Why read The Wandering Jews?

Book cover of The Wandering Jews

Book description

Every few decades a book is published that shapes Jewish consciousness. One thinks of Wiesel's Night or Levi's Survival in Auschwitz. But in 1927, years before these works were written, Joseph Roth (1894-1939) composed The Wandering Jews. In these stunning dispatches written when Roth was a correspondent in Berlin during…

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European history

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Wandering Jews as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Ori Yehudai

Author

In this short book of essays, Joseph Roth, author of the great novel The Radetzky March, describes the efforts of Eastern European Jews to find new homes in the West following the turmoils of World War I and the Russian Revolution. Roth reports on interwar Jewish life in shtetls in Eastern Europe and in what he calls “ghettos in the West” such as Vienna, Berlin, and Paris, as well as in America and the Soviet Union. He writes with sympathy about “ordinary people” forced out of their homes at a time of growing restrictions on international movement and mounting…

From Ori's list on modern Jewish migration and displacement.