"Many years ago, a man named Mendel Singer lived in Tsuchnovo. He was pious, God-fearing, and ordinary, a Jew like everyone else..."

This is how Roth begins his novel about the loss of faith and the suffering of man. The modern Job is tested in the ghettos of tsarist Russia and then on the merciless streets of New York. Mendel Singer loses his family, falls seriously ill, and becomes a victim of harsh treatment. He needs a miracle...

- I don't want to burn just one house, I don't want to burn just one person. You will lose it if I tell you what I intended to burn. You will lose it and say: Mendel has gone mad, like his daughter. But I assure you: I am not mad. I was mad. I was mad for over sixty years, but today I am not.
- Tell us, then, what do you want to burn!
- God! I want to burn God!

It is impossible to describe the delicate poetic language of this book, but I guarantee its remarkable literary merits.
(Thomas Mann)

It was expected that I would read Roth's Job with interest: I appreciated Roth's talents already from his early works, and his latest book truly surprised me, especially thanks to the warm tones that enriched the author's palette.
(Robert Musil)

The life of this ordinary man absorbs us, as if someone is writing about our own life, our own expectations, our own struggles. Roth's language has the discipline and power of classical German literature. A great and moving book that no one will be able to ignore.
(Ernst Toller)

Roth was a cultural monument of the Jews of Galicia: ironic, compassionate, perfectly attuned to the destructive era in which he lived.
(Harold Bloom)

Joseph Roth's work is as a whole a trag?die humaine, forged with the techniques of modern literature.
(Nadine Gordimer)

Perhaps there is no other contemporary writer who combines the novelistic and poetic language with greater mastery, the robust, incorruptible realism with strong flashes of metaphor and simile.
(James Wood)

Anyone who surrenders to the emotion that this book evokes should not feel burdened by it: what shook them was the legitimate impact of pure great art.
(Lion Feucht Wanger)