Job (22 page)

In keeping with Roth's journalistic activity, his early novels – such as
Hotel Savoy
(1924),
Rebellion
(1924),
Zipper and His Father
(1928),
and Right and Left
(1929) – are observational accounts of such subjects as the return from war, political unrest, and the failed search for personal fulfillment amid the harsh realities of postwar Europe. They largely exemplify the principles of the
Neue Sachlichkeit
(New Objectivity), an aesthetic and literary
movement of 1920s Germany that emerged in opposition to the emotiveness of Expressionism and championed documentary-style portrayals of social conditions, often with a political edge. Notable among the representative works of the movement are the art of George Grosz, the photography of August Sander, and the writing of Alfred Döblin, which share a commitment to raw depictions of contemporary life. Roth articulates a similar approach in his preface to his 1927 novel
Flight Without End:
“I have invented nothing, composed nothing. It is no longer a matter of ‘poetic creation.' What is most important is what is observed.”

Job
marks a turning point in Roth's career. In it, he ventures into the depths of inner subjectivity so as to convey the vicissitudes of an individual fate. As the title suggests, the tale of Mendel Singer, a pious, destitute and “entirely everyday” children's Torah teacher whose faith is tested at every turn, is a modern fable based on the Biblical story of Job. Singer witnesses the collapse of his world: his youngest son is born with what seem to be incurable disabilities, one of his older sons joins the Russian Army, the other deserts to America, and his daughter is running around with a Cossack. When he flees to America with his wife and daughter, further blows await him. Ultimately, in the face of unbearable suffering and loss, Singer gives up hope and curses God, only to be saved by a miraculous reversal of fortune. A stirring exploration of the human heart in its most profound sorrows and joys,
Job
achieves a new artistic height in Roth's oeuvre, displaying the poetic potency and sensitivity that would henceforth characterize his writing.

But the novelist, in entering this later phase, did not abandon his extraordinary powers of realism. In his description of the shtetl where the story begins, for example, Roth renders in luminous detail the milieu with which he was familiar from his Galician childhood and which he documented in 1927 in a collection of journalistic essays on Eastern European Jewry titled
The Wandering Jews.
Roth's interest in those who
had been displaced by the redrawing of national boundaries – in the wake of the war, the Russian Revolution and the Treaty of Versailles – extended beyond Jewish refugees. He wrote dispatches from encampments and ghettos in which unwelcome, maltreated people of all sorts dwelled. Nonetheless, it is no wonder that the centuries-old figure of the migrant Jew who is nowhere at home would strike the writer as an embodiment of the peripatetic nature of postwar modern life, ultimately prompting him to evoke the trope of Jewish exile in
Job.
Roth's firsthand encounters did not merely provide
Job
with realistic detail, but also enhanced his intimacy with a deeper current of Jewish experience. As a stranger everywhere himself, he must have felt all the more attuned to the Jewish condition of rootlessness, encapsulated by the Russian peasant Sameshkin in
Job
with little sympathy: “Why do you people always roam around so much in the world! The devil sends you from one place to another.”

In its combination of Roth's well-honed reportorial exactitude with a newfound melancholy lyricism,
Job
anticipates
The Radetzky March,
the author's elegy for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There is also a connection between the subjects of the two works: Roth's increasing nostalgia for the monarchy was intimately related to his consciousness of Jewish homelessness. Roth was one of many Austro-Hungarian Jews who had embraced the imperial ideal of a supranational, multiethnic state. However imperfect its realization, this ideal offered the monarchy's Jewish subjects, who could not claim a territory of their own, a promise of belonging. The breakup of the Empire – precipitated by the national independence movements of Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians, Serbs, Croats and Slovenes – shattered this hope and gave rise to nation-states based on ethnicity in which Jews were imperiled by greater marginalization and persecution.

Roth's mourning for the bygone era of his early years forms the
thematic core of his work. Certain motifs drawn from his Galician memories turn up again and again in passages tinged with sorrow. One such moment occurs in
Job,
when a few scarcely discernible stars over Manhattan remind Singer of “the bright starry nights at home, the deep blue of the widely spanning sky, the gently curved sickle of the moon, the dark rustle of the pines in the forest, the voices of the crickets and frogs.” These are the sights and sounds of Roth's childhood surroundings. Similarly recurrent is a cast of characters: smugglers and deserters, Hassidic “wonder rabbis” and fleeing Jews, tavern keepers and middlemen, Cossacks and Ruthenian peasants, Polish nobles and Austrian officers – all the mysterious borderland figures that fascinated the young Roth in Brody. They populate his stories and play important roles in
Job
and
The Radetzky March.
It is no accident that these two chronicles of loss contain the richest expressions of Roth's preoccupation with the border, the site of crossing from one world into another, of transition and transience, of departure from the familiar into the foreign.

The border is also the place from which the signs of imminent upheaval are most visible. In
The Radetzky March
dwellers in the Austrian border regions perceive the approaching war long before those in Vienna, “not only because they were accustomed to sensing coming things, but also because they could see the portents of collapse every day with their own eyes.” Having grown up in a climate of disquiet and ferment that presaged the monarchy's downfall, Roth was keenly aware of the augmented vision of things from the periphery, “where the demise of the world could already clearly be seen, as one sees a storm at the edge of a city, while its streets still lie unsuspectingly and blissfully under a blue sky.” This border-perspective is crucial to Roth's world-view as a quintessential outsider, from his beginnings as a fatherless and poetically inclined Jew from Europe's eastern frontier to his last years as an exile in Paris. The
acuity of Roth's discernment from the margins is evident in the incisive nature of his journalism, the political foresight of his early fiction, and the emotional profundity of his late work.

The elegiac turn in Roth's writing that begins with
Job
is traceable to the author's afflictions at the time. In 1929 his wife was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Like Deborah Singer in the novel, who is desperate to find a cure for her disabled son, Roth sought the help of a Hassidic rabbi for his stricken wife. The crisis with Friederike must have reawakened the painful memory of his father's madness: Nachum Roth had been entrusted to the custody of a wonder rabbi. The scenes in
Job
in which the Singers' daughter, Miriam, succumbs to insanity and ends up in an asylum reflect the trauma of Friederike's eventual institutionalization. In letters from this period, Roth explained his woes in terms akin to those he uses in
Job:
“It is a curse that has struck me,” he wrote, “God alone can help.” The novel's fairy-tale ending, in which the rabbi's prophecy comes to pass and father and son are miraculously reunited (and which Roth once confessed he could not have written had he not been drunk), may well have served as a catharsis for the author in more ways than one. The scene in
Job,
in which it is not the father but the son who is healed, is the mirror image of the longed-for reunion that remained an unfulfilled wish outside the realm of fiction. Friederike's psychosis no doubt compounded this grief.

After Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Roth refashioned himself as a Catholic conservative and monarchist. Having fled Berlin for Paris, the writer – who had once signed his articles for socialist-leaning newspapers “Der rote Joseph” (Red Joseph) – espoused the conviction that only the Catholic Church and a resuscitation of Habsburg rule could save Austria and Europe from the Nazi menace. Numerous contemporaries noted Roth's mythomania and his tendency to adopt diverse masks and roles, but this was certainly the most bewildering of his transformations. Still, it
seemed to emanate in some way from his elemental yearning for the vanished past, which intensified in those years. At the same time, tormented by guilt over his wife's suffering and burdened by ever-worsening financial strains, Roth – who had always been a heavy drinker – descended ever deeper into the alcoholism that would take his life in 1939. A year later, Friederike would fall victim to the Nazis' so-called “euthanasia” program in an Austrian sanatorium. Roth's art had reached its pinnacle at the point when his life and his world began their tragic collapse.

Ross Benjamin