About the Author

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,aJobabecame his first worldwide success, followed by his magnum opus,aThe 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 Holderlin'saHyperion, Kevin Vennemann'saClose to Jedenewaand Thomas Pletzinger'saFuneral 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'saSpeak, Nabokov.

Reviews

Job is perfect. . . . a novel as lyric poem. —Joan Acocella

Galician Jewry achieved another grand figure in Joseph Roth, whose Job is both immensely sorrowful and finally strangely hopeful. —Harold Bloom

Job is more than a novel and legend, it is a pure, perfect poetic work, which is destined to outlast everything that we, his contemporaries, have created and written. In unity of construction, in depth of feeling, in purity, in the musicality of the language, it can scarcely be surpassed. —Stefan Zweig

This life of an everyday man moves us as if someone had written of our lives, our longings, our struggles. Roth’s language has the discipline and rigor of German Classicism. A great and harrowing book that no one can resist. —Ernst Toller

A beautifully written, and in the end uplifting, parable for an era of upheaval . . . Job, opened to any page, offers something of beauty. . . Ross Benjamin's excellent new translation gives us both the realism and the poetry. —The Quarterly Conversation

The totality of Joseph Roth's work is no less than a tragédie humaine achieved in the techniques of modern fiction. —Nadine Gordimer