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Awards
OverviewGranta's republication of Joseph Roth's novels has created a new generation of readers for this great novelist. Roth was also celebrated as a journalist, and The Wandering Jews is his portrait of the Jews of Eastern Europe: of their poverty, their towns and trades, their feast days and mystical rabbis. This was a community living under the shadow of extermination, and Roth was aware of the threat. Michael Hofmann, an award-winning poet, has again translated a neglected classic. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Joseph Roth , Michael Hofmann , Michael HofmannPublisher: Granta Books Imprint: Granta Books Edition: New edition Dimensions: Width: 13.00cm , Height: 1.50cm , Length: 19.80cm Weight: 0.110kg ISBN: 9781862074705ISBN 10: 1862074704 Pages: 168 Publication Date: 16 October 2001 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Tertiary & Higher Education , Professional & Vocational Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Temporarily unavailable  The supplier advises that this item is temporarily unavailable. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out to you. Table of ContentsReviews'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; 'The Wandering Jews reconnects with the rich complexities of European Jewish culture before it was swallowed up by the Holocaust. Roth's brilliant and penetrating analysis proved tragically prophetic. At this distance, it gives a timeless perspective on the vulnerability of dispossessed people everywhere' The Times; 'Of the many books written about the Jewish people few have approached the clarity and exactness achieved in this short, astonishing study. Roth's reportage remains vivid and pertinent. As a cultural study of a homeless, persecuted race it is as perceptive as it is practical. His lightness of touch always prevails. Above all the fiction is unforgettable, the prose fluid and beautiful. It must also be said he is a forgotten master- the fiction is evocative, atmospheric and accessible. Read everything he has written - and wonder at one of literature's most enduring, beguiling and deserving voices' Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times; 'Roth...is one of the greatest. Why he was forgotten, I have no idea...In The Wandering Jews, a book dozens of times larger than itself in love and argument and stern sympathy...[Roth] also demonstrates that war is not necessary to break our faith. Only civilisation is. Only a writer who had chosen to live with that sound of shattering could do that.' New Statesman Joseph Roth lived a short life, dying at 45 just before the war, in 1939. He was born in Galicia, in the extreme of the then Hapsburg Empire. He lived at various times in Vienna and Berlin. and had a long association with the Frankfurter Zeitung. He visited the USSR and spent the last years of his life, following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, in Paris, Amsterdam, Ostend and the south of France. A wandering Jew, he wrote a book about other wandering Jews, most of whom were rather more rooted in their locations than Roth himself. These Jews were 'wandering' not so much because they couldn't stay in one place for any length of time (they could), but because as Jews they were members of a dispersed people who had 'wandered' the globe since the collapse of Israel in post-biblical times. There is an odd, anti-Semitic twist to this notion of the Jews as wanderers. The legend of Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew, tells the story of a man who cursed Jesus on the way to Golgotha and was in turn cursed with homelessness. He was taken to be representative of all Jews and their inability to settle anywhere was taken to be a sign of divine disfavour. In fact, of course, the Jews were very good at putting down roots and usually only left places when they were expelled or life was made intolerable for them. Roth's book is about how the lives of the Jews of Eastern Europe were made intolerable twice over - once in Eastern Europe itself, and then once again in Western Europe. 'It is terribly hard to be an Eastern Jew,' Roth writes, and then adds 'there is no harder lot than that of the Eastern Jew newly arrived in Vienna'. Roth's book was written and published in 1920, and then updated in 1937. In his preface to the 1937 edition, Roth explains that his original purpose in writing the book was to pursuade the Jews and non-Jews of Western Europe to grasp the tragedy of the Eastern Jews. There was then 'no acute problem' facing Western Jews. The 17 intervening years had changed all that, however, and it was the once-fortunate Jews of Germany who were now in most trouble. 'The German Jew,' Roth writes, 'is even worse off than the Eastern Jew. He has forgotten how to wander, how to suffer and how to pray.' And then, later: 'German Jews are doubly unhappy. They not only suffer humiliation, they endure it.' Roth writes with sympathy and insight and his short book, though a work of reportage, retains its freshness and interest. Review by ANTHONY JULIUS (Kirkus UK) Author InformationJoseph Roth (1894-1939) was the great elegist of the cosmopolitan and doomed Central European culture that flourished in the dying days of the Austrian Empire. His books include The Legend of the Holy Drinker, Confession of a Murderer, Flight Without End, Right and Left, The Emperor's Tomb, The String of Pearls and The Radetzky March. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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