Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #148813 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 168 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
As a journalist, Joseph Roth's greatest strength, and perhaps his greatest weakness, was his self-professed "love" for his subjects. Roth, who is best known for his novels (particularly The Radetsky March), was the star journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung in the early 1920s, when he began writing stories that led to The Wandering Jews. This book, newly translated by Michael Hofmann, is a masterpiece of literary journalism whose political prescience (regarding tensions between Eastern and Western Jews, and the too-easy consolations of assimilation) is grounded in eclectic character studies (of, for instance, Parisian elites, a carnival performer from Radziwillow, a dock worker in Odessa). In an age of idea-driven journalism, when stories are often tailored to prove a writer's pre-existing thesis, Roth's lovingly inductive reasoning is refreshing. And his aphoristic insights are as spontaneous as they are circumspect. ("When a catastrophe occurs, people on hand are shocked into helpfulness".) The statement that best summarises Roth's belief about the unalterable fate of the Jews also epitomises the polished spontaneity of his style: Roth writes that wandering is "a tribulation that is appropriate to all Jews, and to all others besides. Lest we forget that nothing in this world endures, not even a home; and that our life is short, shorter even than the life of the elephant, the crocodile, and the crow. Even the parrots outlive us". --Michael Joseph Gross

Synopsis
The first English translation of Joseph Roth's portrayal of the Jews of Eastern Europe: their poverty, their towns and trades, their feast days and the mysticism of their rabbis. Roth was conscious that this was a community living under the threat of extermination.

From the Publisher
Media Reviews
‘This [is a] rich little book…Roth’s gift of phrasing, which can switch without warning from lyrical sentiment to irony, never deserts him’ Observer

‘This new book contains superb reportage’ The Irish Times

‘Almost every page has flashes of the novelist’s descriptive wit and the trained journalist’s eye for a story’ Sunday Telegraph

‘It shows some prophetic insights, and some illusions’ Evening Standard

Customer Reviews

Plenty of insights, but ultimately lightweight
The recent publication of Roth's musings on the Jews has brought positive reviews, many of them making more than a nod in the direction of the respected translator Michael Hofmann. Such praise for the translation is largely well-deserved. The only possible quibble concerns the occasional point in the (English) text where the momentum of the piece is halted by an odd, often non-English usage (possibly done for deliberate effect). One can almost hear the gears grinding in the translator's (rather than the author's) brain.

However, despite the useful insights it provides into Jewish life (and into Roth's views on Jewish life - not the same thing, of course), this rather haphazard accumulation of anecdotes ultimately adds up to something rather disappointing and lightweight. Too many of the details fall flat in their determinedly quotidian meanderings, rather than coming across as valuable insights "from the horse's mouth", as it were. In Roth's own novels, and the work of other German writers such as Günter Grass, such an accretion of detail adds up to a kind of symbolic naturalism that teaches us things at both micro and macro level, about both the immediate context and the wider world. Removed from the discipline of plot, the descriptions have nothing to drive them forward but the reader's own hindsight.

Nevertheless, such visions of a vanished world are, of course, valuable per se precisely because much of what they describe (the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe) was largely wiped out. The slim volume is therefore worth a read for anybody interested in the field.

My own personal favourite among the wealth of detailed observations, which perhaps illustrates the problems inherent in such a personalized view, where one person's insight may be another person's prejudice, is the reference to Jewish interpreters. Roth says that Jews, being able to understand the spirit of the outsider, intuit. Gentiles merely translate. (As a translator/interpreter myself, that tickled me).

The book, then, like much of Roth's work, is one of the only ways we have of remembering this vanished world. It should be read in that light.

This is the first translation into English of "The Wandering Jews", possibly because Roth's work is being rediscovered (or just discovered), but also perhaps because such memoirs are gaining in importance from a historical point of view, irrespective of any perceived literary merit.