However, despite the useful insights it provides into Jewish life (and into Roth's views on Jewish life - not the same thing, of course), this rather haphazard accumulation of anecdotes ultimately adds up to something rather disappointing and lightweight. Too many of the details fall flat in their determinedly quotidian meanderings, rather than coming across as valuable insights "from the horse's mouth", as it were. In Roth's own novels, and the work of other German writers such as Günter Grass, such an accretion of detail adds up to a kind of symbolic naturalism that teaches us things at both micro and macro level, about both the immediate context and the wider world. Removed from the discipline of plot, the descriptions have nothing to drive them forward but the reader's own hindsight.

Nevertheless, such visions of a vanished world are, of course, valuable per se precisely because much of what they describe (the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe) was largely wiped out. The slim volume is therefore worth a read for anybody interested in the field.

My own personal favourite among the wealth of detailed observations, which perhaps illustrates the problems inherent in such a personalized view, where one person's insight may be another person's prejudice, is the reference to Jewish interpreters. Roth says that Jews, being able to understand the spirit of the outsider, intuit. Gentiles merely translate. (As a translator/interpreter myself, that tickled me).

The book, then, like much of Roth's work, is one of the only ways we have of remembering this vanished world. It should be read in that light.

This is the first translation into English of "The Wandering Jews", possibly because Roth's work is being rediscovered (or just discovered), but also perhaps because such memoirs are gaining in importance from a historical point of view, irrespective of any perceived literary merit.