Job

by Joseph Roth

Genres: Religious & Inspirational; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

JOB by Joseph Roth (HIOB, 1930) is a modern retelling of the Biblical story in a mixed form, fable and realism. It follows the fortunes of the Singer family from Western Russia at the end of the 19th century to New York in the early 20th. Stefan Zweig wrote: "JOB, more than a novel and a legend, is a pure, perfect poem of our time, and if I am not mistaken, the only one certain to outlast all that we, its contemporaries, have created and written." Heinrich Böll comments: "Joseph Roth's novels transpire in a world that is no longer: the world of Eastern Jewry, as Roth describes it in JOB, existed up to 1940: in that year the murderers swept it away. Thus Joseph Roth's work is not only poetry and great prose, it is also documentation of everyday Jewish life, such as is seldom to be found."

Release date: August 7, 2011

Publisher: Archipelago

Print pages: 250

Sample

Many years ago there lived in Zuchnow a man named Mendel Singer. He was pious, God-fearing and ordinary, an entirely every- day Jew. He practiced the modest profession of a teacher. In his house, which consisted of only a roomy kitchen, he imparted to children knowledge of the Bible. He taught with genuine enthusiasm and without spectacular success. Hundreds of thousands before him had lived and taught as he did. As insignificant as his nature was his pale face. A full beard of ordinary black framed it completely. His mouth was hidden by the beard. His eyes were large, black, languid and half veiled by heavy lids. On his head sat a cap of black silk rep, a material out of which unfashionable and cheap ties are sometimes made. His body was wrapped in a customary half-long Jewish caftan, the skirts of which fluttered when Mendel Singer rushed through the street, knocking with a hard regular wing beat against the shafts of his high leather boots. Singer seemed to have little time and nothing but pressing goals. Certainly his life was always hard and at times even a torment. He had a wife and three children to clothe and feed. (She was pregnant with a fourth.) God had bestowed fertility on his loins, equanimity on his heart and poverty on his hands. They had no gold to weigh and no banknotes to count. Still, his life ran steadily along like a poor little brook between sparse banks.