A Captivating Tour of Jewish Life at the Moment before the Holocaust and Israel

If you’ve always longed to read a book capturing that very special moment in history when the European Diaspora still was the Jewish people, even as the state of Israel was looming on the far horizon—a book explaining, from within, that moment of incipient transition into two Jewish identities—it has existed since 1930. The problem is that it was written in French, and by a Gentile at that, and for decades nobody bothered introducing it to the English-speaking public.

But now the situation has been rectified. Albert Londres’ masterpiece, The Wandering Jew Has Arrived, has recently been published in a superb translation by Helga Abraham, an Egyptian-born graduate of Edinburgh University who now lives in Jerusalem. In her foreword, Abraham goes so far as to compare Londres with “such great documentarians as Mark Twain and George Orwell.” I couldn’t agree more.

In his French homeland, Londres remains to this day a national icon, whose name graces the French equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for journalism. He was born in 1884 in Vichy—then famous as an elegant health resort—to a working-class family; his father was a tinker, his grandfather a peddler. Thanks to the free, high-quality education network set up by the Third Republic, he was able to attend high school and thereafter dabbled in poetry and theater before settling on journalism at Le Matin, one of the country’s leading newspapers.