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11 Article 43 in LCPJ Philip Roth and His Jewish Problem Abstract The Shehu, Erion 2014: Philip Roth and his Jewish Problem To be downloaded from www.lcpj.pro Article 43 in LCPJ Philip Roth and his Jewish Problem Abstract The article addresses the issue of the Jewish problem in Philip Roth’s fiction, through which, relying on contemporary monographs and critical studies, we seek to prove that the label of a “self-hating Jew” is totally erroneous and out of touch with the reality, and that his compelling fiction provides and ensures his position as one of the greatest living American writers. Key words: Jewishness, holocaust, Philip Roth, identity, counterlives, goy, diaspora. Introduction Of all contemporary American writers, Philip Roth is arguably the most ambitious and hailed as America’s best living novelist. Unlike many aging novelists, whose productive qualities wane over time, Roth has demonstrated a unique ability not only to sustain his literary output but even to surpass the scope and talent inherent in his previous writings. His work has garnered every major American literary honor including the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, a Pen/Faulkner Award and many more. His portrayal of the common man, not as a Jew but as a universal human being and his assault on the American experience, Philip Roth has always tried to explore the deepest recesses of the American Jews and how they have evolved and adapted to the American experience during the second half of the 20th century. Known for having reinvented himself throughout his career, Philip Roth’s work quintessentially portrays the life of American Jews and stands as an introspection of America itself. Volume 7/2, 2014 11 © LCPJ Publishing Shehu, Erion 2014: Philip Roth and his Jewish Problem To be downloaded from www.lcpj.pro Writing about Jews Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew! It is coming out of my ears already, the saga of the suffering Jew! I happen also to be a human being! Alexander Portnoy, from Portnoy Complaint Why can’t Jews with their Jewish problems be human beings with their human problems? Nathan Zuckerman, from The Counterlife From the start, and early in his career, Philip Roth was considered a self-hating Jew, a Jew who had a problem with his own Jewishness. In the novella Goodbye Columbus (1959), short stories such as “Defender of Faith” added more fuel to the fire, and outraged the “establishment” Jews who felt that Roth was representing Jews in a very derogatory way (Cooper, 1996: 41-42). The phrase “the Jewish question,” or “the Jewish problem,” originates from the title of a book in 1843, “Die Judenfrage,” by the German historian, Bruno Bauer. Bauer argued that Jews could achieve political emancipation only if they relinquished their religious consciousness. While Roth has insisted he does not speak for American Jews and their way of life in America, he has given America a gallery of memorable Jewish characters: for example Sophie and Alexander Portnoy, Brenda Patimkin, Eli the Fanatic, and Nathan Zuckerman are household names. All of them have achieved a social and sexual emancipation by relinquishing if not wholly, then partly their religious consciousness by becoming “rootless” Jews. Early in his writing career, his story “Defender of the Faith,” which appeared in The New Yorker in April 1959, narrates the actions of a Jewish sergeant who decides not to play favourites with Jewish soldiers, while exposing his conflict of loyalties. Some readers thought the story confirmed anti-Semitic stereotypes, and a number of letters to Roth, to the magazine, and to his publisher attacked him for damaging the image of the Jew. “Your one story makes people ... forget all the great Jews who have lived,” claimed one letter to him (Reading Myself, 1975: 702). Nonetheless, Philip Roth, considered by many the best living American writer and part of the Jewish triumvirate of Bellow-Malamud-Roth, has gone to great lengths to demonstrate his critics that his first and foremost obligation as a writer is toward his art and not to the community. He is © LCPJ Publishing 12 Volume 7/2, 2014 Shehu, Erion 2014: Philip Roth and his Jewish Problem To be downloaded from www.lcpj.pro so much the born satirist, and as Podhoretz himself lauds him, “naturally driven by instinct for seizing on those gestures and traits of personality by which people expose their weaknesses and make themselves ridiculous” (Doings, 1964: 240). Being part of the third generation of Jewish-Americans and the youngest writer of the above-mentioned triumvirate, Roth was less affected by the implications of the Holocaust and less inclined to show solidarity, even in arts, toward his community. David Gooblar, in his fantastic analysis of Philip Roth’s major phases of his career, clearly summarizes Roth’s struggle with his readers at first: “Writing when he did, and writing about Jews, Roth could not merely be a writer who happened to be Jewish” (Major Phases, 2011: 11). The external provocations, pressures exerted on him by the Jewish-American community at that time, in many ways dictated the formation of Roth’s literary sensibility, and his sense of himself as a writer for years to come. Unlike Bellow and Malamud, who were considered the “exemplary Jewish sons”, Roth would tread the path of the “bad boy” of Jewish American literature. Of course, that was only the beginning of a series of accusations that would follow him in the coming years. Answering his critics in an essay, “Writing About Jews,” he supported the right of a novelist to explore transgression, and the very core that is defined in the human nature: “The world of fiction frees us from the circumscriptions that society places upon feeling” (Reading Myself, 1975: 195). At his 1962 appearance at a symposium at Yeshiva University, he was attacked by the audience, although Ralph Ellison, also on the panel, came to his defence. Addressing the audience, he stated: “I am not a Jewish writer; I am a writer who is a Jew.” With this simple statement, Roth perfectly encapsulates the integrity and complexity of Jewish-American cultural identity that mark his works. He exemplifies a salient cultural pattern of post-World War II American writing and as Timothy Parrish states it, “the more ethnic his work seems, the more American it becomes” (Companion, 2007: 127). It is impossible to talk about Roth’s Americanness without also addressing his Jewishness, because he mingles Jewish history in the wider contextual American scene. A sense of Jewish history permeates his characters, all imbued with the sharpness of wit and layers of emotional insight and socio- Volume 7/2, 2014 13 © LCPJ Publishing Shehu, Erion 2014: Philip Roth and his Jewish Problem To be downloaded from www.lcpj.pro political concerns. They are not Jews staccato, detached from the American dream; on the contrary they are part of it but it is the struggle to balance the former with their own Jewishness that spawns the conflict and creates a paradoxical theatre. In his theatre, where Roth is the puppet master, Jewishness is a pervasive theme: “Jewishness as a problem, as a burden, as a source of strength, and, always, as a source of laughter” (Safer, 2006: 3). Contrary to what Aharon Appelfeld said, “Roth’s Jews are Jews without Judaism”, it is essentially their Judaism in the American context that creates the paradoxical theatre of sheer playfulness and deadly seriousness, which for Roth are his “closest friends” (Conversation with Philip Roth, 1974: 98). Throughout his career, Roth has been reinventing himself and each of his works is based on cultural heritage and fictional reconstructions of his ethnic past. Many contemporary African-American, Native-American, Hispanic-American, and Asian-American writers attempt to recreate pre-American pasts in order to define their present American identities. Roth’s work has as its premise the knowledge that his historical situation as an American is known to him through the eyes of being a Jew and the descendant of Jews who came to Weequahic, Newark. Thus stated, Roth’s primary focus is not European Jews, Israeli Jews, or even fresh immigrant American Jews. Rather, as in Goodbye, Columbus, The Plot Against America, he writes about the descendants of those immigrants who have found in America something they never imagined in Europe and as Timothy Parrish says, “the opportunity to define how they perceive or do not perceive themselves to be Jews” (Parrish, 2007: 130). “Thou shalt not reveal in group secrets to the goyim” (Eleventh Commandment) The Jews that inhabit Roth’s fiction are quite distant to the Jews that inhabit Europe and contrary to the latter have not experienced the atrocities of the Holocaust. To use a term inspired by Roth, the Holocaust is something like the “counterhistory” of American life. Roth’s Jews are not virtuoso Jews, always hiding their libidos for fear of providing ammunition to the goyim. In his essay “Writing about Jews” he describes how one of his earliest stories, “Defender of the Faith” in the novella Goodbye, Columbus was attacked for confirming an “anti-Semitic stereotype” in its portrayal of Sheldon Grossbart, who tries to persuade his superior, Nathan Marx, to do him favours by pleading their shared racial background. The stories explore how Jews are led to this kind of mutual bond and aid by pleading © LCPJ Publishing 14 Volume 7/2, 2014 Shehu, Erion 2014: Philip Roth and his Jewish Problem To be downloaded from www.lcpj.pro to their collective suffering of Holocaust and persecution. Yet the story is little concerned with the military, or with World War II, but concentrates on Jews growing comfortable as they settle into the suburbs of America and assimilate into American society, trying to avoid their duties to protect their people from the murderous impresario, Adolf Hitler.
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