Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on All the Frontiers of Civilization

Reprint.  164pp.  Printed red paper wraps.  8vo.  Covers a little worn, gently rubbed and slightly discoloured at edges. Spine a little ridged and sunned, with title added neatly in manuscript.  Internally a little less than bright but neat, clean and tight throughout. A virulently anti-semitic tract first published in 1934, this copy being a 1964 reprint.  Written by one of America's foremost Jewish pornographers, who spent nine years in jail for state and federal obscenity convictions.  Roth was a complex man and his authorship and publication of Jews must live one of the most complex periods of his life.  Born a Jew in what is now Ukraine, he emigrated to the United States with his family at the age of four.  The tract was published in 1934, at a time when it was most relevant to the development of the Nazi movement.  Roth was under the pressure of bankruptcy, having fallen foul of the underground economy of erotica publishing and produced "this example of ethnic self-hatred ...a terrified response to insecurity and a substitute for self-examination" (Jay A Gertzman in We Meet Our Destiny ont he Road We Take to Avoid It, 2013).