And he drove at his son’s side to Forty-fourth and Broadway, the Astor Hotel.
*Perhaps to avoid terms that would be unfamiliar to non-Jewish readers of his time, Roth refers to the Jewish Passover feast, Pesach, by the name of the Christian holiday Easter (Ostern in German) celebrated at the same time of year and calls matzoh, the unleavened bread eaten at Passover, “Easter bread” (Osterbrot).[Translator]
XVI
Pitiful and stooped, in a green shimmering coat, holding the little red velvet sack, Mendel Singer entered the lobby, observed the electric light, the blond porter, the white bust of an unknown god at the foot of the stairs and the black Negro who tried to take the sack from him. He stepped into the elevator and saw himself in the mirror next to his son, he closed his eyes, for he felt dizzy. He had already died, he was floating in heaven, it would never end. His son grasped him by the hand, the elevator stopped, Mendel walked on a soundless carpet through a long corridor. He didn’t open his eyes until he stood in the room. As was his wont, he went immediately to the window. There he saw for the first time the American night from up close, the reddened sky, the flaming, sparkling, dripping, glowing, red, blue, green, silver, golden letters, pictures and signs. He heard the noisy song of America, the honking, the tooting, the roaring, the ringing, the screeching, the creaking, the whistling and the howling. Opposite the window on which Mendel was leaning appeared every five seconds the broad laughing face of a girl, composed entirely of sprayed sparks and points, the blinding teeth in the open mouth made of a piece of melted silver. A ruby red, foaming goblet floated toward this face, tipped of its own accord, poured its contents into the open mouth and withdrew, to reappear newly filled, ruby red and foaming over with white froth. It was an advertisement for a new soda. Mendel admired it as the most perfect representation of the night’s happiness and of golden health. He smiled, watched the picture come and disappear a few times and turned back to the room. There stood his white bed with the covers turned back. Menuchim was rocking in a rocking chair. “I won’t sleep tonight,” said Mendel. “You lie down to sleep, I’ll sit beside you. You slept in the corner, in Zuchnow, next to the stove.” “I remember clearly one day,” began Menuchim, taking off his glasses, and Mendel saw the naked eyes of his son, they seemed to him sad and weary, “I remember a morning, the sun is very bright, the room empty. Then you come, lift me up, I sit on a table, and you ring a glass with a spoon. It was a wonderful ring, I wish I could compose and play it today. Then you sing. Then the clocks begin to toll, very old ones, like great heavy spoons they strike gigantic glasses.” “Go on, go on,” said Mendel. He too remembered clearly that day, on which Deborah left the house to prepare for the journey to Kapturak. “That’s the only thing from the early days!” said his son. “Then comes the time when Billes’s son-in-law, the violinist, plays. Every day, I believe, he plays. He stops playing, but I always hear him, all day long, all night long.” “Go on, go on!” urged Mendel, in the tone in which he always encouraged his pupils to study.
“Then there’s nothing for a long time! Then one day I see a great red and blue fire. I lie down on the floor. I crawl to the door. Suddenly someone pulls me up and pushes me, I run. I’m outside, people are standing on the other side of the street. Fire! The cry bursts from me!” “Go on, go on!” urged Mendel. “I remember nothing else. They told me later that I was sick and unconscious for a long time. I remember only the times in Petersburg, a white hall, white beds, many children in the beds, a harmonium or an organ is playing, and I sing along with a loud voice. Then the doctor takes me home in a car. A tall blond woman in a pale blue dress is playing piano. She stands up. I go to the keys, there’s a sound when I touch them. Suddenly I play the songs of the organ and everything I can sing.” “Go on, go on!” urged Mendel. “I can think of nothing else that would matter more to me than those few days. I remember my mother. It was warm and soft with her, I believe she had a very deep voice, and her face was very big and round, like a whole world.” “Go on, go on!” said Mendel. “Miriam, Jonas, Shemariah I don’t remember. I heard about them only much later, from Billes’s daughter.”
Mendel sighed. “Miriam,” he repeated. She stood before him, in her golden-yellow shawl, with her blue-black hair, nimble and light-footed, a young gazelle. She had his eyes. “I was a bad father,” said Mendel. “I treated you badly, and her too. Now she is lost, no medicine can help her.” “We will go to her,” said Menuchim. “I myself, Father, have I not been healed?”
Yes, Menuchim was right. Man is unsatisfied, Mendel said to himself. He has just experienced a miracle, already he wants to see the next. Wait, wait, Mendel Singer! Just look what has become of Menuchim, the cripple. Slender are his hands, wise are his eyes, soft are his cheeks.
“Go to sleep, Father!” said his son. He sat down on the floor and pulled off Mendel Singer’s old boots. He gazed at the soles, which were torn, had jagged edges, the yellow patched uppers, the roughened shafts, the hole-riddled socks, the frayed pants. He undressed the old man and laid him in bed. Then he left the room, took a book from his suitcase, returned to his father, sat down in the rocking chair next to the bed, lit the small green lamp and began to read. Mendel pretended to sleep. He squinted through a narrow crack between his eyelids. His son laid the book aside and said: “You are thinking of Miriam, Father! We will visit her. I will call doctors. They will cure her. She is still young! Go to sleep!” Mendel closed his eyes, but he didn’t fall asleep. He thought of Miriam, heard the unfamiliar noises of the world, felt through his closed eyelids the nocturnal flames of the bright sky. He didn’t sleep, but he felt at ease, he rested. With his wakeful head he lay bedded in sleep and waited for the morning.
His son prepared him a bath, dressed him, sat him in the car. They drove for a long time through noisy streets, they left the city, they came to a long and wide road, on the sides of which stood budding trees. The engine emitted a high-pitched hum, in the wind Mendel’s beard waved. He was silent. “Do you want to know where we’re going, Father?” asked his son. “No!” answered Mendel. “I don’t want to know anything! Wherever you go is good.”
And they reached a world where the soft sand was yellow, the wide sea blue and all the houses white. On the terrace in front of one of those houses, at a small white table, sat Mendel Singer. He slurped a golden-brown tea. On his stooped back shone the first warm sun of the year. The blackbirds hopped up close to him. Their sisters were fluting in front of the terrace. The waves of the sea lapped the shore with a gentle regular beat. In the pale blue sky were a few little white clouds. Under that sky Mendel was willing to believe that Jonas would one day turn up again and Miriam come home, “in all the land were no women found so fair,” he quoted inwardly. He himself, Mendel Singer, will, after late years, have a good death, surrounded by many grandchildren and “old and full of days,” as it was written in “Job.” He felt a strange and also forbidden longing to take off the cap of old silk rep and let the sun shine on his old pate. And for the first time in his life Mendel Singer voluntarily uncovered his head, as he had done only in an office or in the bath. The sparse, curly little hairs on his bald head were moved by a spring wind, as if they were strange delicate plants.
Thus Mendel Singer greeted the world.
And a gull flew, like a silver bullet of the sky, under the canopy of the terrace. Mendel watched its precipitous flight and the shadowy white trail that it left behind in the blue air.
Then the son said:
“Next week I’m going to San Francisco. On the way back we’re playing ten days in Chicago. I think, Father, that we can go to Europe in four weeks!”
“Miriam?”
“Today I will see her, talk to doctors. Everything will be fine, Father. Maybe we will take her with us. Maybe she will recover in Europe!”
They returned to the hotel. Mendel went into his son’s room. He was tired. “Lie down on the sofa, sleep a little,” said his son. “In two hours I’ll be back!”
Mende
l lay down obediently. He knew where his son was going. He was going to his sister. He was a wonderful man, the blessing rested on him, he would make Miriam healthy.
Mendel glimpsed a large photograph in a reddish-brown frame on the small dressing table. “Give me the picture!” he implored.
He gazed at it for a long time. He saw the young blond woman in a bright dress, bright as the day, she sat in a garden, through which the wind meandered and moved the bushes at the edges of the flowerbeds. Two children, a girl and a boy, stood next to a small wagon with a donkey harnessed to it, as are used in some gardens as a vehicle for play.
“God bless them!” said Mendel.
The son left. The father remained on the sofa, he laid the photograph gently beside him. His weary eyes wandered through the room to the window. From his deep sofa he could see a jagged cloudless piece of sky. He picked up the picture again. There was his daughter-in-law, Menuchim’s wife, there were his grandchildren, Menuchim’s children. When he looked at the girl more closely, he thought he saw a childhood picture of Deborah. Dead was Deborah, with strange, otherworldly eyes she perhaps witnessed the miracle. Gratefully Mendel remembered her young warmth, which he had once tasted, her red cheeks, her half-open eyes, which had shone in the dark nights of love, narrow enticing lights. Dead Deborah!
He stood up, pushed a chair to the sofa, placed the picture on the chair and lay down again. As they slowly closed, his eyes took the whole blue brightness of the sky into sleep and the faces of the new children. Beside them emerged from the portrait’s brown background Jonas and Miriam. Mendel fell asleep. And he rested from the weight of happiness and the greatness of miracles.
Translator’s Afterword
“I’ve seen a few worlds perish,” laments Mendel Singer, the protagonist of Joseph Roth’s 1930 novel Job: The Story of a Simple Man, in the course of a life afflicted by one misfortune after another. So too had his creator. Born in 1894 in Brody, a small, mostly Jewish town in Galicia – a province at the easternmost edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, six miles from the Russian border – Roth witnessed the disappearance of his homeland from the map with the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918. This experience of irretrievable loss through historic upheaval profoundly shaped his fiction, essays and journalism. Above all, his twin masterpieces – Job, the tale of an uprooted Russian Jew, and The Radetzsky March (1932), a generational novel that traces Austria-Hungary’s demise – convey the fundamental homesickness at the heart of the author’s life and work.
When Roth first left home in 1913 for the University of Lemberg, from which he transferred the following year to the University of Vienna, he was not eager to identify with his origins. Indeed, as a student in the Austrian capital – where there was widespread contempt for Ostjuden, as Eastern European Jews were disparagingly called, and Galicia was considered a particularly backward region – he sought to disguise his background through false biographical claims and affectations. He named Schwabendorf, a predominantly German town, as his birthplace, and variously described his father – who in reality had been placed in care for madness before Joseph was born – as a Viennese factory owner, an army officer, a Polish aristocrat, and other imaginary figures. In 1916 Roth abandoned his German literature studies to volunteer for military service in the First World War. Upon entering the anti-Semitic atmosphere of the Austrian Army, he shed his former first name, Moses (Joseph had been his middle name).
The fall of the empire at the end of the war became the pivotal event of Roth’s life. His novels of the early 1920s are Heimkehrerromane, stories about returning soldiers. They testify to the shock of his own unattainable homecoming. Like the writer himself, Roth’s soldiers invariably discover that, in the radically transformed postwar landscape, they no longer have homes to come back to. Though he moved to Berlin in 1923 with his new wife – Friederike Reichler, the daughter of Galician-Jewish parents – Roth went on to lead a restless, itinerant existence as a journalist for Austrian and German newspapers, usually of a liberal or leftist bent. As a foreign correspondent, he reported from a variety of places, including Russia, Poland, Albania, Italy and France. His was the life of a stateless nomad, shuttling among the hotels, cafés and taverns of Europe’s cities and provinces. Fittingly for a man of the press, his debut as a novelist in 1923, The Spider’s Web – which presciently diagnosed the threat of the fascist right – was published as a newspaper serial.
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 Jewis
h 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.