Job : The Story of a Simple Man - Softcover

Joseph Roth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0982624603 ISBN 13: 9780982624609

Publisher: ARCHIPELAGO BOOKS, 2010

Synopsis

The faith of Mendel Singer, a teacher in Galicia, is tested at every turn. Eventually his worldview erodes along with his belief in God's omnipotence. Singer and his family move to America, where his eldest son joins the army and is killed in WWI. Then a miracle occurs, and Singer's faith is renewed. This moving and insightful modern fable is one of Joseph Roth's greatest works. Born in 1894 in a small Galician town on the border of the Hapsburg Empire, Joseph Roth, author of more than fifteen novels, was one of the central figures of the émigré intellectual opposition to the Nazis. Roth is among the greatest Central European writers of the twentieth century.

About this title

Review:

Job is perfect. . . . a novel as lyric poem. --Joan Acocella

Galician Jewry achieved another grand figure in Joseph Roth, whose Job is both immensely sorrowful and finally strangely hopeful. --Harold Bloom

Job is more than a novel and legend, it is a pure, perfect poetic work, which is destined to outlast everything that we, his contemporaries, have created and written. In unity of construction, in depth of feeling, in purity, in the musicality of the language, it can scarcely be surpassed. --Stefan Zweig

This life of an everyday man moves us as if someone had written of our lives, our longings, our struggles. Roth's language has the discipline and rigor of German Classicism. A great and harrowing book that no one can resist. --Ernst Toller

A beautifully written, and in the end uplifting, parable for an era of upheaval . . . Job, opened to any page, offers something of beauty. . . Ross Benjamin's excellent new translation gives us both the realism and the poetry. --The Quarterly Conversation

The totality of Joseph Roth's work is no less than a tragédie humaine achieved in the techniques of modern fiction. --Nadine Gordimer

About the Author:

Joseph Roth was born in 1894 in Galicia, an eastern province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During the First World War, he abandoned his studies in Vienna to serve in the Austrian Army. He wrote thirteen novels and numerous short stories and essays. Published in 1930, Job became his first worldwide success, followed by his magnum opus, The Radetzky March, in 1932. When Hitler rose to power, Roth went into exile in Paris, where he died in 1939. Ross Benjamin is a writer and translator living in Nyack, New York. His translations include Friedrich Hölderlin's Hyperion, Kevin Vennemann's Close to Jedenew and Thomas Pletzinger's Funeral for a Dog. He was a 2003-2004 Fulbright Scholar in Berlin and won the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar's Speak, Nabokov.

About this edition

• Publisher: ARCHIPELAGO BOOKS
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0982624603
• ISBN 13: 9780982624609
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216