Roth was not in any conscious way responding to Fitzgerald’s book, and Goodbye, Columbus was a spontaneously written work—“with some of the virtues and all of the defects of spontaneity,” Roth tells me, now that its defects seem all too clear to him. Still, at the time, The Great Gatsby was indeed fresh and important in his mind. During the mid-fifties, in graduate school, he had taken a course on the American Twenties, in which each of the students was assigned a particular year for a cultural report. Roth had drawn 1925: “the most terrific year,” he says. “The Great Gatsby, Manhattan Transfer, the start of The New Yorker.” The impact of Fitzgerald’s book on him was in its “angle of social observation,” he says, but early critics saw more than a bit of Fitzgerald’s feckless Daisy in Brenda Patimkin, ruthlessly competitive yet angelic in tennis whites as she and a friend with a fake Katharine Hepburn accent play on into the soft summer night, while Neil waits impatiently for their first date to begin. The fact that Brenda owes her beauty to a nose job and her family fortune to Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom Sinks in lowly Newark does not detract from her allure. To Neil, she is every bit as much “the king’s daughter” as Daisy was to Gatsby—Roth simply (if unknowingly) took over Fitzgerald’s chivalric phrase. A king’s daughter is a princess, of course, and Roth has been widely accused of helping to establish the stereotype of the Jewish American Princess. In fact, the term did not arise until more than a decade later, in the early seventies, and probably had more to do with the exaggerations of the entire Patimkin household in the movie version, directed by Larry Peerce, that appeared about that time.
Roth’s book is filled with implications about class and race. Smart as he is, Neil has a dead-end job as a librarian, and the only significant person in his life, aside from Brenda, is a little black boy who shows up regularly to look at art books. Instinctively, Neil protects the boy from both the racism of a colleague and the threat that his favorite book, filled with reproductions of Gauguin’s Tahitian paradise, will be borrowed by an unpleasant old white man. (Roth shamelessly stacks the deck against this second Gauguin lover.) Yet if Roth’s hero feels empathy with a poor black boy staring at pictures of unobtainable beauty—Neil himself sees Gauguin’s Tahitians in terms of the Patimkins—and feels a similar connection with the Patimkins’ black maid, it’s clear that neither the boy nor the maid feels anything toward Neil in return. He is on his own in an uncertain and uncomfortable social space, starry-eyed about Patimkin bounty, yet proud and angry enough to want to heave a rock through the glass wall of the Harvard library after Brenda finally makes the hard choice between him and her family.
The real novelty of Roth’s view of American Jewish life, circa 1959, was its absence of any sense of tragedy or oppression. (“Green lawns, white Jews,” one of Roth’s characters remarks about Goodbye, Columbus some thirty-five years later, in Operation Shylock: “The Jewish success story in its heyday, all new and thrilling and funny and fun.”) True, Aunt Gladys sends off bundles for the “Poor Jews in Palestine,” but this seems already an archaic gesture. The far more up-to-date Mr. Patimkin, surveying his lavatorial empire, comes to the rueful conclusion that his adored children—Ron, Brenda, and Julie—know no more about being Jewish than the goyim. Hurling themselves into the American dream, the Patimkins live a continuous daily round of sports (an extra place is set at dinner not for Elijah but for Mickey Mantle) and of eating—gargantuan meals, served by Carlota, the maid, that smother conversation in active digestion and extra helpings. As a result, Neil, as their guest, concludes that “it would be just as well to record all that was said in one swoop, rather than indicate the sentences lost in the passing of food, the words gurgled into mouthfuls, the syntax chopped and forgotten in heapings, spillings, and gorgings.” And he does so in the form of a little play:
RON: Where’s Carlota? Carlota!
MRS. P.: Carlota, give Ronald more.
CARLOTA (calling): More what?
RON: Everything.
MR. P.: Me too.
MRS. P.: They’ll have to roll you on the links.
MR. P. (pulling his shirt up and slapping his black, curved belly): What are you talking about? Look at that?
RON (yanking his T-shirt up): Look at this.
BRENDA: (to me) Would you care to bare your middle?
ME (the choir boy again): No.
MRS. P.: That’s right, Neil.
ME: Yes. Thank you.
CARLOTA (over my shoulder, like an unsummoned spirit): Would you like more?
ME: No.
MR. P.: He eats like a bird.
JULIE: Certain birds eat a lot.
BRENDA: Which ones?
MRS. P.: Let’s not talk about animals at the dinner table.
The comedy is not particularly cruel, since most of the individual portraits are rooted in affection: for the unpretentious, belly-slapping Mr. Patimkin, who has sweated his way up from Newark poverty; for lithe and clever Brenda, breaker of rules and reader of Mary McCarthy; even for knuckleheaded Ron, a former college basketball star who keeps his jockstrap suspended from the bathroom shower—a colossal, lumpen, sentimental guy, more like a warmed-up version of Fitzgerald’s Tom Buchanan than any Jew any previous American writer had conceived. The Patimkins harbor no doubts about their right to what they have or about their standing in America. But what did America think of them?
Goodbye, Columbus won the National Book Award in 1960, a remarkable achievement for a first book of short stories by a twenty-seven-year-old writer. It also received substantial praise from the “four tigers of American Jewish literature,” as Roth identifies Saul Bellow, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, and Leslie Fiedler, all of whom recognized a strong voice and a fresh perspective—the next development in the saga of Jews in America to which they themselves belonged. Roth’s depiction of the Patimkins, in particular, was considered (in Howe’s words) “ferociously exact,” a real reflection of the spiritual vacuity (in Bellow’s formulation) that had befallen an untold number of American middle-class Jews. Some thirteen to eighteen years older than Roth, these literary tigers were—unlike Roth—the children of immigrants, born into a generation that kept them closer to religious feeling, however fiercely they had rebelled against it. The fact that Bellow saw Roth’s rather cheerful and healthy if dull-witted suburbia as another chapter of the Jewish historical tragedy says more about Bellow than it does about Roth. But Roth was grateful for the critical support, especially for Bellow’s statement that a Jewish writer should not be expected to write “public relations releases” in the hope of reducing anti-Semitic feeling and, indeed, that the loss to “our sense of reality” wasn’t worth the gain, if there was any gain at all. Bellow gave Roth a meaningful go-ahead, when—awards or no awards—more people than ever seemed intent on getting him to stop.
Goodbye, Columbus also won the Daroff Award of the Jewish Book Council of America, just a year after it was given (by a different group of judges) to Leon Uris’s Exodus. Roth’s book was not a widely popular choice. Uris himself spoke out about the new “school” of Jewish American writers, “who spend their time damning their fathers, hating their mothers, wringing their hands and wondering why they were born.” Their work, he added, “makes me sick to my stomach.” Roth read the Uris interview, published in the New York Post, when it was clipped and sent to him by another angrily accusing reader. All these accusations were quoted by Roth himself in two essays of the early sixties: “Some New Jewish Stereotypes” (American Judaism, 1961) and “Writing About Jews” (Commentary, 1963), both republished in Roth’s 1975 collection, Reading Myself and Others. These essays—and Roth did not frequently write essays—show how seriously he took the charges, how wounded he felt by them, and yet how certain he was that he was right. He noted that people read Anna Karenina without concluding that adultery was a Russian trait; Madame Bovary did not lead readers to condemn the morals of French provincial women en masse. He was writing literature, not sociology or—Bellow’s helpful phrase—public relations. He was aspiring t
o the highest artistic goals, and he expected that if he explained himself, very carefully, people would come to understand.
In 1962, Roth, who was teaching at the University of Iowa, accepted an invitation to speak at Yeshiva University in New York, in a symposium titled “The Crisis of Conscience in Minority Writers of Fiction.” His fellow speakers were Ralph Ellison, whose depiction of Negro family life in Invisible Man had brought charges of defamation from his own community, and Pietro di Donato, the author of a novel about Italian immigrants, Christ in Concrete, that had been a bestseller in the thirties. But it was clear from the start that Roth was the center of interest. As he describes the event in his autobiographical volume, The Facts, the tone was set by the moderator’s opening question: “Mr. Roth, would you write the same stories you’ve written if you were living in Nazi Germany?”
The prolonged attacks that followed left him in something like a state of shock, barely able to reply coherently to the questions and statements that were hurled at the stage and overcome by the realization that “I was not just opposed but hated.” In sympathy, Ellison took up his defense; Roth remembers Ellison stating, in regard to his own work, that he refused to be a cog in the machinery of civil rights. Nevertheless, upon leaving the stage, Roth was surrounded by a still unsated, fist-shaking crowd. He escaped them, at last, with his wife and his editor. And in the safety of the Stage Delicatessen, over a pastrami sandwich, he vowed, “I’ll never write about Jews again.”
Real Americans
He had not intended to write about them in the first place. Roth has often pointed out that he had the childhood of an all-American boy, growing up in Newark in the thirties and forties—he was born on March 19, 1933, just as Franklin Roosevelt took office—doing his homework and listening to the radio and playing baseball. His grandparents were part of the great wave of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Polish Galicia at the end of the nineteenth century; he was named after his mother’s father, who died before he was born and who had converted his Hebrew name, Feivel, to Philip. Roth’s paternal grandfather, Sender Roth—who had studied to be a rabbi in Galicia and ended up working in a Newark hat factory—died when Philip was very young, but both grandmothers were presences throughout his childhood. The family visited them every Sunday, leaving in the morning to see his father’s mother, who lived with his aunt in a tenement in central Newark—they had a coal stove, Roth remembers, that they cooked on—and, after lunch, driving to see his mother’s mother in a tiny apartment in neighboring Elizabeth. When gas was rationed during the war, the family walked to Elizabeth about once a month, a happy adventure, he recalls, that involved crossing a bridge over the railroad tracks and skirting the edge of a large and dreadful cemetery. Yet neither Philip nor his older brother, Sandy, ever really got to know the grandmothers well, since the balabustas spoke hardly any English and the boys spoke no Yiddish at all.
Still, Roth remembers that great affection passed between the generations, even without words. In a loving letter that he wrote to his maternal “grandma” from college when she was very ill—his mother would have translated and read it to her—he proudly told her that he had a part in a play (it was the Ragpicker in Giradoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot) and described it as “a very poor man, much like Grandpa must have been when he first saw America. And like you and Grandpa, this poor man wants the world to be good.” (Roth finds this letter unbearably sentimental today; but it simply shows a well-meaning nineteen-year-old writing to his grandmother on her own terms.) Among these good and venerable relations, Roth also recalls the plainly frightening figure of his paternal grandmother’s sister, a stern and massively bundled woman called Meema Gitcha. Her name was “too good not to use,” he says with a laugh—it appeared decades later in Operation Shylock—although even now he isn’t certain what it means.
Roth’s parents, Herman and Bess Roth, were both New Jersey born and bred—“Americans from day one,” as he puts it. But, like so many of their generation, they served as a kind of buffer for their own children between the old world and the new. The family attended synagogue only on the High Holy Days—and mostly, it seems, to please the elder generation. His mother kept a kosher kitchen, Roth explains, for much the same reason: how else could the grandmothers come to dinner at their house? (He recalls his mother lighting Sabbath candles, however, as an entirely private devotional gesture, moving her arms hypnotically around the flame as though in a trance—remembering her father, he believes—just like the mother in “The Conversion of the Jews.” Roth imitates the gesture for me with great tenderness, although it seems he has forgotten that he ever put it in a story.) Philip was sent to Hebrew school, three afternoons a week for three long years, and was ever resentful at spending the precious hours after school in a stuffy room above the synagogue, when he could have been out in the air at center field. It might have been worse, though. Sandy had to go to Hebrew school for five years; the family strictures were gradually loosening.
He remembers clearly that he was eight, and playing outside, when the news of Pearl Harbor interrupted the broadcast of a Dodgers–Giants football game. The radio had been on in the Roths’ apartment, and his parents called down from the window to get him to come upstairs, where they explained what had happened and what war meant for the country. This was the first real break in the pattern of his life, after which all his memories become more distinct. Through the duration of the war, he followed battle maps and wrote long letters to two of his cousins overseas, young men whose father—one of his father’s older brothers—had died young, and who spent a lot of time around his house while they were growing up. Another cousin, dressed in his U.S. Navy uniform, taught him to shoot craps. He was hugely impressed by “the manliness of the guys who’d been in the war,” particularly since he felt himself to be, he says, “a good little Jewish boy, a sissy”: a kid more brains than brawn. (He is quick to add, however, that he did not appear this way to others.) The romance of manliness that runs through Roth’s work may have its beginnings here, in the experiences of a wartime child.
Eager to do his part, the skinny kid went door-to-door collecting old papers and tin cans, which he brought to the collection center at his school. Gym class now included a section called “commando obstacle”: climbing fences, jumping over ditches, being a soldier. He loved it. In his own account of these years in The Facts, Roth has wondered if later generations—post-Vietnam generations—can ever comprehend the absolutely unambiguous sense he gained, during that war and because of that victory, “of belonging to the greatest nation on earth.” These were years of continual propaganda about freedom and democracy; and years of striving, both at war and at home, to make the slogans real. It was a time when American promise seemed boundless, with opportunities open to all hardworking boys.
Newark was a city filled with upward-striving immigrants—there were significant populations not only of Jews but of Italians, Irish, Germans, and African Americans up from the South—although each group maintained its own staked-out area. The Weequahic section, where the Roth family lived, was an almost wholly Jewish enclave in the southwest corner of the city. Fully developed only in the twenties and thirties, it was settled by first-generation American Jews eager to leave the crowded squalor of their parents’ immigrant quarters in central Newark’s Third Ward, where Herman Roth was born in 1901. (Bess Roth, née Finkel, was born three years later, in Elizabeth, and had grown up as the only Jewish child in an Irish Catholic milieu.) Weequahic was made up of tidy wood-frame houses, many of which—the Roths’ included—were divided into three apartments. Locust trees had been planted all along Summit Avenue, where Philip lived at No. 81, in a five-room apartment on the second floor, until he was nine. There was a little lawn out front with a patch of irises, which Roth can still picture his father tending in his undershirt on weekends. (He also remembers the year that the irises did not come up because his father—a novice gardener, to be sure—had planted the bulbs upside down.) The situation was much the sam
e on nearby Leslie Street, where the family moved when the rent went up. The only difference was that the new house was across the street from a Catholic orphanage, part of a complex containing a church and a school and a small working farm, all enclosed by a chain-link fence. Behind the fence, he could observe the orphans playing—he never spoke to any of them—and feel how lucky he was to have a family.
Out on this edge of the city, there were still plenty of empty lots, filled with tall weeds and wild apple trees and, admittedly, some debris (“People would junk stuff,” Roth notes, “but there was not a lot of it”), where the neighborhood kids played. The area had been farmland in the not too distant past, and Roth recalls the old grandfather of an Italian family next door on Summit Avenue—one of the few non-Jewish families around—going out in his suit and tie (which was all he ever wore) into the overgrown lots and “finding wild onion and chives and even baby potatoes that he would bring back to use in their soup.” It wasn’t exactly bucolic, he says, “but it wasn’t totally urban, either—there was so much open space.”
The population of the newly built schools was Jewish, too. In Newark, as in every major American city, the public schools were expected to complete the work of assimilation and social transformation that parents had begun. The Weequahic schools were remarkably efficient at their task; by second grade, Roth says, most of the kids assumed they were going to college. “There was nothing else the parents had to give us,” he explains, “not money, not status, not positions, so they made sure they gave us an education.” He was so excited when he started going to school—the Chancellor Avenue School, on the commercial street running perpendicular to Summit Avenue—that he used to run there every morning.
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books Page 2