The Wandering Jews

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by Joseph Roth,

Translated by Michael Hofmann

W. W. Norton and Co.

Due/Published November 2001, 168 pages, paper

ISBN 039332270X

The classic portrait of a vanished people. 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 the whirlwind period of Weimar Germany, he warned of the false comforts of Jewish assimilation, laid bare the schism between Eastern and Western Jews, and at times prophesied the horrors posed by Nazism. The Wandering Jews remains as vital today as when it was first published.

Author Biography: Joseph Roth is the author of such classics as The Radetzky March. He died in Paris in 1939. Translator Michael Hofmann won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize for his translation of Roth's The Tale of the 1002nd Night.