The Wandering Jews by Joseph Roth

Author:Joseph Roth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2000-03-12T05:00:00+00:00

BERLIN

1.

No Eastern Jew goes to Berlin voluntarily. Who in all the world goes to Berlin voluntarily?

Berlin is a point of transit, where, given compelling reasons, one may end up staying longer. Berlin has no ghetto. It has a Jewish district. This is where emigrants come who want to get to America via Hamburg or Amsterdam. This is where they often get stuck. They haven’t enough money. Or their papers are not in order.

(Again: papers! Half a Jew’s life is consumed by the futile battle with papers.)

The Eastern Jews who come to Berlin are often on a transit visa that allows them to stay in Germany for two to three days. There are quite a few who came on a transit visa, and end up staying in Berlin for two or three years.

Berlin has long-established Eastern Jews, who generally arrived before the War. Their relatives came after them. Refugees from the occupied lands came to Berlin. Jews who had served in the German armies of occupation in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania had to return to Germany with the German army.

There are Eastern Jewish criminals in Berlin as well. Pickpockets, bigamists and con artists, counterfeiters, racketeers. Hardly any burglars. No violent criminals, no murderers.

The struggle for papers, the struggle against papers, is something an Eastern Jew gets free of only if he uses criminal methods to take on society. The Eastern Jewish criminal was generally a criminal in his past life. He gets to Germany on false papers, or with none at all. He doesn’t register with the police.

Only the honest Eastern Jew — honest and timorous — registers with the police. It’s much more difficult in Prussia than in Austria. The Berlin police like to undertake house-to-house searches. They check papers on the streets as well. They did a lot of that during the Inflation.

The trade in secondhand clothes is not prohibited, but it’s not sanctioned either. No one without a hawker’s license is allowed to buy my old trousers. Or sell them, for that matter.

But buy them he does. And sells them too. He stands on the Joachimsthaler Strasse, or on the corner of Joachimsthaler and the Kurfürstendamm, pretending to mind his own business. He has to be able to tell from the look of a passerby, first, whether he has old clothes to sell, and second, if he needs money.

Whatever clothes he manages to buy, he sells the next morning at the old-clothes exchange.

There are distinctions among hawkers too. There are rich and powerful hawkers, to whom the little ones look up shyly and humbly. The more money a hawker has, the more he earns. He doesn’t go out on the street himself anymore. He doesn’t need to. I’m not even sure whether it is still appropriate to refer to him as a “hawker.” In fact he has a secondhand clothes shop and a business license. The license is not in his own name but that of someone settled in Berlin, a solid citizen who doesn’t know anything about clothes but takes a cut from the business all the same.

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