Sometimes, history can seem like current affairs. While huge changes go on around us, some events happen again and again. The circumstances change, but the underlying story doesn't. The experience of being caught up in a war, of becoming an unwelcome stranger in your own country, of being persecuted remains the same. So, alas, does the standard response of the fortunate to the unfortunate, the mixture of condescension and ignorance with which refugees are treated.
The one difference between history and current affairs, of course, is perspective. We can see things more clearly with hindsight. We are able to grasp the moral meaning of events that happened decades ago because we know where they led. We can convince ourselves that, of course, if we had been alive in those times, we would have responded more generously than our ancestors did.
Recently, Granta Books has republished an extraordinary non-fiction work by the great Austrian novelist Joseph Roth. Roth died in 1939, while Europe was on the brink of the abyss, and it has taken many decades for his work to be given its proper place in modern literature. He was also, however, a journalist in Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s. One of his great interests in that role was the plight of refugees and displaced people in the aftermath of the first World War, the Russian Revolution and the redrawing of national boundaries by the Treaty of Versailles.
In 1927 Roth published a short book, The Wandering Jews, based on his reporting of that plight. It is an important historical work in its own right. But it is also a timely work. In Michael Hofman's lucid translation, it has a terrific sense of urgency. By plunging us back into the living stream of Europe before the Holocaust, it unsettles our cosy belief that civilised people like us would never have turned our backs on those who needed sanctuary.
Like many people who come to Ireland now from Africa, central Europe and elsewhere, the displaced Jews of the years between the wars were the victims of history, politics, persecution and poverty. From where we now stand, we can see two things about them clearly.
One is that the failure to stand up against anti-Semitic prejudice contributed to perhaps the greatest disaster ever to befall Western European culture, the Holocaust. The other is that those Jews who did manage to find a home in the West made within a few decades an immense contribution to the societies, economies and cultures in which they were given sanctuary. They remind us, in the starkest terms, both of the cost of prejudice and of the benefits of openness.
This is why Roth's book is so unsettling. It is the antithesis of the kind of polite, humble appeal to the conscience of civilised people that we might expect. It starts off instead with a fierce refusal to pander either to the prejudiced or the patronising. In a wonderful foreword, he does what few writers have ever done: reject certain would-be readers.
"This book," he writes, "does not address itself to those Western Europeans who, by virtue of the fact that they grew up with elevators and flush toilets, allow themselves to make bad jokes about Romanian lice, Galician cockroaches, or Russian fleas. This book is not interested in those objective readers who peer down with a cheap and sour benevolence from the rickety towers of their Western civilisation upon the near East and its inhabitants; who, out of sheer humanity, are struck with pity at inadequate sewage systems, and whose fear of contagion leads them to lock up poor immigrants in tenements where social problems are solved by simple epidemics. This book does not want to be read by those who would seek to deny their own fathers or forefathers if they happened to escape from such tenements."
The people he writes for instead are "readers from whom the Eastern Jews do not require protection: readers with respect for pain, for human greatness, and for the squalor that everywhere accompanies misery; Western Europeans who are not merely proud of their clean mattresses".
Roth goes on to describe the many, varied and extremely diverse peoples who make up the Jewish communities of Europe. As he describes them, of course, the reader of 2001 is encountering ghosts. We know, as he did not, that the human life he describes in all its vitality and complexity is on the brink of extinction, that most of the men, women and children he encounters will be piled into mass graves, or poisoned in gas chambers or worked as slaves until they succumb to exhaustion and disease. And knowing these things, we also have to ask why the kind of enlightened Western European culture, of which Roth himself was such a shining example, proved to be so weak in the face of this barbarism.
The answer, probably, is that it had been weakened by the kind of low-level everyday contempt that he addresses in his foreword. The smugness of privilege created a lazy indifference to the plight of others. The arrogance of relative wealth produced a sense of superiority. The towers of Western civilisation became rickety because so many people used them as a vantage point from which to look down on others. And the most unsettling thing about Roth's book is that it calls to mind not just the lessons of the past but the smugness of the present.
fotoole@irish-times.ie