Melodies of melancholy

Of the many books written about the Jewish people few have approached the clarity and exactness achieved in this short, astonishing study by the great Viennese novelist. Although published in 1926, long before the horrors of the second World War and the death camps were exposed, Roth's reportage remains vivid and pertinent. As a cultural study of a homeless, persecuted race it is as perceptive as it is practical. Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was a Jew; he understood the people whose lives he saw in their daily settings. Yet at no time does he impose his insider's status. He never mentions his Jewishness. He does not presume to know; he records.

In the course of the narrative, he first examines the Jewish experience in the Polish shtetl before moving on to Vienna, Berlin, Paris - "where the Eastern Jew begins to become a Western European" - and the US. The heart of the book is the plight of the Eastern European Jew in the West. History and geography has rendered the Jew the definitive outsider. "Eastern Jews have no home anywhere, but their graves may be found in every cemetery." Roth makes the point as relevant now as it was then, "Today the Jews constitute a `national minority' in many countries." An irony cuts through the book: "what bliss to become a `nation', no different from the Germans, the French, or the Italians, having already been a `nation' themselves for over three thousand years and fought `holy wars' and experienced periods of greatness."

Earlier he remarks that the eastern Jew in his homeland knows nothing of the social injustice of the West. Presenting the "habitual bias" governing the actions and opinions of the typical Western European, Roth skilfully displays the flaws of Western society before concluding, "the Eastern Jew looks to the West with a longing it really doesn't merit".

Unfairness exists everywhere, but the most powerful divide appears to be that between the Eastern dream and the Western reality. And of the many sad ironies surfacing with each sentence - Roth never wastes a word - is his comment that the Eastern Jew, forbidden to live in villages and big cities, is so taken with envying the glories of the West with its promise of a new life that he "sees none of the advantages of his own homeland . . . nothing of the quality of the people, in whom simplicity can produce holy men or murderers, melodies of melancholy, grandeur, and obsessive passion.`'

While Roth never describes his personal experience, a strong sense of his personality emerges and there are rhetorical asides. He draws on history, but he most trusts the evidence of his own eyes. By travelling in several countries, he was witness to the suffering of many Jewish communities. His reportage is historical documentary: it is also social observation. His lightness of touch always prevails. "In a true Jewish cafe you can walk in with your head under your arm and no one will notice."

Above all, the fiction is unforgettable, the prose fluid and beautiful. Roth is a great European writer and the surest chronicler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is he who has most brilliantly described the chaos of change leading to the Empire's decline, as well as the particular mood which heralds the end of an era. Roth evokes the expanse of a central European world which stretched from Austria to the edges of Russia. It must also be said he is a forgotten master. One of the finest literary essays Nadine Gordimer has written addresses this question, the inexplicable obscurity of a wonderful writer about whom relatively little is known. Various publishers, most notably Granta, have set out to redress this situation. Roth's 15 novels, which include The Legend of the Holy Drinker, Confessions of a Murderer, Flight Without End, Right and Left, The Emperor's Tomb, The String of Pearls, and his masterpiece The Radetzky March. With the publication of Rebellion, his last untranslated novel last year, all of his books are now available in English. The fiction is evocative, atmospheric and accessible; in poet Michael Hofmann, it has found the perfect translator.

From his birth Roth, for all his literary gifts, was destined for hardship. His father left his mother before he was born and later died in a Dutch lunatic asylum. They never met. Roth's wife later went insane, while the writer died at 44, an alcoholic traumatised by the events in Vienna. Shortly before his death in 1939, in a Paris hospital, he wrote of his desire for the "return of the Empire". Alongside the fiction he was also a journalist and his reportage is fascinating. The Wandering Jews is the first of his non-fiction to be translated. In it he notes the essential differences between Jewish experiences in contrasting settings, claiming the Eastern Jew assimilates faster in Berlin than in Vienna, because "Berlin levels out differences and kills off particularities. Hence the lack of a Jewish ghetto there."

Wandering and homelessness are the themes, yet Roth also looks at the settled Jew living in appalling conditions. He writes of the Jewish tailor - any Jewish tailor in a Vienna ghetto; "The sewing machine clatters, the iron is parked on the chopping board, he sits on the marriage bed to measure up his customers. Who would seek out such a tailor?" The life and times of the Jewish peddler is brilliantly described. So too is the Jewish funeral. Roth writes about one he witnessed in a shtetl; "The body of the devout Jew lies in a plain wooden box, covered with a black cloth. It is not wheeled but carried, by four Jews running at a brisk clip along the shortest possible way . . . They almost race through the town with the corpse. The preparations have taken a day. A body is not allowed to remain unburied for more than twenty-four hours. The wailing of the mourners can be heard all over town. The women run through the streets, crying out their grief to every stranger. They talk to the deceased . . . They declare that they want to die - and all the while running down the middle of the public street - as indifferent faces peer out from windows and other people go about their business . . . The most shattering scenes take place at the cemetery. Women refuse to leave the graves; they have to be dragged away; they require taming as much as comforting."

Different places require - or inspire - different responses. It wasn't easy for an Eastern Jew, writes Roth, to make his way to Paris. "Brussels and Amsterdam were both far more obvious destinations." Language is a factor. "The little Eastern Jew has a somewhat exaggerated fear of a completely foreign language. German is almost a mother tongue to him. He would far rather go to Germany than France." But to Paris they went. Roth describes the Frenchification of the Jewish immigrants. "In the streets of the Jewish quarter of Paris, I was amused to hear the parents speaking Yiddish, and the children replying in French."

Throughout this wonderful narrative Roth demonstrates his genius for observation, his instinctive feel for the right phrase and the candid humanity which graces his fiction. Read The Wandering Jews and then read everything he has written - and wonder at one of literature's most enduring, beguiling and deserving voices.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times