Joseph Roth’s anti-American utopia

Abstract

The article is devoted to the novel Job [Hiob] (1930), written by the Austrian Joseph Roth about the life of a Russian Jew named Mendel Singer. Upon his emigration to America, he is subjected to trials not unlike the long-suffering biblical character — a cruel test of faith followed by last-minute miraculous salvation. Roth’s narrative strategy rests on the substitution of the empirical picture of the world with the spiritual reality of a religious mind. By contrasting the poetics of realism with the truth of the eternal myth, Roth insists on an artist’s right to depict reality from the metaphysical perspective of the absolute future. This material provides the background for the article’s discussion of the conflict between social adaptiveness and culture, which not only are mutually conditioned but also tend to develop in stark contradiction with each other. Roth’s protagonist, who embodies the Jewish idea of becoming a society’s opponent, remains on the culture’s side. He survives America’s excruciating test, and it is only through the mythological model of Job at the core of the novel that the story has a happy ending — a triumph of a religious and aesthetic utopia.