Joseph Roth was born in Galicia in 1894. He worked as a journalist in Vienna and Berlin until Hitler's rise to power. In 1933, he fled to Paris, where he joined a growing community of exiled intellectuals. He died there in 1939.
Michael Hofmann is a poet and frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, and is widely regarded as one of the world's foremost translators of works from German to English. He lives in London.