Instead of simple comforts and a place to rest, however, he finds seven floors inhabited by bizarre characters: idealists, failed revolutionaries, clowns, people down on their luck barely able to settle their bills and those who are extravagantly rich. The hotel’s vertical structure reflects the social hierarchy; the more comfortable rooms at the ground floor belong to the rich, while the poor live upstairs. Moreover, dancers, strippers and actors from the upper levels often catered to the needs of the wealthy below.
Gabriel lived in one of the cheap rooms on the sixth floor, mingling mostly with the underprivileged. But the seemingly unshakable order of things gradually begins to change – there is talk of revolution in the air, as the factory workers begin their strike. The revolution doesn’t take off, though, and in the end, Roth’s narrator leaves Łodź, dreaming about the new promised land – California. The story's last word is ‘America’.
Gabriel Dan’s story is obviously a romanticized version of Joseph Roth’s own past. The author would claim that he fought in the war, even though he probably never ever held a gun in his hand. When World War I started, Joseph Roth was a second-year student, and at that time, he spoke out against war effort and declared himself a pacifist. Yet, around 1916, his seemingly unshakable resolve began to crack, due to some of his classmates, young women who saw him as a scaredy-cat and goldbrick.
Together with a friend – the novelist and poet Józef Wittlin – Roth tried to get admitted into the army and fight, but without much success, due to poor health. Instead, what truly connected the author to Gabriel Dan was a room at one of the upper floors of Savoy, where Roth began writing his debut novel. While Joseph Roth lived till the end of his life in various hotels, the Savoy is the only one he decided to immortalise.