Joden op drift

The Wandering Jews by Joseph Roth

Known best for his classic novel about the Austria-Hungary Empire, The Redetsky March, Joseph Roth was first and foremost known for his journalistic reports about the state of Europe following the first Great War.

In The Wandering Jews his reports about the state of

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the Jewish people in Eastern and Western Europe is well documented. From the shtetls of Poland to the streets of Paris and the quarantines of Ellis Island the journeys and lives of the common Jew and the assimilated German Jews are portrayed.

In the first chapter, “Eastern European Jews in the West” while important to frame the time and environment within which he wrote this book, it is rather lengthy and thus boring, for the task at hand. It would have easily been addressed in ½ the time but why quibble, for what follows explodes off the page; in the richness of description and the wisdom of observation he captures all the intricacies of activities and personalities that persist within the Jewish communities of Eastern and Western Europe.

From the muddy streets of the shtetl to the boulevards of Berlin and Paris he reports on the unique qualities of the Jewish people, their history and tradition and the blind eye the German Jews turned on their own kind only to then be caught up in the horrors of the Nuremberg Laws and what followed.

“…The German Jew had grown arrogant. He had lost the God of his fathers and acquired an idol instead: the idol of civilzatory patriotism. But God had not forgotten him. And he sent him on his wanderings, a tribulation that is appropriate to 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 parrots outlive us”.

His reports were probably among the first to foretell the coming Holocaust and the damage it left in its wake for both the Jewish people and their tormentors.

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A short journalistic book about East European Jews in the 1920’s.
The book starts with a chapter about the dream of East European Jews about Western Europe (Germany and France), a Western Europe that doesn’t exist, except in literature. It also describes the problem of Jews not being a

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nationality, a nation state, except in the nascent state in Palestine. As Jews are not a nation, they are only tolerated, even if in some West European states they were treated as a national minority.
There follows chapters on the East European shtetl (small town), Jewish ghettos in Vienna, Berlin and Paris, the difficulty of emigrating to the US and a somewhat idealistic description of Jews in the newly formed Soviet Union. The chapter about life in a shtetl is probably most interesting.
Written in 1926-1927, the book is premised around East European Jews being better off than those in Western Europe, whilst not shying away from the problems in the West. He is also dismissive of emigrants to Palestine being able to retain their Jewish identity once they took up arms against the Arabs.
The book ends with the preface to a new edition of the book published in 1937, critically noting the erosion of rights of German Jews, who were stripped of German citizenship and forbidden relations with non-Jews. As Roth puts it, it seems he “must now defend German Jews against their cousins from Lodz, just as [he] attempted previously to defend the Lodz cousins against attacks by the German.”
He finishes pessimistically that Zionism (a Jewish state in Palestine) can bring only a partial solution; and Jews who remain in Europe will not achieve equality. History was so much crueler.

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Fascinating nonfiction from Roth only translated into English about 20 years ago.
Roth was a Jewish journalist and novelist. This book is a heartfelt view of the Jews of Eastern Europe in the 1920s in the aftermath of the first world war. The author’s writing is characterized by an apparent love

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of Eastern European Jewish culture and sardonic comments directed at those who looked down on them, especially westernized secular Jews. The key that greatly increased my appreciation of the book is a few lines in the translator’s forward that tell us what the reader wouldn’t otherwise know - Roth was born in Galicia, moved to Vienna, served in the Austro-Hungarian army in WWI, and became a well-known journalist writing for German newspapers. So the outline of the book is autobiographical, it is nostalgic, and, to some extent, Roth’s sardonic comments are about the people in his own adult world or maybe himself.

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