not into the girl that we’ve known until now, but rather into an elderly woman, eighty years of age. Jacob Pliniak has acquired the body of an old woman, in whose memory the existence of a Jacob Pliniak is perhaps logged, a dead man that drowned while performing his ablutions in a lake upon whose shores he built his house. It’s important to point out that in the Kabbalah these transformations that entail person, gender, and time are referred to as “Aphoristic Pools.” The further distanced the person, gender, and time of the transformation, the closer the story comes to another dimension. Perhaps this is why the writer Joseph Roth dares not to just create this very particular episode, but also, just lines ahead, to insist that in the town, the one which the elderly woman Rose Plinianson must now face, hundreds of dance academies have sprung up.