The Wandering Jews

The Wandering Jews

By: Joseph Roth  

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Average Customer Rating: 5.0 out of 5

Publisher: Granta Books

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Eastern Jews don't have a home, but a grave in every cemetery - 'The Eastern Jew looks at the West with a longing that the West does absolutely not deserve.'
How prophetic was this sentence from Roth's 1927 essay, as far as Vienna and Berlin was concerned!
The essay's subject was the westward emigration of Eastern (Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Romanian ...) Jews. Roth specifies in his introduction that the essay was written for those, to whom these people did not need to be defended for their poverty and partial backwardness, but for those who respected these people's pain and hardship.

This emigration had massively increased after WW1, the Russian Revolution, and the disintegration of the Austrian Empire. One reason for this massive movement was the new concept of the nation state. Central and Eastern Europe was a patchwork of `nations' in non-national states. The western concept of the nation state was forced upon the world, and the Jews ended up without a state --- so they needed to invent one. Roth was skeptical about Zionism, which would lead to a European kind of state and would keep wearing the European Mark of Cain (Roth's words, not mine). But it was certainly better to be a nation than to be mistreated by another. But can it be the world's purpose to consist of nation states?

The Eastern Jews were not generously welcomed, not even by the Western Jews. What was an Eastern Jew? All those whose ancestors had fled from Western pogroms to the East. Western Jews were those who were lucky that their ancestors did not have to flee. Or who had forgotten that their ancestors had fled from Eastern pogroms to the West. In a nutshell: Western Jews were from Breslau, Eastern Jews from Krakau.

Roth's essay is not a scientific analysis, not sociologically, not politically, not historically. It describes Jewish reality in various settings: the traditional small Jewish town, the Jewish minorities in large towns (Vienna, Berlin, Paris, New York/Chicago). We learn about divisions among Jewish believes, about rabbis and miracle rabbis, about professions and about festivals and markets and life in general.
The text is based on Roth's personal experience and observations, as one of them and as a journalist after the war. I have by now probably read over 90% of his available fiction, and I like some of his novels and stories better than others. For the language and the attitude of this essay, it ranks high among my favorite texts by him. It is the practice ground for the great novel Job, and it plays into bits and pieces of many other fictional texts by Roth.

10 years later, JR wrote a preface for a new edition planned by the exiled publisher Lange out of Amsterdam in 1937. I would like to summarize Roth's last chapter:
1. Zionism is only a partial solution to the Jewish problem.
2. Jews can only achieve the dignity that gives outer freedom, if the host nations achieve the inner freedom and the dignity that grants empathy.
3. That is not likely to happen - without a miracle from God.
Jewish believers still have their heavenly consolation. The others have `vae victis'.
End of paraphrase.
End of book.
End of review.
The 1937 edition was not published, as far as I know.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
extraordinary book - This is a non fiction book by Joseph Roth whose other books are mainly fiction - he was a prized journalist and writes like the best of both worlds - this book is an extraordinary picture of a period of life which we don't know enough about - because WW II got in the way and rendered information about Jews and life in Germany and eastern Europe in the 20's and 30's sort of academic and moot - It is an important and compelling and sad book - sad because we readers know facts that the author doesn't - we know what happened and he doesn't know the future. It is a valuable book which I have recommended and given to many friends.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Brilliant, compassionate, and chillingly prescient - "The Wandering Jews" of the title are the displaced and unwanted Jews of Eastern Europe (from where Roth himself came before he made himself into one of Western Europe's foremost journalists and writers) before World War II. As Roth puts it, "Eastern Jews have no home anywhere, but their graves may be found in every cemetery." And as Roth foreshadowed (that line originally was published in 1925; this translation also includes the preface and an afterword to the later 1937 edition), the plight of the Eastern Jews only promised to become more dire. Indeed, one senses that Roth despaired that any strident alarm would be in vain. Thus, more than an alarm, THE WANDERING JEWS is a requiem. (And Roth went on to drink himself to death in 1939.)

In the first part of the book, Roth sets out to limn the character and essence of the Eastern Jew. I am willing to believe that he is thoroughly successful. (Example: "None of the many untrue and unjust accusations that are brought against Eastern Jews by the West are as untrue and unjust as the accusation that they are what the gutter press likes to call Bolshevik. Of all the world's poor, the poor Jew is surely the most conservative.")

In the second part of the book, Roth provides snapshots of five different aggregations of the Eastern Jews -- in the ghettoes of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris, in America (where there are "people who are more Jewish than the Jews, which is to say the Negroes"), and in Soviet Russia. As for the future of the Jews in Russia, Roth was somewhat optimistic in 1925, but by 1937 that optimism had been dispelled altogether. (Roth thus proved himself more cold-bloodedly realistic than many contemporary European liberals.)

Joseph Roth was a superb writer and a masterful polemicist. (I recently read a collection of H.L. Mencken's journalism, this particular one "A Religious Orgy in Tennessee", dealing with the Scopes Monkey Trial, and while there are obvious similarities between Roth and Mencken, who were contemporaries, Roth was by far the better and more cultured writer.) Here, the sardonic and sarcastic tone, albeit understandable, is at times wearing, but it is readily tolerated and forgiven by virtue of the sheer acuity of Roth's intellect and insights and by his compassion.

Roth is extremely prescient, not only about communism and Soviet Russia and about the Nazis and the Holocaust ("Centuries of civilization are no guarantee that a European people, by some ghastly curse of fate, will not revert to barbarism."), but also, startlingly so, about the Zionist/Palestinian dilemma. With regard to that last conundrum, I will let Roth, once again, speak for himself:

"Zionism and nationhood are by their nature Western European ideals * * *. Only in the East do people live who are unconcerned with their "nationality", in the Western European sense. They speak several languages, are themselves the product of several generations of mixed marriages, and fatherland for them is whichever country happens to conscript them. * * * Natiionality is a Western concept."

"The young halutzim [Zionist Jews who seek to establish a Jewish presence in Palestine] are brave farmers and workers, and they demonstrate the willingness of the Jew to work and till the fields and become sons of the soil, in spite of having spent hundreds of years among books. Unfortunately the halutzim are also oblighed to take up arms, to be soldiers, and to protect the land against the Arabs. Thus the European example has been carried into Palestine. * * * The Jew has a right to Palestine, not because he once came from there but because no other country will have him. The Arab's fear for his freedom is just as easy to understand as the Jew's genuine intention to play fair by his neighbor. And despite all that, the immigration of young Jews into Palestine increasingly suggests a kind of Jewish Crusade, because, unfortunately, they also shoot."

This is a remarkable and brilliant portrait of a marginal and now tragically vanished people by a remarkable and brilliant person.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
The Fears of 1937 Were Realized Sooner than Roth Thought - This book was a paen by a 'civilized (read westernized)' Jew on the cusp of WW2 and the holocaust. Roth travelled in most of post-WW1 Eastern Europe to learn the plight of his Jewish compatriots. In the original edition (written in 1926) he speaks of Eastern European Jews (mostly those of Galicia and the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires) being able to find freedom of conscience and a world without anti-semitism by moving to the West. Unfortunately, by the West he meant Germany.

In the epilogue of the 1937 edition (which he wrote from self-exile in Paris) he takes the "New Germany" to task for the treatment of the Jews. He make major points as to the failure of the League of Nations to protect the Versailles Treaty 'national minorities' and specifically the treatment of DPs (displaced persons, people literally without a country). He makes the point that animals are protected in most countries better than Jews and DPs.

He is prescient when he speaks of an 'impending disaster' and seems to presage 'donor burnout'. He tells how right after a calamity, everyone seems to want to pitch in, but after awhile, except for a few philantropists, everyone pretty much wants to go back to their own lives.
This book is among the strongest statements made prior to WW2 of the approaching calamity, not just for Jews but all of Europe.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
The Ostjüde Writes Back - Joseph Roth's "The Wandering Jews" is one of the best written and most important books about East European Jews ever published. At a time of growing anti-Semitism (the first edition was written in 1926 and an update was published in Paris in 1937) and an immigration crisis affecting Germany as countless refugees poured into Berlin from the East, Roth--himself a Jew from Galicia, the easternmost part of the former Austrian empire--creates a sympathetic yet clearsighted portrait of contemporary Jewish life. In the process he effectively responds to all the stereotypes and libels heaped on East European Jews. For the contemporary reader, however, what is most affecting about this portrait is Roth's ability to convey a panorama of Jewish life on the brink of destruction. Though no one (except maybe Hitler) could have predicted, even in 1937, the extent of the devastation that would be visited on European Jewry, Roth's writing in this book serves as an indelible and moving memorial to a civilization that would soon disappear forever. It must therefore count among the first books in what would now be called "Holocaust literature," and one of the most meaningful works of protest literature--protest against the stereotypes that reduced Jews to objects of scorn and contempt; protest against the violence that would ensue from these stereotypes--of all time. Michael Hofmann's understated and articulate translation of this poignant, heartbreaking little book is a tremendous service for English-language readers. It fills in a vital space in the emerging image of Joesph Roth, a writer finally receiving his due in the precincts of European modernism, and it should be read by everyone interested in good writing and the problems of 20th century history.

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