JOB by Joseph Roth (HIOB, 1930) is a modern retelling of the Biblical story in a mixed form, fable and realism. It follows the fortunes of the Singer family from Western Russia at the end of the 19th century to New York in the early 20th. Stefan Zweig wrote: "JOB, more than a novel and a legend, is a pure, perfect poem of our time, and if I am not mistaken, the only one certain to outlast all that we, its contemporaries, have created and written." Heinrich Böll comments: "Joseph Roth's novels transpire in a world that is no longer: the world of Eastern Jewry, as Roth describes it in JOB, existed up to 1940: in that year the murderers swept it away. Thus Joseph Roth's work is not only poetry and great prose, it is also documentation of everyday Jewish life, such as is seldom to be found."
