The latest addition to my website is Joseph Roth‘s Hiob (Job, the Story of a Simple Man). This is a modern (late 19th/early20th century) updating of the story of the Biblical Job, whom God made suffer, in order to test him. Our Job is Mendel Singer, a Russian Jew, living in Zuchnow, a fictitious town in Tsarist Russia. He is married with four children. His youngest is handicapped. Things get worse when his two eldest sons are called up the army, with one fleeing and escaping to the US, and his daughter has a Cossack boyfriend. The son who escaped pays for his parents and sister to join him in the US and things start to look up, when more afflictions fall on Mendel and he ends up wanting to burn God. He eventually adapts and moves on but he does have his fair share of suffering.