The Wandering Jews

Joseph Roth

Editions

Review

How extraordinary it is to see this document published in English at the beginning of the 21st Century!  First published in Austria in the early 1930s, it is a cry of pain for the problems of Jews from Eastern Europe. Impoverished and subject to pogroms and abuse at home, unwanted abroad.  Profoundly civilised, but neither understood nor listened to… As a portrait of the Jews just before the holocaust, it is of the greatest interest, as one would expect from the author of The Radetzky March pbk £8.99.  Surprisingly, the place Roth invokes as behaving well towards its Jews is Soviet Russia.  He wrote a new preface to a 1938 edition of the book in which he grants that Russia’s treatment is not quite so good as he supposed, but even so he does not fundamentally alter his estimate of the theoretical benefits brought to Russian Jews by the Revolution.

The conclusion of the book offers no hope for the future of European Jews – neither in the East, nor in the West.  It is shocking to register that this is before the Second World War, before Roth had any idea of how the Soviet Union behaved towards people, or what the Nazis would succeed in perpetrating on the Jews.  It is precisely because the book is dated that it is so interesting. - review by Johnny de Falbe