Product details
Biographical note
Joseph 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.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
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, 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
This new book contains superb reportage
Irish Times