Beatitudes
Joseph Roth indicates that at the time when Rose Plinianson emerged from the waters, the dance schools were a space that took on a greater number of students by the day. In the original text it says that people of the most diverse qualities turned up to that town, with great excitement, in hopes that their lives could occur with a sense of rhythm. They had erected both the typical salons used for rehearsing celebratory parties and a series of grandiose academies where they even taught the steps to tropical music. The competition was so abundant that, with growing frequency, new dances emerged with techniques even more difficult than the last ones. It was oftentimes the norm to resort to such advanced bodily skills that the performances carried with them an air of finding yourself in the rings of a circus instead of a dance studio. After reading these lines, some might find it logical that the publication of a text with these characteristics in the form of a book became impossible. Which is the motive why Joseph Roth reserved this story for his moments of inebriation. According to some scholars, the writing of The Border had more to do with a type of prayer that helped the author not only sanctify the things he went about indicating, but also to testify as to the secretive world that he had cultivated throughout his life. The massive construction of schools was, without a doubt, the most important business in the region. The main avenue, aside from the church and the bank, had all other available spaces dedicated to this activity. The learning methods were so effective that they became famous in many surrounding towns. The lines of automobiles that formed on the access roads were long. It became common to see tourists sleeping in their cars or even on the street itself. The appearance of these schools likewise brought about the immigration of a large quantity of musicians. There were aficionados of primitive instruments and performers of classical music. Someone even showed up who invented his own instruments, many of which played themselves. Some of the performers arrived with their families, who settled down in the camps equipped for said means. Certain foreigners could not grasp the reasons for which there were no hotels in the region. Few were those who knew that a decree issued by the women’s committee, overseen decidedly by Rose Plinianson, had forbidden them. At this point it would be fitting to question the authenticity of the exact words that Joseph Roth used to narrate the previous paragraph. At the Kiepenheuer & Witsch publishing house, two versions of this passage exist. Reading the first, which is not the one offered just lines above, one might think that the author treated the story as a finished work… that he wished to prepare the reader for its immediate publication. It is not known where the idea to use dance as the narrative arc capable of transmitting the book’s central idea could have emerged from. Perhaps Joseph Roth was seeking — through the curious mixture of mystical and mythical tendencies of interpretation — a theory in which dance played a fundamental role, to express his vision of the collapse of an entire lineage. It is not by chance that the narrative begins in the era of Russian pogroms and ends a century later. Nor that we see how a community of immigrants goes about gradually shedding itself of its ancient beliefs. Joseph Roth does not portray political regimes carrying out racial cleanses — as some authors tend to do when writing on the topic — but rather he presents the facts in such a way that the decision seems to be taken on, and quite naturally, by the inhabitants of a hypothetical town taken over by hundreds of dance academies. The writer affirms in his story that only the houses lived in by members of the women’s committee remained free of the influence of the academies. The homes of these characters appear here as if they had been constructed around a lake of stagnant waters. The lake and the houses are shown, in this version, to be an awful-smelling place, plagued by insects, and not the beautiful pool supposedly found by Jacob Pliniak in the first account of the facts, when, following innumerable letters written by his brother, he reaches the area, accompanied by Julia and Rose, his adopted daughter. Even less so as the splendid terrain prepared for him by his spiritual brother, Abraham. The houses, says the author in this part of the story, have been built facing a lake of pestilent waters that host an exaggerated swarm of insects, which would render the development of a normal dance-hall impossible. But living in these conditions does not seem to matter to the members of the women’s committee. They have one mission to complete: to close the academies set up in the city. They are not willing to let themselves be defeated and give up their houses, as dozens of families have done in recent years, not only for religious reasons but faced with the offers by the current academy owners. Recently an academy closed down because the committee discovered that the dressing rooms were being used as a place to sleep. They managed to revoke its license, but could not take back the property. The owner was still Pliniak Realty, founded many years back by Jacob’s spiritual brother, Abraham, who did not delay in putting it back up for rent. Nor did the committee let a hand touch the community church, which was in the sights of more than one academy. Other spots that the committee managed to save were the boardwalk and the beach. They managed to issue a prohibition against walking in that area with musical instruments or dance costumes. Any strange movement carried out was punished with a fine. To determine when a dance step began to break the law they had set up discrete signs, on which drawings explained the moment in which the movement began to be dangerous. The clarity with which, in this passage, Joseph Roth’s unspoken ideas about the apostates of his generation are expressed is astonishing. Since the time he lived in his native Galicia, the writer felt like he was living out the last phases of the Jewish spirit. His past appeared to be getting placed on trial by history, he implies in one of his letters — lost in our times — warning, a bit later on, of the complete obviousness of his interpretation of what had occurred. The deepest evil was not necessarily the one that had put the pogroms into play, he pointed out, but rather the one that would attack the faith of the generations who survived them. Jacob Pliniak also pointed out, immediately after subjecting himself to the day’s first ablution, that they needed to proclaim a new way to read the Scriptures. With these affirmations, Jacob Pliniak and Joseph Roth in equal parts seemed to intuit that fate had nothing to do with them. Or at the very least with a religion like the one that they shared. It is not coincidence, then, that just like the penances that Joseph Roth imposed upon himself, mostly characterized by the long and tortured writing sessions to which he obligated himself — brought forth oftentimes in a state of complete inebriation — Jacob Pliniak soaked his skin whenever the slightest opportunity presented itself. Nor that Joseph Roth would come to affirm that not everything was honesty among the members of the city’s women’s committee. He writes that, on one occasion, a scandal broke out involving two of its main members: the respectable Rose Plinianson, the transformed daughter, and the reverend Joshua MacDougal, an aspiring priest well known in the region for acquiring the most awing religious conversions purely by means of spiritual songs. It all started to come to light that Rose Plinianson had begun to participate (although, if you take her later testimony to be true, it was almost without intending to) in the academy fever that suffocated the city. To the surprise of all, Rose Plinianson created, overnight, her own dance academy. This apparent contradiction, which could appear to be a mistake in Joseph Roth’s writing, is possibly part of the reason that the text of