The Wandering Jews

Finally, a book about what was lost. Written before the War - so, in fact, not a book 'about' the Holocaust at all - this slim volume records the great novelist and journalist Joseph Roth's journeys and observations amongst the Jews of Eastern Europe.

Affectionate, frustrated, angry, comic and tragic, Roth's sketches and mini-essays portray a society and a world that was already under threat, and soon to be extinguished altogether. The final pages note 'swastika'd schoolchildren' and the spectre of mechanised barbarism: that no-one, not even Roth, could have foreseen the scale of the cataclysm that would follow makes the experience of reading The Wandering Jews excruciatingly sad. Written as socially-concerned journalism, it became, post-facto, an unintentional elegy for a vanished world