Joseph Roth finished The Legend of the Holy Drinker two weeks before he died in Paris, drunk and stateless. Written between the fall of 1938 and the spring of 1939, his last nouvelle is considered the legacy and testament of his most intimate thought, but, as with the rest of his work, it has often been read exclusively within the Western canon, ignoring its undeniable inscription in the European Jewish tradition. In this illuminating essay, researcher Berta Ares Yáñez explores the topos, symbols, metaphors and literary motifs that characterize the work of Roth, prophet of modernity, in the light of the literature of the eastern shetl and Lurian mysticism, and thus reconciles it. with what Hannah Arendt called the "occult tradition" to refer to texts whose understanding cannot be referred to the canon with which Europe has explained itself.