Job

A New Translation

By: Joseph Roth

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Mendel Singer is a poor Jewish teacher in the Russian Pale of Settlement — a melamed who teaches small children the Torah in a single room and earns barely enough to feed his family. He is pious, unremarkable, the simplest of men. He is, Joseph Roth announces in the subtitle of his 1930 novel, precisely the kind of man that the ordeal available to Job is also available to.

His youngest son Menuchim cannot walk properly, cannot speak properly, sits in the corner while Mendel teaches other children the letters he has not yet managed. The rabbi who is consulted delivers the prophecy that runs through the entire novel: Menuchim will suffer. Menuchim's pain will be Mendel's joy.

The family emigrates to America, leaving Menuchim behind in Russia because he cannot make the journey. In America, Mendel's daughter goes mad, his wife dies, his sons are killed in the war. He is left alone in a city whose language he cannot speak, whose world has no use for what he is — his piety irrelevant, his vocation without students, his entire formation organized around a world that the new continent has dissolved. He rails against God with the fury of a man who has nothing left to lose by saying what he thinks.

Roth was born in 1894 in the Galician borderlands of the Habsburg Empire, adjacent to the world he was describing, and wrote Job with the intimacy of proximity and the tenderness of mourning. Published in 1930 — two years before The Radetzky March, as the world Roth had known was approaching its final catastrophe — it is the complementary elegy to the later novel's Habsburg mourning: where The Radetzky March mourns the military-administrative tradition of the empire, Job mourns the religious world of its Eastern Jewish periphery. Two dimensions of the same lost civilization, rendered by the same writer from the same vantage point of irreversible loss.

The ending provides what the Book of Job provides — the prophecy fulfilled, the one left behind returned. Not the restoration of everything. The return of the one thing that was left in the snow.

Whether that is enough is the question the novel leaves open, as the Book of Job leaves it open for any reader honest enough to ask it.

One of the essential novels of the twentieth century — and the most honest rendering in any literature of what it costs to be a simple man in an unequal contest with everything that history can bring to bear.