Parallels and Differences – Writings of the pre- World War Two Jewish author Joseph Roth as they Relate to Canada’s Aboriginal Situation
The thoughts and emotions of great literature timelessly reflect life as humans have always lived it. By allowing us to see parallels, they inform, contextualize, guide and comfort us. They make us thinkmore critically, and on present-day issues and on life generally, make better judgments. We are foolish not to look to it in our search for solutions to one’s own and to society’s problems.
Previous essays of mine examined the literary writings of George Eliot and Anthony Trollope for these purposes, with an emphasis on better understanding and perhaps ameliorating the tragic human rights situation of Aboriginals in Canada today.
This essay looks to the early twentieth century life and writings of the Eastern European Jewish author, Joseph Roth, for these same purposes.
Roth was born in 1894 in the small Galician town of Brody, situated in the far eastern extremity of the Austro – Hungarian Empire, (now part of the Ukraine), where to be born Jewish was to automatically be in the defensive category of the “other”.
After a relatively normal and happy childhood, and after serving in the Austrian army in World War One, he experienced, as millions did, the almost total civilizational collapse that occurred as the result of that Great War, epitomized for him by the ending of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the death of Emperor Franz Josef, the latter whose power and authority had long-protected the Empire’s Jews from the worst of the rising, overt and violent anti-Semitism that increasingly defined this age of newly created, mono-ethnic nation states, none of which had any tolerance for Jews or any desire or ability to protect them.
The extent of this old world-ending civilizational rupture and collapse was rendered literally and symbolically by Roth in his contrasting pre-War and post-War descriptions of Brody, in his 1932 novel, The Radetsky March:
” Everything was so secure. Every stone lay in its place. The streets of life were well-paved. Secure roofs rested on the walls of the houses…A lot of peoples might exist but no nations…But today, Herr District Captain, the stones on the street lie askew and confused in dangerous heaps, and the roofs have holes, and the rain falls into the houses, and everyone has to know on his own which street he is taking and what kind of house he is moving into…We lost a whole world.”
In the years before and immediately after World War One, over 100,000 Jews were murdered in pogroms in Russia, Ukraine and Poland (constituting a dry run for the Holocaust twenty later). Many thousands more were forced to leave those newly formed nation states and become exiles and refugees in the cities of Eastern Europe.
Roth, in a “feuilleton” he wrote in 1920, published in a collection of his newspaper writings under the title, What I Saw, knowing his Jewish shtetl people since childhood and intensely identifying with them, described their dispossessed and discriminated-against situation:
“Many of the refugees arrived straight from the Russian POW camps. Their garments were a weird and wonderful hodgepodge of uniforms. In their eyes I saw millennial sorrow. There were women there too. The carried their children on their backs like bundles of dirty washing. Other children, who went scrabbling through a rickety world on crooked legs, gnawed on dry crusts.
They were refugees. We know them as “the peril from the East”. Fear of pogroms have welded them together like a landslip of unhappiness and grime, that, slowly gathering volume, has come rolling across Germany from the East…A small minority of them are young and healthy…Mostly they are old and frail, if not broken.
They come from Ukraine, from Galicia, from Hungary. Back home they fell victim, in their hundreds of thousands, to pogroms. The survivors make their way to Berlin. From here they head west, to Holland and America, or south, to Palestine.”
Roth was an insecure, needy, self-hating, self-destructive, chain-smoking alcoholic. (Because of this self-abuse he died in 1939 at only age 46.) He was also a brilliant, learned man, who, devoid of illusions, “saw through” all things in his political, social and personal worlds. He was a harsh critic, especially of himself. Because of his self-described “lowly Ostjuden origins” he had passionate empathy for those refugees and exiles described above, and the strongest sense of social injustice in relation to all such persecuted peoples. As his biographer Kieron Pim wrote in Endless Flight, his biography of Roth:
“Across his oeuvre he is a poet of the marginalized, the alienated and the dispossessed: of those who sought refuge after their homelands were destroyed, of those whose fractured lives reflected his own. In a time when our social fabric is fraying once more, when displacement, migration and transience are again the norm and ugly reductive nationalisms threaten to overpower liberal aspirations, Roth speaks to us with as much urgency and power as he did to those who read him during his brief lifetime.”
The dispossessed circumstances of pre-World War Two European Jews are partially parallelled in the past and present quasi-segregationist circumstances of Canada’s Aboriginals, who, excluded from full participation in the affairs of their country, were never able to establish normal, meaningful connections with their fellow Canadians.
(I say only “partially parallelled” with the Jewish experience, because these tragic circumstances are as much inflicted on Aborginals by their own leaders as by the actions of past and present non-Aboriginals.)
There’s a law-and-order crisis on Canada’s Indian reserves with which Aboriginal leaders lack the will, the understanding of, and the institutional resources to cope. Accordingly, Aboriginal people are vastly overrepresented in Canada’ criminal justice system.
Rates of domestic violence are 16 times higher on reserves than off. Aboriginal women have an overall rate of violent victimization that is double that of Aboriginal men and close to triple that of non-Aboriginal women.
Alcohol and drugs and the child neglect that results from it, are devastating Aboriginal communities, which find themselves helpless against the bootleggers and drug dealers. This has produced a child welfare crisis.
The James Smith Cree Nation tragedy epitomized the tragic social dysfunction and dangers of Indian reserve life, where ten people were stabbed to death by a drug-crazed reserve resident who, with a publicly known, outstanding arrest warrant against him, had been harboured on the reserve for days before the tragic event.
As the result of all this kind of daily tragedy the life span of Aboriginals is more than ten years shorter than that of non-Aboriginals!
Tragically, Aboriginal elites, enabled by Canada’s non-Aboriginal elites, are more concerned with preserving and augmenting their Canadian taxpayer-financed, “self-determination, lands, resources, culture and identity” race-based agenda for their purely abstract “nations” than they are of ending this concrete, human rights crisis.
If he were alive Roth would excoriate Aboriginal leaders for this.
Canada’s laws have turned Aboriginal Canadians into neglected, semi-permanent refugees in their own country – into an impoverished, despairing, non-assimilative, internally-exiled “other”- homeless within their own home- with the Indian reserve being the fact and the symbol of this dysfunctional, discriminatory “otherness”, much like that of the Eastern European Jews of Joseph Roth’s time and place.
The post World War One rupture and collapse of Roth’s once relatively civilized world was similar to the civilizational rupture and collapse of pre-contact Aboriginal cultures caused by European migration and settlement.
In the 1600’s, within a generation or two of the first contact of any Aboriginal tribe with Europeans, that tribe’s stone-age culture, with all its skills, arts, knowledge, crafts, and practices, was to a large and fatal extent caught up in a process of being given up, let go, and assimilated by and into the compelling attractions and advantages of technologically-superior European culture.
This essentially blameless process continued until, by the 1870’s, pre-contact Aboriginal culture had mainly vanished, leaving Aboriginals, like Roth’s exiles and refugees, in a state of total “millennial sorrow” dependency.
The psychological effect of this cultural rupture and collapse- this displacement and dispossession- was more devastating for Aboriginal peoples than it was for Roth’s Eastern European Jews. Unlike the Jews, Aboriginals had no urban, literacy-based, mobile, occupationally flexible, “law of the Book” culture to sustain them through their hardships.
Aboriginal culture was oral, pre-literate and solely land-based, and once the land was surrendered by treaty or otherwise and taken up by settlers, Aboriginals were left with little with which to remain independent and culturally cohesive.
Joseph Roth wrote that with the loss of his old world, “I have no home aside from being at home in myself”. Aboriginals have always had similar feelings arising from the loss of their old world.
And still, because of their troubled, “inorganic” (Roth’s word) histories, neither (now) Israel nor Aboriginal leaders have been able to normalize their peoples’ existences. For both, all is still tension and uncertainty.
In this situation the creation of Indian reserves as a temporary solution to the problem of “what to do with the Indians?” who were left behind by the march of time and changing circumstances, was, in retrospect, one of the great mistakes of Canadian history.
Instead of Aboriginals immediately becoming part of a joint process of being integrated into the mainstream of modern urban, agrarian and industrial Canadian life, Aboriginals found themselves, somewhat like Roth’s Ostjuden, condemned to live segregated lives on reserves as official, siloed “others”, a profoundly illiberal and divisive situation that severely harmed them and continues to severely harm both them and Canada as whole.
A reserve-based feeling of Aboriginal separateness was naturally created by this situation- a reserve-based sense of difference akin to the “double consciousness” always felt by Jews like Roth and other minorities in any majority culture.
This is a universal phenomenon in our migrating world, described by the American Black writer W.E.B. DuBois[i] in 1903:
“It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness; an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
So ingrained now is the Aboriginal feeling of separateness and difference that, despite the tragic social effects of Indian reserves, so reliant have Aboriginals become on them and the ethos of passivity and dependency that they embody, that when Pierre Trudeau’s 1969 White Paper offered Aboriginal leaders an end to reserves, fearing freedom and equality and the responsibilities that come with them, they refused it.
Homeless and effectively stateless Jews wandered and fled for centuries in search of the security of enforceable laws that only a state can offer. They were finally rewarded with Israel.
Canada invited – implored- Aboriginals to leave their security-blanket reserves, (where no rights are secure- even the Charter of Rights can be legally abrogated on reserves), and join the Canadian state as equals. In refusing this offer Aboriginal leaders have condemned their peoples to the precarious status of the wandering Jew of old, because, despite their present legal bravado arising from court victories over the past 30 years, as Roth’s life teaches us, laws and political views can change and disappear overnight.
The 1969 White Paper was withdrawn, reportedly causing the resigned and frustrated Trudeau to sadly say, echoing the centuries-old situation of the Jews: “We’ll keep them in the ghetto as long as they want.”[ii]
Which is essentially where Aboriginal Canadians physically and psychologically remain.
A particular problem for both on-reserve Aboriginals and Aboriginals who have left the reserves for mainly jobless lives in Canadian cities is the connection between unemployment, homelessness and crime.
In What I Saw Roth wrote that in the Jewish situation of rampant homelessness and unemployment, turning to crime was inevitable such that, as he dryly noted, “a Jew “finding accommodation should be taken as proof of criminality”.
With words directly applicable to Canada’s high Aboriginal crime rate he wrote:
There are no jobs for these people with German companies, even though the only way they can pose any kind of threat is if they are not allowed to work. Then of course they will become black marketers, smugglers, and even common criminals.
Surprisingly, Roth was not a Zionist. Like many prominent, cultured and assimilated European Jews at the time, especially those in Western Europe, he didn’t believe in the rising Jewish “land back” movement centred on Palestine, which he said was “aping” the failed European ethno-nationalist ideologies, and failing to understand the meaning and destiny of the Jewish people, which for him, meant keeping religion separate from nationalism and the nation state. In What I Saw he wrote, in 1929:
“Of all the thousand ways that Jews have gone, and go, and will go, not one leads to a concrete earthly goal. No “fatherland”, no “Jewish homeland” …Clearly, it is the secret “will of history” for this people to have no country to live in but to wander the roads. And that daunting will corresponds to the daunting constitution of the Jews. In seeking a “homeland” of their own, they are rebelling against their deeper nature…It should be understood, at long last, that Zionism can only be a bitter experiment, a temporary, opportune degradation of Judaism…If Zionism appeals to the warlike traditions of Judaism, then one should counter that the conquest of Canaan is less of an achievement than the Bible, the Psalms, and the Song of Songs; also, that the present of the Jews is greater, possibly, than their past: being more tragic.”
History proved Roth wrong. He couldn’t – no one could – imagine the Holocaust, which obligated Europe to give the Jewish people a State – Israel – to settle the moral debt owed to them because of it.
But in one sense Roth proved to be right. The State of Israel, the result of migration, military conquest and the dispossession of over 400,000 Arab occupants, is now fusing its unique religious identity with nationalism, “aping” the nationalist, expansionist ideologies that too often beset nation states.
Now that after centuries years of wandering and flight there is no more “Next year in Jerusalem.” – now that the Jewish people have achieved their millennial destiny- Israel is becoming a depressingly commonplace state, and, as exemplified by Gaza and the West Bank, it and the Jewish people have lost the persecution-based moral and spiritual high ground they occupied during all those wandering years.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak wrote that Israel, by choosing to expand its borders instead of striving for peace within narrow borders, is reverting to the aggressively expansionist, imperialist, messianic and conquering nation of Old Testament Joshua, risking the loss of not only its moral reputation and moral core, but of its long-term security.
Euro-Canadians and Canada’s original Aboriginal inhabitants experienced a more benign common history, characterized by the former achieving dominance over the latter through honourable and peaceful development.
Migration, conquest and dispossession– a commonplace of history since before Man first walked out of Africa, while frequently causing ends to tribes, nations and cultures, also frequently caused net improvements to them as well, which, except for the mistake of creating Indian reserves and the tragic effects of that, the latter has been the reality for the Aboriginals of Canada.
Roth presciently warned about the dangers of excessively fusing religion with nationalism and of seeking sovereignty over a land already inhabited by another people.
What Roth warned against reflects a general mindset being fatally embraced by Canadian Aboriginal leaders, who want to fuse tribalism with racial nationalism and take back control of the lands of their long-distant ancestors now inhabited by non-Aboriginals. Their goal is to have in Canada geographically separate, internal “nations” of Indian reserves with radically different laws, social conventions, language, governance structures and “ways of knowing”.
The pursuit of this mirage-like goal comes at the costs of not only racially dividing Canada and causing severe harm to the Canadian economy, but in addition, wreaking further human rights deprivations and abuses like those described above on the vast majority of vulnerable, marginalized Aboriginal Canadians, who are cannon fodder for their leaders’ “separate nation-based, self-determination”, race-based vanity projects.
Roth saw everywhere and personally experienced the pernicious consequences of former multi-cultural polities like Austria and Germany turning into “blood and soil” race states, in which, as a feature of the “collectivist mysticism” (Endless Flight) characteristic of them, the racially “chosen ones” allegedly acquired through their “pure blood” at birth an innate, uniquely superior character, independent of merit. Also, only those same chosen ones deserved full rights, compared to those with purportedly inferior “mixed” blood, who had fewer rights, or, as eventually in the case of Jews, no rights; not even the right to life.
Roth, like most Jews, believed the opposite.
One of the reasons that the Jewish people survived for centuries without a country, without a government and without a common language was that to better ensure their survival as a distinct people they “mixed blood” freely, mainly through marriages.
Jewish novelist Amoz Oz wrote;
” Jewish blood” does not appear anywhere in Jewish sources. Not once. We do not have “Jewish blood” as a concept. In the Bible there is “clean blood.” …We have the saying “Your blood is no redder”, meaning, no redder than anyone else’s blood, for we were all created equal in the image of God.”
This was Roth’s thinking. He saw “blood mixing” as enriching both the individual and the collective. For him:
“The more mixing, the more characteristics! The more hyphenation in individual and collective identities the better.” (Endless Flight)
Tragically for Aboriginal Canadians, their leaders, exhibiting “a deadly mixture of pride and ignorance”, (Hannah Arendt, below), espouse the blood purity, innate personality and collectivist mystical thinking of the 1930’s and early 1940’s German state. To get the gist of this thinking, one need only substitute “Aboriginal” for “Aryan”.
The Aboriginal propagandist Tanya Talaga fully reflects this benignly racist thinking in her recent book The Knowing, one of the themes of which is that Aboriginal so-called “blood memory” of family, clan, identity and knowledge can be passed down the generations as part of an innate personality acquired at birth, through a racially exclusive bloodline and a racially exclusive, “special” connection to the sacralised “soil”, or “land.”
The immediately below is but one example from The Knowing of the collectivist, magical- thinking drivel that permeates the racially exceptionalist, non-assimilative mindset of Talaga and her fellow Aboriginal leaders and spokespersons:
“Our eggs hold our secrets. Passed down through our mothers. Through the womb, regenerating, carrying forward the lines of our families, whichever corner of the earth they come from. They also carry our lived experiences, our love and pain. Eggs travelling like beavers swimming in the rivers, moving gently but purposefully before stopping and deciding that this is where they should make their homes…”
I deliberately use the word “benign” to describe Aboriginal race thinking because I am certain that Aboriginal leaders and their non-Aboriginal enablers in government, academia and the media, because of their clearly demonstrated lack of knowledge of literature and history, simply don’t realize the horrible significance of what they are espousing and/or seeming to agree with. Because of their ignorance – it must be childlike ignorance! [iii]– the obvious parallels to Nazi “blood and soil” thinking and the deadly consequences of it simply never enter their quick and clever but uninformed and unimaginative minds.
(In this regard, having a low opinion of not only himself but of human nature itself, Roth ruefully conceded that intellectual, rational thinking “stands no chance against mysticism.”)
Aboriginal leaders and their enablers seem not to know that this “race society” concept – this idea of separate, special rights-holding, (or equal rights-deprived), race-based “nations” within Canada – has substantially contributed to the twentieth century being regarded as one of the bloodiest, most barbaric centuries in recorded history.
Thus, whether these people are aware or not of this idea/concept’s recent sick existence and deadly consequences, once they are made aware of it and shown its parallels to the innocent but ignorant thinking of Aboriginal leaders in Canada -once they are told or reminded that such thinking – by twisted logic but logic nonetheless – led to Auschwitz- such thinking must be automatically rejected by Aboriginal leaders and all other right-thinking people in Canada.
In fact, as Roth believed, and as Jewish history, world history and common sense all show, racially indifferent assimilation is good and necessary. It’s the driving force of creative change. All human activity is affected by and is the product of assimilative forces. Cultures that don’t assimilate die. Aboriginal culture today, to the extent that it exists, only exists because of its assimilative integration with and life support derived from Euro-Canadian culture and institutions.
The German-Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt never met Joseph Roth. By the time of Roth’s death in 1939 she had already fled to America, where she ultimately wrote her most famous and influential book, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
In it she wrote that the doctrine of race “denies the very possibility of a common humanity”.
And in the book she articulated one of the fundamental truths and requirements of any truly liberal democracy – a truth that Joseph Roth spent his life promoting and defending- namely, that its citizens, to best protect their individual and collective rights, must live in a protective, (with the organized liberal state being the protector), common civic world, in order to achieve the “genuine equalplurality of peoples in whose complete multitude alone mankind can be realized.”
In a 1933 essay entitled The Auto-da-Fe of the Mind, published in What I Saw, written just after the Hitler’s takeover of Germany, Roth accused the “European mind” of “capitulating” to the ideas and forces that gave rise to Hitler’s triumph.
“It is capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination (it will be the task of some future generation to establish the reasons for this disgraceful capitulation).
Such a charge is fully warranted against Aboriginal leaders and our enabling non-Aboriginal elite classes for capitulating to the anti-intellectual, anti-Enlightenment and benignly racist idea that Canada should have Indian reserve-based, taxpayer-subsidized, race nations existing within its borders, while at the same time totally ignoring the human rights sufferings of the vast majority of powerless and marginalized Aboriginal peoples caused by the very existence of those same reserves.
Peter Best
Sudbury
September 30th, (National Truth and Reconciliation Day), 2026
[i][i] Quoted in Reckless Daughter, the biography of Joni Mitchell, Harper Collins Publishers Ltd. Toronto, 2017
[ii] Quoted by Indigenous author Bob Joseph in 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act, Indigenous Relations Press, 2018, Port Coquitlam
[iii] “To be ignorant of what occurred before you is to always remain a child.” – Cicero
