There is something about Bible stories, and all ancient storytelling, that gives them great power. We all have our feelings, our moments of joy and despair, but compared to the era of belief what richness of emotion have we lost! The story of Job contains one example of such richness. Our present sufferings can seem to pale in comparison with those of a man who feels betrayed by his God. For, whatever great and terrible increase in scale of suffering we bear witness to (especially these days…), there appears to have been a concomitant loss in depth of pain. Many Bible stories have been modernised in literature and the arts in general, and perhaps first among these is the Book of Job. This tale of good and evil and the mystery of the divine maintains its strength even now, when faith is little more than a puff of smoke.
It’s not hard to see why Joseph Roth, a Jew writing in German, might have found Job’s story close to his heart. Born in 1894 in Brody, on the edge of the multinational Habsburg Empire, his life was one of recurrent tragedy. An absent father, battles with antisemitism in the military, the collapse of his country (which, with all its peoples, allowed many Jews like Roth to feel at home), the madness and incarceration into a mental institute of his wife, his own alcoholism, and finally the rise of Hitler – none of these was a recipe for joy.
But his novel of 1930, Job: The Story of a Simple Man, to give it its full title, is in its way a joyous tale. For all its monstrous grief and suffering, Roth’s story of Jewish life is filled with a gentle nostalgia and affection for the minor things of life that bring it value. In some way, it’s similar to John Williams’s novel, Stoner, which also takes a life of misfortune and finds the beauty in it. I’d like to share what I loved about Roth’s Job below.
A Jew in Russia
A Simple, Pious, Life
Job begins by introducing us to Mendel Singer, its hero and our modern-day Job. He is “pious, God-fearing and ordinary”, and he works as a teacher. He is humble; his house is small. His faith and trust in God is simple and true. He teaches children because he does not have the knowledge to teach older children the ways of his faith. Mendel Singer lives in the borderlands of the Russian Empire. He lives there with his family – his wife Deborah, his daughter Miriam, and his three sons – Shemariah, Jonas, and Menuchim. The last son was born unlucky, unable to grow normally or talk. His unlucky birth is the first tragedy that is visited upon the home of Mendel Singer.
But really it is hard to say how far this early part of Job is bleak. Instead, for all the poverty the Singer family live in, there is a remarkable dignity to their world, in part thanks to Roth’s careful attention to his characters and his beautiful language. I don’t know how anyone could read something like this without feeling a sense of nostalgia, a feeling that life is being lived:
“He sat down, sang a little song, then the parents and children slurped the hot soup, smiled at the plates and spoke not a word. Warmth rose in the room. It swarmed from the pots, the bowls, the bodies.”
Mendel’s teaching, too, is given the same treatment:
“The bright choir of children’s voices repeated word after word, sentence after sentence, it was as if the Bible were being tolled by many bells.”
Of course, simply writing beautifully is not enough to cancel out grief. But there is no grief here – not in these passages, at any rate. The feeling that we have as we read Job is instead that we are always too late in counting our blessings, in realising what value there is in what we already have. We are drawn into wisdom by witnessing the absence of it. We can only watch, powerlessly, as Job’s family slip towards abyss after abyss.
Grief Begins
The two healthy boys grow up and are conscripted into the Russian army – which meant a lifetime away from home, and an enforced rejection of Jewish strictures like avoiding pork. By using all of her savings Deborah is able to get Shemeriah smuggled out of the country – and this too, meant that the chance of ever seeing his family again is next to zero. And Miriam, the girl, begins to flirt with the Cossacks, with the Russian soldiers in town. Only Menuchim remains at home, and he is speechless and dumb.
Now beautiful descriptions start moving towards describing torment. “Sorrow blew through their hearts like a constant hot and biting wind”. When Shemeriah, now Sam, writes from America, describing its glory and his prosperity, the father’s grief is laid open – his soul cannot leave the world it has always inhabited. “The sons disappeared: Jonas served the Tsar in Pskov and was no longer Jonas. Shemariah bathed on the shores of the ocean and was no longer called Shemariah. Miriam… wanted to go to America too. Only Menuchim remained what he had been since the day of his birth: a cripple. And Mendel Singer himself remained what he had always been: a teacher.”
I liked the way that the story is so simple. Each of the healthy children has an animal associated with them. Miriam, the coquette, is a gazelle; Jonas the strong is a bear; while Shemariah the cunning and thoughtful is a fox. The simplicity of the piled-up misfortunes makes an equally simple plot diagram. The idea is simple, even if the execution makes use of modern ideas and modern problems. Things like interminable Russian bureaucracy mix easily together with brutal and unfortunately timeless antisemitism. For instance, while walking home one night Mendel thinks – so simply, as to be shocking to a sheltered reader like myself – “A peasant or a soldier would now emerge from the grain, accuse Mendel of theft and beat him to death on the spot – with a stone perhaps”.
A Jew in America
America – the Promised Land?
Mendel Singer, thanks to news and money from Sam and to avoid Miriam’s desire to be with Cossacks, gathers his family for the one-way journey to America. But Menuchim, still underdeveloped, is left behind – the journey would be too much for him. For Deborah in particular this is a moment of crisis. When she went to the rabbi about her deformed son his promise was that he would grow up to be wise and strong, but that for this to come to pass she must not leave him, even if he is a great burden. But still, with no choice, the family leave him entrusted to another family, and depart.
In America Mendel Singer finds riches – his son Sam is a clever guy. But he also finds himself and his world further slipping away from the simple, pious, world that he’s truly after. He notices that in America there are no frogs or crickets at night, and the stars above are “miserable” and “mutilated”. He escapes into dreams, hoping that Menuchim will get better. One day he hears from Jonas in the army, and joy returns for a brief moment. And then terrible, dreadful, history shows its hand. War breaks out in Europe.
The book continues its downward descent. “Fear shook him as the wind a weak tree”. Tragedy comes for Mendel Singer, again and again. At first he prays, and then begins to feel that singing psalms is nothing against the might of flames and cannons. It is the first kind of doubt in Job. The sense that God cannot hear you. But things will get worse still. America has yet to join the war.
Rebellion
Mendel talks to the dead. He knows that God has forsaken him. “For me He has no pity. For I’m a dead man and live”. But his passive feeling cannot last. One more tragedy awaits to push him over the edge. The high point of Job is so unbelievably good. Roth takes his source material and makes a real, thundering, blasphemous rebellion out of it. I had to stop reading I was so in awe. Mendel attempts to burn his bible – the one possession still connecting him with his past in Russia. We see, in his mind, the pages burning, but he hesitates. “His heart was angry with God, but in his muscles the fear of God still dwelled”.
Mendel’s neighbours come to try to stop him. They try to speak to him of Job, the story of a man punished by God as a test. Mendel will have none of it. “My presence brings misfortune, and my love draws down the curse as a lone tree in a flat field the lightning”. His final outburst is something awesome:
“The devil is kinder than God. Because he is not as powerful, he cannot be as cruel. I am not afraid, my friends!”
Mendel’s final rebellion can only come from a position of faith, because only faith disappointed can lower you into such depths. It is beautiful and harrowing in equal measure, but also uncanny. As if, for the modern reader, Mendel is a fool for his belief. But a fool we can’t help but admire, and perhaps, one we wish we could emulate.
Conclusion: A Good Job?
Job: The Story of a Simple Man ultimately does not stray too far from its biblical source. However, I found the modernised ending to be one of the weakest parts of the book. Roth, the translator Ross Benjamin writes in my copy’s afterword, once confessed that he could only have written the ending drunk. That’s the impression I got too. The modern world is well suited for tragedy, but modernising miracles, as Roth attempts to do, can come across as fake and kind of desperate. But that’s not to devalue Job. It is a really good, really enjoyable book. Roth’s language is wonderful, and his feeling for the slow declines of modern life – the loss of identity, of culture, of homeland – is sublime. I thoroughly recommend it, and will definitely be reading some more Roth very soon.
Have you read any Joseph Roth? Leave a comment with your thoughts if you have.
Update: for my review of The Radetzky March, go here.