Job

" Jobis perfect. . . . a novel as lyric poem." --Joan Acocella Jobis the tale of Mendel Singer, a pious, destitute Russian Jew and children's Torah teacher whose faith is tested at every turn. His youngest son seems to be incurably disabled, 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 of fate await him. In this modern fable based on the biblical story of Job, Mendel Singer witnesses the collapse of his world, experiences unbearable suffering and loss, and ultimately gives up hope and curses God, only to be saved by a miraculous reversal of fortune. 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 emigre intellectual opposition to the Nazis. Roth is among the greatest Central European writers of the twentieth century.

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.