The Wandering Jews: The Classic Portrait of A Vanished People

By Joseph Roth
Translated by Michael Hoffmann
With a Comment by Elie Wiesel

"[A] book of impassioned reportage and polemic...it is impossible not to feel a sympathetic wonder."—Michael Andre Bernstein, The New Republic

"In these disturbing yet strikingly illuminating pages, the truth of Jewish destiny from long ago vibrates and sings..."—Elie Wiesel

"[C]aptures and encapsulates Europe in those uncertain hours before the upheaval of a continent and the annihilation of a civilization."—Cynthia Ozick, author of Quarrel and Quandary

One of the foremost novelists of the twentieth century, Joseph Roth (1894-1939) wrote these evocative dispatches between the two World Wars. In them he warned of the false comforts of Jewish assimilation, laid bare the schism between Eastern and Western Jews, reflected on the concept of Jewish identity, and looked with foreboding at Germany’s future. The combined exigency and restrained contemplation of Roth’s writing have earned him comparisons to his more celebrated contemporaries Thomas Mann and Isaac Babel. Now brilliantly rendered by the award-wining translator Michael Hofmann, The Wandering Jews offers a unique view of the European Jewish experience at a critical juncture of world history. 

Paperback
168 pages
W.W. Norton & Co., 2001
Originally Published in 1927
5 x 0.5 x 7.5 inches
ISBN 9780393322705
History