Job
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JOSEPH ROTH
The Story of a Simple Man
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Translated from the German
and with an afterword by Ross Benjamin
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archipelago books
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Copyright © Ross Benjamin 2010
First Archipelago Books Edition, 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted
in any form without prior written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roth, Joseph, 1894â1939.
[Hiob, Roman eines einfachen Mannes. English]
Job, the story of a simple man / Joseph Roth ; translated from the
German by Ross Benjamin. â 1st Archipelago Books ed.
p. cm.
I. Benjamin, Ross. II.Title.
PT2635.084H5132010Â Â Â Â 833'.912 â dc22
2010038453
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Cover art: Marc Chagall
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This publication was made possible by the generous support of Lannan
Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York
State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
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Job
Part One
I
Many years ago there lived in Zuchnow a man named Mendel Singer. He was pious, God-fearing and ordinary, an entirely everyday Jew. He practiced the modest profession of a teacher. In his house, which consisted of only a roomy kitchen, he imparted to children knowledge of the Bible. He taught with genuine enthusiasm and without spectacular success. Hundreds of thousands before him had lived and taught as he did.
As insignificant as his nature was his pale face. A full beard of ordinary black framed it completely. His mouth was hidden by the beard. His eyes were large, black, languid and half veiled by heavy lids. On his head sat a cap of black silk rep, a material out of which unfashionable and cheap ties are sometimes made. His body was wrapped in a customary half-long Jewish caftan, the skirts of which fluttered when Mendel Singer rushed through the street, knocking with a hard regular wing beat against the shafts of his high leather boots.
Singer seemed to have little time and nothing but pressing goals. Certainly his life was always hard and at times even a torment. He had a wife and three children to clothe and feed. (She was pregnant with a fourth.) God had bestowed fertility on his loins, equanimity on his heart and poverty on his hands. They had no gold to weigh and no banknotes to count. Still, his life ran steadily along like a poor little brook between sparse banks. Each morning Mendel thanked God for his sleep, for his awakening and for the dawning day. When the sun went down, he prayed once more. When the first stars began to sparkle, he prayed a third time. And before he lay down to sleep, he whispered a hasty prayer with weary but zealous lips. His sleep was dreamless. His conscience was clear. His soul was chaste. He had nothing to regret and there was nothing he would have coveted. He loved his wife and delighted in her flesh. With healthy hunger he swiftly consumed his meals. His two small sons, Jonas and Shemariah, he beat when they were disobedient. But the youngest, his daughter Miriam, he caressed often. She had his black hair and his black, languid and gentle eyes. Her limbs were delicate, her joints fragile. A young gazelle.
He taught twelve six-year-old pupils reading and recitation of the Bible. Every Friday each of the twelve brought him twenty kopecks. This was Mendel Singer's only income. He was only thirty years old. But his prospects of earning more were slim, perhaps nonexistent. When the pupils grew older, they moved on to other, wiser teachers. Life became more expensive from year to
year. The harvests were poorer and poorer. The carrots decreased, the eggs became hollow, the potatoes frozen, the soups watery, the carp thin and the pike short, the ducks meager, the geese tough, and the chickens nothing.
Thus sounded the laments of Deborah, Mendel Singer's wife. She was a woman, occasionally something got into her. She stole glances at the property of the wealthy and envied merchants their profits. Mendel Singer was much too lowly in her eyes. She reproached him for the children, her pregnancy, the rising prices, his low fees and often even for the bad weather. On Friday she scrubbed the floor until it turned yellow as saffron. Her broad shoulders jerked up and down in a regular rhythm, her strong hands rubbed vigorously every single floorboard, and her nails dug into the gaps and hollow spaces between the boards and scraped out black grime, which breaking waves from the bucket completely obliterated. Like a broad, mighty and mobile mountain, she crawled through the bare, blue-washed room. Outside the door she aired the furniture, the brown wooden bed, the sacks of straw, a planed-down table, two long and narrow benches, horizontal boards, each of them nailed to two vertical ones. As soon as the first twilight breathed on the window, Deborah lit the candles in candlesticks made of nickel silver, covered her face with her hands and prayed. Her husband came home in silky black, the floor shone up at him, yellow as melted sun, his face shimmered whiter than usual, and blacker than on weekdays his beard darkened. 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. The cheap candles in the nickel silver candlesticks couldn't stand it, they began to bend. Stearin dripped on the brick-red and blue checkered tablecloth and encrusted in no time. The window was flung open, the candles braced up and burned peacefully to their end. The children lay down on the sacks of straw near the stove, the parents remained sitting and gazed with troubled solemnity into the last little blue flames, which shot up jaggedly out of the cavities of the candlesticks and, gently undulating, sank back, a fountain of fire. The stearin smoldered, thin blue threads of smoke drifted upward to the ceiling from the charred remains of the wick. “Ah!” sighed the woman. “Don't sigh!” Mendel Singer admonished. They fell silent. “Let's sleep, Deborah!” he commanded. And they began to murmur a bedtime prayer.
At the end of each week the Sabbath commenced thus, with silence, candles and song. Twenty-four hours later it was submerged in the night that led the gray procession of weekdays, a round dance of tribulation. On a hot midsummer day, in the fourth hour of the afternoon, Deborah gave birth. Her first cries pierced the singsong of the twelve studying children. They all went home. Seven days of vacation began. Mendel got a new child, a fourth, a boy. Eight days later he was circumcised and named Menuchim.
Menuchim had no cradle. He hung in a wicker basket in the middle of the room, fastened with four ropes to a hook in the ceiling
like a chandelier. From time to time Mendel Singer tapped with a gentle, not loveless finger on the hanging basket, which immediately began to rock. Occasionally, this motion calmed the infant. But sometimes nothing helped against his desire to whimper and scream. His voice croaked over the holy sentences of the Bible. Deborah climbed onto a stool and took the infant down. White, swollen and colossal, her bosom poured from her open blouse and drew the glances of the boys overpoweringly. Deborah seemed to suckle all present. Her own three older children surrounded her, jealous and desirous. Silence fell. They heard the infant's smacking.
The days stretched into weeks, the weeks grew into months, twelve months made a year. Menuchim still drank his mother's milk, a thin, clear milk. She couldn't wean him. In the thirteenth month of his life he began to make faces and groan like an animal, to breathe in racing haste and gasp in a previously unknown way. His large head hung heavy as a pumpkin on his thin neck. His broad brow folded and furrowed all over like a crumpled parchment. His legs were curved and lifeless like two wooden bows. His scrawny little arms wriggled and twitched. His mouth stammered ridiculous sounds. When he had an attack, he was taken out of the cradle and shaken well, until his face turned bluish and he nearly lost his breath. Then he recovered slowly. Brewed tea (in several little bags) was laid on his meager chest and coltsfoot was wrapped around his thin neck. “It's nothing,” said his father, “it comes from growing.” “Sons take after their mother's brothers.
My brother had it for five years!” said his mother. “He'll grow out of it!” said the others. Until one day smallpox broke out in the town, the authorities prescribed vaccinations, and the doctors penetrated into the houses of the Jews. Some hid. But Mendel Singer, the righteous, fled no divine punishment. Even the vaccination he awaited calmly.