The Wandering Jews Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann Granta, 130pp, £12.99 ISBN 1862073929

British readers have had the recent good luck to be treated to the progressive publication in English of all Joseph Roth's novels (congratulations to Granta), and thus to a neglected European novelist being rediscovered for the canon. Roth, in his comedie pathetique of Austria-Hungary in novels such as The Radetzky March and The String of Pearls, and his fables of an alternately angry, didactic, humorous and compassionate fabulism (Rebellion and The Legend of the Holy Drinker), is one of the greatest. Why he was forgotten, I have no idea.

Possibly he was filed away as the memorialist of an empire of tin soldiers. He died, an alcoholic, in 1939, the same year that The String of Pearls was published. He was 44. His chronicle of nice-but-dim Rittmeister Taittinger, so effortlessly outmanoeuvred by reality, looks back with poignancy to the pinnacle of Viennese power. To remember that George Orwell's Coming Up For Air and Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn were published in the same year is to understand the ease with which novelists can be set aside by "modernity". I wouldn't make any claims for Roth's "relevance" today; I will say only that his storytelling is always balanced on the blink of an eyelid, the all too human instant when everything may change in a character's life, when catastrophe - or, more rarely, joy - may strike.

If The Wandering Jews, Roth's first non-fiction to be published in Britain, was lost in the general setting-aside, it deserved it no more than did any of his 13 novels. In its 130 pages, it succeeds in being report and polemic, analysis and monument, introduction and clairvoyance about the Jewish populations of Austria-Hungary and the Soviet Union - the Jews of Galicia, Ruthenia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine and Russia - after the First World War and Russian revolution. More than 70 years ago, Roth identified, for example, the emptiness of the civilisation that awaited those Jews who came west. "The Eastern Jew looks to the West with a longing that it doesn't really merit. To the Eastern Jew, the West signifies freedom, justice, civilisation, and the possibility to work and develop his talents . . . Anyone deserves the West who arrives with fresh energy to break up the deadly, antiseptic boredom of its civilisation, prepared to undergo the quarantine 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."

Roth was writing in the 1930s, when Hitler's Nuremberg Laws were legislating the German Jews into Untermenschen. But he was also opposing the promises of the west to the life of the shtetl (which is crucial to his quality as a novelist as well as a reporter). So, beguiled, "the Eastern Jew sees none of the advantages of his own homeland. He sees nothing of the boundless horizon, nothing of the quality of the people, in whom simplicity can produce holy men and murderers, melodies of melancholy, grandeur, and obsessive passion."

The European Jews' first migrations were the aftermath of war; subsequent ones were the result of proliferating social and economic factors. Like an idea planted by accident, the Wanderschaft couldn't afterwards be uprooted. Economic propaganda from the west, encouragement in letters home by migrants who had gone before, the belief that in the west there was legal protection from the pogrom: a gamut of 20th-century historical forces eroded and erased the already fragile eastern shtetl - to Roth's disgust.

His description of shtetl life is immediate and alive. Nowhere in the book does Roth mention his own Galician Jewish ancestry; his evocation seems to owe everything to a need to recreate a homeland of the mind: "The little town lies in the middle of a great plain, not bounded by any hill or forest or river. It runs out into the plain. It begins with little huts and ends with them. After a while the huts are replaced by houses. Streets begin. One runs from north to south, the other from east to west. Where they intersect is the marketplace. At the far end of the north-south street is the railway station. A passenger train calls in once a day. A passenger train pulls out once a day. And yet, many people spend their entire day at the station. They are traders. Their interest legitimately extends to freight trains . . . The town has 18,000 inhabitants, of whom 15,000 are Jews."

I have not read the original German, but in Michael Hofmann's excellent English, that passage has emotional as well as descriptive virtues. It underlines, for one thing, the ancient simplicity of a people who "are not rare visitors of God, they live with him", which Roth opposes to the compromises of assimilation in the west (merely another form of wandering) and the dark, if not blind, alley of Jewish nationalism. The Jews, he wants to say, may be more than a "nation" in the European sense, and in pressing their entitlement to national rights and a homeland, they may be renouncing "far more important claims". The "patriotic madness" of wanting a fatherland is a part of the hated assimilation into western civilisation - the grandchildren of those pacifists who once bruised their brows on the walls of the prayerhouse now need the organ to get them in the mood, and are proud of being lieutenants in the Jewish reserve, "their God a commanding officer".

Roth the wanderer and impoverished exile was as well situated to idealise the shtetl's simplicity as he was to see harsh truths about the west. He lived, in his mind, suspended between the two - which is fundamental to his greatness: to remind us, in the terse lyricism of his prose, how it is important to value things according to our feelings rather than objective analysis, and to live (and die, as he did) within the contradictions such feelings produce. In Roth's case, this was the contradiction, in his novels, of being deeply attached to nearly all that he satirised - the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, the military code, imperial order and its supranationalist pretensions - and, in this book, of being nostalgic, and as furiously critical of the gullibility and stupidity of the eastern Jew as of the futility of the western nations, in their uniformity, selfishness and material piety (including their nationalism).

Roth may be nostalgic for the shtetl. He may be wrong about Palestine, against which he devotes impressive pages of argument (pointing out, for example, that an Orthodox Hasid from the east will always prefer a Christian to a Zionist). Though he had the foresight to quit Germany in 1933, dying in 1939, he neither saw nor imagined the unimaginable - after which, a state of Israel could not be denied the survivors.

It seems an old, old story, this narrative of prayerhouses, men in long black coats and wonder-rabbis, of water-carriers and musicians and the batlan - the eastern Jewish fool and storyteller for weddings and cold winter nights. Is it so very distant? In Roth's reports of his journeys and experiences in the ghettoes of Vienna, Berlin and Paris, I felt - as a goy reader - the sorrows of Europe as much as those of the Jews. Have these sorrows blown away? Hearing of the condition of asylum-seekers on today's news, can we say that, in the 21st century, we are retrieving all the humanity and divinity we lost in the 20th?

Roth tells a story about a musical clown he met in France, an artiste from the old Russo-Austrian border town of Radziwillow. The man was the only member of his family who had been able to study in the west, in Vienna. One night, performing Beethoven, he had realised that he, a Jew, had no business performing serious music, and joined a circus instead, where he became convinced he had kept to the tradition of his ancestors. Not all Jews could belong to the circus, he agreed. But: "I'm a Yid from Radziwillow . . . unless they're with the circus, they have to suck up to all sorts of people they don't know and don't like." Circus equals family, home, shtetl, liberty - not to mention refuge from sorrow.

A clown is what Roth should perhaps have been. He was too clever a batlan, too willing to meet the challenge of living out his contradictions: as a novelist, serious one minute, a master of near-farce the next; upholder of the idea of Austria-Hungary - "my only Fatherland" - and satirist of the empire's downward curve. The clipped rhythms of his prose, the handbrake turns of plot, the wonderfully well-sprung ride of a Roth novel, make his work seem a 19th-century creation, while his sense of man's absurdity and the difficulty of relationships in a material world stamp him as modern. In retrospect, possibly his greatest literary contribution was to clear the decks, singlehandedly, of the hangovers of Europe's imperial era. It is not often mentioned that he is unfailingly elegant and witty as he takes the world down with him.

A last glance at his genius. In The Radetzky March, there is a passage where Lieutenant Carl Joseph Trotta, grandson of the "hero of Solferino", is asked point-blank by his friend the regimental surgeon if there is anything going on between him and the surgeon's wife, Eva. "Nothing whatsoever, Herr Regimental Surgeon. He's gone crazy, the lieutenant thinks. And: It is shattered! Something is shattered. He feels as if he has heard a dry, splintery shattering. 'Broken faith' - he once read that phrase somewhere. Shattered friendship. Yes, it is a shattered friendship."

And it is a broken faith that runs closest to Roth's own Welt-anschauung. In The Wandering Jews, a book dozens of times larger than itself in love and argument and stern sympathy, we hear it as a passionate call to witness a faith breaking under the pressures of war and civilisation. But, as elsewhere in his work, he 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.

Julian Evans is a travel writer and literary critic

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