Wandering Jew by Dennis Marks

Author:Dennis Marks [Dennis Marks]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910749319
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2016-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

When we read his quasi-Hasidic debates with God, Rebellion seems at times like an early draft for Job, Roth’s first great popular success. Although he never suggests that Pum is Jewish, his speech is peppered with Talmudic language. Like his Old Testament model, he is the personification of stoical, uncomprehending endurance. When he realises that by losing his permit he has forfeited not merely his social status but his very existence, he has a vision of descending into penury and madness. Without his permit he feels as if he is adrift on a hostile sea. Job has now become Jonah.

Rebellion is only superficially a product of the New Objectivity. It certainly employs journalistic narrative gestures and sharply observed social detail. Yet like the cinema and visual art of Weimar Berlin, the documentary surface conceals an expressionist core. Roth employs this stylistic trick throughout his next substantial work, Flight Without End, where he goes to great lengths to seduce us into believing that we are witnessing unmediated documentary truth. In the Preface, he constructs a mini-manifesto of the Neue Sachlichkeit:

I have invented nothing, made up nothing. The question of ‘poetic invention’ is no longer relevant. Observed fact is all that counts.

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