Job the Red

Born in Berlin in 1895, he could have grown up to take over his parents' printing company.
Instead, he joined the Socialist Workers' Youth, married a woman from the humblest of backgrounds and earned his living as an editor of the Red Banner. Expelled from the KPD for his criticism of Stalin and branded Public Enemy Number One by the Nazis as a Communist and a Jew — despite the fact that unlike his famous brother Gershom he never actively practised Judaism, he was murdered in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1940.

Mirjam Zadoff has devoted herself to writing his biography based on eyewitness interviews and personal testimonies published here for the first time. More than anyone else, Werner Scholem embodied the rifts in German society between the wars, making this book emblematic of an era.

Werner Scholem – communist and Jew: a tragic life story provides a new perspective on the 20th century

A highly evocative paradigm of the situation facing German Jews before and after the rise of Hitler