Reading Roth on the Sidelines
The news of Philip Roth’s death last week didn’t evoke a rush of feeling, as it did for many of the writers who responded to it. I’d read Roth’s fiction piecemeal throughout my 20s and early 30s, but I’ve always been ambivalent about it. As life sped up in the last few years, I had no occasion to return to his novels. Part of my ambivalence came from his largely negative portrayal of women, but it also had a lot to do with the kinds of Jewish identities that his work explores.
I grew up in Russia and Israel until I was 18, and went to college in Boston the following year. Even though my parents were decently paid professionals, we were always lower-middle class. I spent my teenage years casting covetous glances at my Israeli classmates’ Levis jeans and Adidas high-tops. In college, I wondered if I could ever afford a Gap skirt that wasn’t on the clearance rack or a J Crew sweater. Later, as I prepared to graduate with my English B.A., I began to envy those classmates whose parents could foot the bill while they took on unpaid internships or enrolled in an MFA.
In “Goodbye, Columbus,” the subtle and moving short story that launched Roth’s career, Neil is a lower-middle-class Jewish twenty-something who works at the public library in Newark. The narrative centers on his romance with Brenda Patimkin, a girl from the affluent suburb of Short Hills. The story is about class mobility as much as it is about first love and extramarital sex. Despite his efforts, Neil never gets much of a foothold among these better-off Jews. Even in the aftermath of the Holocaust, when Jews where supposed to share a bond of solidarity, class divisions trump ethnic ties.
Most of the criticism of Philip Roth that followed the elegies in The New Yorker and The New York Times focused on Roth’s misogyny. Tamara Fox states that Roth “hated Jewish women,” and that she felt relieved when she heard of his death. Jordana Horn, a journalist who grew up in Short Hills accuses Roth of popularizing the “Jewish American Princess” stereotype. When I saw the acronym, “JAP,” I had to keep reading to figure out what the author meant. Needless to say, I was never the subject of this stereotype.
Reading “Goodbye, Columbus” in my early 20s, I identified with Neil, as later I identified with other male protagonists in class-hopping romances: Vladimir Girshikin in Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, for instance, or Gogol Ganguli in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. Yes, I did feel uncomfortable about the way Brenda and Roth’s other women were portrayed. But as a voracious and indiscriminate reader, I was used to feeling uncomfortable. Sometimes books written by women made me feel even worse: they portrayed a kind of privileged sorority that excluded anyone who didn’t belong to the same class and social group.
It was easy, then, to relate to Neil and some of Roth’s other protagonists insofar as these characters were lower-middle-class Jews — and the sons of painfully, embarrassingly Jewish parents. If you are an Ashkenazi Jew and if the air of the shtetl still, somehow, hovered over your childhood, you know what I’m talking about. These are the fathers from Franz Kafka’s fiction and the mothers from Woody Allen’s films (I always think of the mother who hovers above New York City in Allen’s “Oedipus Wrecks”). Whatever else bothered me about Roth’s novels, I loved his portrayal of the parents, and I loved Roth for these portrayals.
Yet once I read past these depictions of the characters’ childhood, and got deeper into their struggles, I realize not only that many of these struggles are foreign to me, but that they also exclude my experiences and perspectives. Roth came of age in postwar America, and even though Roth is skeptical of the revolutions of the 1960s, his protagonists share this decade’s preoccupation with personal liberation and fulfillment, especially where it comes to sex. Most of Roth’s adult characters are well off, and the only thing tying them to the anxious world of their parents are the Oedipal hang-ups that keep these characters from achieving a truly spectacular love life.
It’s strange to think that Roth is closer to my grandparents’ generation than even to that of my parents. When Roth was penning “Goodbye, Columbus” in 1940s or early 1950s, my maternal grandparents had just emerged from the horrors of World War II in Russia and the Ukraine, and were starting from scratch in Leningrad — my grandmother, an accountant, my grandfather, an administrator at a grocery store. They raised my parents under overt antisemitism, and when my parents came of age only a handful of careers were open to them. The one-bedroom apartment where I lived as a small child was a hard-won luxury — a big step up from the communal apartments in which my mother and father had been raised.
A third generation, I can understand what Roth’s characters agonize about, and, at least to a point, why they can’t bring themselves to treat women as human beings. After all, what had begun as a counterculture, a Romantic rebellion against the 1950’s mores, has become mainstream, has arguable turned into an ethic. I can understand these characters, but I don’t relate to them. As much as I may disagree with my parents, I share their struggle for a reasonably secure existence, free of violence or prejudice. I also share that struggle with people who don’t happen to be Jewish, and whose history, experience, and tastes are nothing like my own. Maybe under different circumstances I would have appreciated Roth’s Dionysian irreverence more. But life being what it is, I will keep reading his fiction in small doses.
