Brody or Brodi is a small provincial town about a hundred kilometers miles east of Lviv.
Joseph Roth was born in this town.
Yesterday we visited Brody. We went to the rather large Jewish cemetery that strangely enough survived the war and we saw the remains of a synagogue.
There is a plaque on the gymnasium that Joseph Roth attended and a street is named after him. The address where he was born and where he lived till he moved to Lemberg remains a mystery.
In 1927 Joseph Roth wrote: “Es ist furchtbar schwer, ein Ostjude zu sein.” (“It’s terribly hard to be an Ostjude.”)
Thank God I’m not an Ostjude; I’m a decent German Jew.