- Person
- Joseph Roth
- Lived
- 1894–1939
- Field
- Novelist & journalist
- From
- Austrian
The story
Joseph Roth was born in 1894 in Brody, a small town near Lemberg in eastern Galicia, at the far edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Jewish culture played an important part in the life of the town, which had a large Jewish population. Roth grew up with his mother and her relatives and never knew his father. He went on to study in Lemberg and Vienna and became a celebrated journalist in Vienna and Berlin, but his fiction kept returning to the Jewish world of Eastern Europe.
Through the 1920s he had only moderate success as a novelist. That changed in 1930 with Job: The Story of a Simple Man. It tells of Mendel Singer, a Jew whose search for God is tested by suffering. The Neue Deutsche Biographie explains that the novel poses the question of God's justice through the contrast between the hardships of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and the opportunities that Jewish emigrants found in North America.
The German Historical Museum calls Job Roth's most successful book, and the Neue Deutsche Biographie says it was the novel that made him famous. Together with Radetzky March two years later, it finally brought him acclaim as a novelist rather than only as a journalist. Today it is still listed, with Radetzky March and his essay The Wandering Jews, among the works for which he is best known.
The story soon travelled beyond the German-speaking world. In 1936 it was filmed in Hollywood as Sins of Man, directed by Otto Brower and starring Jean Hersholt. It was later adapted again as a German-language television miniseries in 1978, directed by Michael Kehlmann.
Job belongs to the group of works through which, in the words of the Neue Deutsche Biographie, Roth became one of the most important portrayers of Eastern European Jewry, a world that was later largely destroyed. Its story of a father's faith and doubt gives modern readers a window into the lives of ordinary Jewish families in Eastern Europe and of those who left for an uncertain new world.
Why it matters
Job carried the faith and suffering of ordinary Eastern European Jews to readers and audiences across the world.
About Joseph Roth
Galician-born novelist and star reporter whose Radetzky March and Job mourned the lost Habsburg world and the Jewish life of the East, written from exile and despair.
More about Joseph Roth
- Almost all of Joseph Roth's novels were filmedNearly all of Joseph Roth's novels were adapted for film or television, including Ermanno Olmi's The Legend of the Holy Drinker.
- Joseph Roth's Radetzky March told an empire's fallJoseph Roth's 1932 novel Radetzky March traced the decline of Austria-Hungary through one family and went through five printings in a few months.
- Joseph Roth wrote against fascism from exileJoseph Roth warned against fascism in Germany and Italy in the 1920s and, after 1933, wrote fiercely anti-fascist articles from exile in Paris.
- Joseph Roth helped fellow refugees in ParisIn exile in Paris after 1933, Joseph Roth helped aid refugees, including through the Entraide Autrichienne, while writing against Nazism.
- Joseph Roth preserved the vanished world of Eastern JewsGermany's national biography calls Joseph Roth one of the most important portrayers of Eastern European Jewish life, a world later largely destroyed.
Sources
- Joseph Roth Lebendiges Museum Online, Deutsches Historisches Museum
- Joseph Roth Wikipedia
- Roth, Moses Joseph Neue Deutsche Biographie
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.