The Wandering Jews by Joseph Roth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What We All Lost

This is a short book, but also a long, if unwitting, epitaph; a heart-breaking celebration of a culture on the verge of its destruction.

The Jews of Eastern Europe - Poland, Lithuania, Russia and Romania - had the misfortune to have settled, usually by invitation, sometimes by coercion, in one of the most fought-over pieces of real estate on the planet. They were rarely under anyone's rule long enough to establish a political position or a collective voice or even recognition as human beings: "...fatherland for them is whatever country decides to conscript them."

Their culture was profoundly religious. "They are not rare visitors to God, they live with him...There is no other people that lives on such a footing with their God...They know that while they may be punished they will never be abandoned." The more his religious zeal is mocked, the more the Jew of Galicia and the Pale insists on an appearance that marks him out as 'God's Jew': untrimmed beard, scholarly intensity befitting the importance of the Torah, a second home in the prayer house, devotion to the rabbi who advises him and intercedes on his behalf. His culture does not run on money, of which there is little, but on prayer, of which there is an abundance. His is an economy of prayer lying under a layer of material poverty.

Isolated by law for centuries from the Christian inhabitants of these Christian countries, the Jews of Eastern Europe were also isolated by culture from the assimilated Jews of Germany and Western Europe. Despised by both Christians and Jews, they learned to despise themselves and their unique culture. They knew nothing of nationality, Jewish or otherwise. With no rights, only obligations, they yearned for escape, not from their culture but from their oppression. They wanted to escape to anywhere, as long as it was West.

But culture and oppression are linked in a sort of ecological dependence. Like the Native Americans, and the tribes of the Amazonian jungle, culture dissipates without the pressure of oppression and its provocation to resistance. To escape is to lose the need to resist, and therefore to assimilate into the culture which simply doesn't care about culture.

Religious indifference is a new sort of oppression which the emigrant Jew doesn't know how to deal with. Now he is despised because he is poor and merely strange. So he becomes part of a nation, to the benefit of neither the Jew nor the West:

"Anyone deserves the West who arrives with fresh energy to break up the deadly, antiseptic boredom of its civilisation, prepared to undergo the quarantine that we prescribe for immigrants. We do not realise that our whole life has become a quarantine, and that all our countries have become barracks and concentration camps, admittedly with all the modern conveniences. The immigrants - alas -do not assimilate too slowly, as they are accused of doing, but if anything much too quickly to our sorry way of living."

Wandering Jews learn French, Italian, and English (but not Spanish, Spain is not welcoming to Jews); they forget their native Yiddish. They do well because they work at it and they know how to 'read the country'. This is a skill honed by oppression. If they can get the necessary exit papers and if they can get into the quota, they go to America: "America signifies distance. America signifies freedom." Every Eastern Jew has a relative in America. In America he can still speak Yiddish, he thinks, just because of all the Jews there already!

In the preface to the 1937 edition, Roth notes the dismal fact that it is the German Jews who now must learn again to wander, either rounded up into ghettos or forced abroad like their Eastern brethren by the Nazi Nuremberg Laws. His apocalyptic final observation is, "There can be no European or European- Christian morality so long as the principle of 'noninvolvement' [by other countries in German anti-Semitism] is respected." "A chilly sort of family," he says, "this 'family of nations!'" Indeed, it was about to freeze solidly.

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