THE MAN OF FAITH

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 60, Issue 4235, 24 January 1940, Page 3

THE MAN OF FAITH

WHO’S WHO IN FICTION.

“MENDEL SINGER’S” TRAGIC STORY.

The time-told story of the “Man of Uz” has come down to us symbolising a virtue more generally honoured i;n the breach than in observance.

It is a good story Well told, the main plbint being that Patience, if persisted! in, will ultimately bring its own reward.

Job was not the humble victim of evil fortune, taking it dying down. He was a man of substance and an employer of labour, respects in which he differed materially from Mendel Singer, the leading character in the novel—“ Job, the Story of a Simple Man,” by Joseph, Roth. The Biblical story has been used a good deal by latter-day fiction writers, sometimes historically, or, as in the present instance, as a motive applied to modern characters and conditions. But whatever the application there inevitably creeps into it something of 'the force and poignancy of the original script.

Joseph Roth, the son of a: Russian Jewess and an Austrian, was bom in 1894 in the German colony of Schalbendorf, in Volhynia, and studied at the University of Vienna, with useful 1 later experience as a soldier in the Austrian and contributor to a German newspaper. In “Job,” his eighth book, he attained world acknowledgement. Commenting on ’t Lion Feuchtwanger says: “Only a thoroughly callous person may deny himself this book. Whoever permits himself tp be touched by it may do so with a good conscience. What has stirred him is the legitimate effect of a pure and great art.”

Mendel Singer was bom at Zuchnow, in Russia, and is described as being pious, Godfearing’ and ordinary, an entirely commonplace Jew whp taught with honourable zeal the Holy Scriptures to 'children of his race as his father and grandfather had done before him. The household consisted of himself, his wife Deborah, three sons and a daughter, and with the six people pent under o»nei small roof it would not be too much to say that a state of mental friction existed. But through it all the character of Mendel—the simple man, toiling at the bottom of the scholastic ladder, shines out as having despite intellectual! limitations a natural rectitude and sense of individual responsibility which at timjsi he finds hard to reconcile.

A poor man devoid of superficial graces and socially encumbered by racial distrusts and antipathies, he takes up his burden with a faith which', even, if it might be deemed archaic, is all sufficient for his spiritual guidance. It could hardly ha said that Deborah was a perfect helpmate. She was too Conscious of Mendel’s shortcomings his small earnings, and lack of parental ambition, and was, in every ounce of her ponderous body, more awake to the actuality of life. (

Love and anxiety concerning his children weighed heavily on Mendel’s troubled soul. The two elder boys were cast in different moulds mentally and physically. Jonas was made for and became, a soldier in the Russian Cossack army—an abomination to his father, who had in mind 'long years of military suppression borne with the submission of a beaten dog which would, if he only dared, set his teeth in the throat of the oppressor.

Then there was Miriam, the embodiment of a world problem, and object of much prayer and heartsearching which yielded little in the way of solution. With Shemariah settled in America, there! remained only Menuchin, the baby with the big head and feeble body, declared by Dr. Soltysink to be an epileptic, whose only hope was removal to a hospital where he could |he treated free of charge. But Mendel knew better than that—“Be still Deborah,” he said, “no doctor can cure h’m if God does not will it.” While other men ( of his race acquired progressive twentieth century ideas, mingling freely and profitably with the Gentiles, and coinforming, outwardly at least, to prevailing manners and customs, Mendel’s attitude to life and its problems was two thousand years behind the times l — have become silly through teaching children,” commented Deborah. “You give them what little

sense you have, and they give you all their stupidity.” FAMILY TRAGEDY. The curse was truly beginning' to operate. The three older children alienated, the wife who had borne then an uncharitable bystaaider sitting in judgement, and Menuchin, tho last hope of a falling house, a dumb idi|ot, Mendel’® faith remained unshaken. It was a faith transmitted from father to son through generations by patient but stubborn endurance, and his solicitude for his little afflicted! son is full of pathos, and a certain nobility of vision which Hooked over and beyond the grosser material things of life.

Moved by a passionate desire to penetrate the darkened mind of Mienuchin, he does find that the child responds . slightly to sound the tinkle of a spoon on glass, but beyond this there is no other mental reaction. The cup seemed now almost brimming when a diversion occurred which meant the complete uprooting of the Singier family, and transportation from its quieter corner of the old world to the rush and promiscuity of the new. The intelligence of Mandel Singer was bounded by formulas which held him as (with chains, and his faith had in it some element iof the ancestor worship of an oriental pagan of philosophy. Yet this did not prevent his being a good l man, acutely alive to his responsibilities as husband, father, and teacher of the Holy Scriptures; the study of which he regarded as the only true qoad to wisdom. There was also in him something of the fatalist waiting for what was going to happen next, but prepared to accept if as an expression of the Divine: will. Shemariah, knowin to his new American friends as “Sam,” had developed the business instincts cf his race and: made money, and being, for all his “foxiness,” a good son, found a place in New York for his father, mother, and Miriam—the drop of bitterness in the otherwise hopeful project being the exclusion of Menuchin, who must perforce be left behind to the cunei of strangers. But the leup was not yet full. Miriam easily adapts herself to the new life and blossoms into a smart American sales lady in her brother’s store, but meets disaster and seclusion in a lunatic asylum. Sam the progressive, the up-to-date, is killed fighting in the Great War, and Deborah dies of a seizure.

The cup has now brimmed over, but Mendel Singer does not succumb. Old and broken, an alien in a strange land he has still an object in life. It is to gdt back to Zuch, now in Russia and kneel at the grave of Menuchur.

This requires money, and he sets about with an inspired resourcefulness to raise the necessary amount. But his cherished purpose is not to be realised —at least not according to his planning. The miracle which happened to the man of Oz so far back in time was to have its parallel in twentieth cenitury New York. It came about through the appearance on the scene of a young Russian musician named “Kossak,” who had achieved European fame, and was paying a Visit to the States, The young man is Menuchin, not dead but grown up, cured and cared for by kind people who saw to the development of his precocious genius.

He takes the old man under his care as one might a beloved child that had been lost and found again. Miriam was to be rescued from the asylum and cured, Jonas had been heard of as alive and wiell, and on the table stood a photograph of Menuchin’s wife and their two children—a I’ttle boy and girl—his grandchildren.

And thus, after having endured so long the buffets of evil fortune, Mendel Sing-er entered into his reward. The translation is by Mrs Sinclair Lewis.