Joseph Roth’s
Job, translated from the original
German Hiob, Roman eines einfachen Mannes
by Ross Benjamin, is a dark but lovely short novel about one Jewish man’s tribulations,
the power of questioning and patience, and the potential for miracles. (Yes, this
post contains spoilers.)
Roth’s Mendel Singer, whose friends compare him to (the
Biblical) Job in the second half of the book, is a poor Torah teacher in a
small village in the borderlands of the waning Russian Empire. Mendel and his
wife Deborah have four children: three sons, one of whom is disabled, one of
whom leaves for the U.S., and a third who joins the Russian Army, plus a
daughter whose dallying with Cossacks in the fields prompts the family to follow
their son to America. Life in America isn’t always easy, either. Somehow New
York’s bedbugs and other parasites, and Deborah’s undying habit of hiding money
under floorboards, stuck with me most.
What struck me about the novel, though, wasn’t the plot, which
contains elements I’ve seen before, but Roth’s storytelling, which, in Benjamin’s
spare translation, offers a matter-of-fact account of intense emotional
suffering. Most wrenching: the Singers leave their youngest child, Menuchim, in
the village when they leave for America, sad that a rabbi’s promise of a miracle
hasn’t transformed Menuchim. Further family tragedies, in America, are
difficult for Mendel, too, causing him to question his faith and choice of
residence. Though the Singers travel from what they believe to be necessity and
Roth includes references to wandering Jews, Mendel wonders where he is in a taut
piece of geographical and psychological ostranenie/defamiliarization that falls
in the middle of the book, just after the Singers arrive in New York:
What do these people have to do with me? thought Mendel. What does all of America have to do with me? My son, my wife, my daughter, this Mac? Am I still Mendel Singer? Is this still my family? Am I still Mendel Singer? Where is my son Menuchim? He felt as if he had been cast out of himself, he would have to live separated from himself from now on. He felt as if he had left himself behind in Zuchnow, near Menuchim. And as his lips smiled and his head nodded, his heart began slowly to freeze, it pounded like a metal drumstick against cold glass. Already he was lonely, Mendel Singer: already he was in America…
Part of the appeal of Job
is that Roth juxtaposes what I labeled “cosmic stuff” in a margin note—“…he
believed he felt distinctly for the first time in his life the soundless and
wily creeping of the days, the deceptive treachery of the eternal alteration of
day and night and summer and winter, and the stream of life, steady, despite
all anticipated and unexpected terrors.”—with earthy material like the peasant cart
driver Sameshkin propositioning Deborah.
There is also a wonderful scene where Sameshkin and Mendel
have a cart accident and must spend the night together beside the road. Mendel
sobs and Sameshkin comforts him:
Then he put his arm around Mendel’s thin shoulders and said softly:
“Sleep, dear Jew, sleep well.”
He stayed awake for a long time. Mendel Singer slept and snored. The frogs croaked in the morning.
The end of Job
brings Mendel an out-of-the-blue miracle that seems to reward his suffering and
refusal to completely abandon God. Benjamin writes, in an afterword, that Roth “once
confessed he could not have written [the ending] had he not been drunk.” Though
the scene is one of book’s most emotional, Roth maintains his composure, even
at the most crucial moment, writing: “All rise suddenly from their seats, the
children, who were already asleep, awake and burst into tears. Mendel himself
stands up so violently that behind him the chair falls down with a loud crash.”
I found Roth’s blend of miracle and matter-of-factness especially
interesting because it seems to place the book in the middle of a continuum of novels
about Jewish life in the borderlands and the United States that I’ve read over the
last several years. On one end, Steve Stern’s The Frozen Rabbi contains lush language, magical miracles, and the
slapstick effect of a Polish rabbi thawing out after a freezer loses its power
decades after the man froze. But in Margarita Khemlin’s stories and novels of the
everyday life of Jewish people in Soviet Ukraine, the language, humor, and authorial
emotions are tamped down—as they are in Job—and
the primary miracle is surviving World War 2, which hovers over her characters’
lives for decades. I’ve translated a bit of Khemlin’s work, which I love for
its loaded concision and suspect Roth’s German in Job has a similar feel. I look forward to reading more of Roth’s fiction.
Disclosures: A
big thank you to Archipelago Books for a review copy of Job and to my friend and fellow blogger Amy Henry, an Archipelago Ambassador,
for introducing me to Archipelago.
Up Next: Probably César Aira’s Varamo.
