Philip Roth As the Jewish American Writer in American Fiction

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“HE FREQUENTLY TURNS OUT TO BE YOU”:

PHILIP ROTH AS THE JEWISH AMERICAN WRITER IN AMERICAN FICTION

MIRANDA EVE COOPER

Jeffrey Israel, Advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Jewish Studies

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Williamstown, Massachusetts

May 13, 2016

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements...... 2 Introduction...... 4 Chapter 1: The Jewish American Writer as a Rothian Creation...... 6 Critical Perspectives on the Jewish American Writer...... 6 The Jewish American Writer in Non-Jewish Literary Culture...... 19 Roth’s Jewish American Writer: Introduction...... 22 The Dual Phallic Anxiety of Roth’s Jewish American Writer...... 25 Roth’s Jewish American Writer as Literary Son...... 34 Roth’s Jewish American Writer as Philip Roth...... 41 Chapter 2: Roth’s Ghost (Writer)s: Contemporary Portrayals of the Jewish American Writer....58 Introduction...... 58 Ensuring a Future for the Jewish American Writer: Legacy...... 60 Listen Up Philip...... 67 Sam Apple Imagines Philip Roth Imagining Philip Roth: “The Butcher of Desire”...... 71 Conclusion...... 84 Chapter 3: Challenging “The Father of Us All:” One Implication of the Roth Character...... 86 Literary Daughters?: The Jewish American Writer as Woman...... 86 Elisa Albert “Tear[s] a Page from the Roth Playbook”...... 93 Conclusion...... 102 Conclusion...... 104 Bibliography...... 106 Appendix of Images...... 110

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank Professor Jeff Israel, without whom my knowledge of and passion for Jewish American fiction likely would not exist, and without whom this thesis definitely would not exist. For opening my world to this rich world of literature, encouraging me to pursue my passions, pushing me to be a better writer, often knowing what I wanted to express before I quite knew it myself, and usually appreciating my puns, I am enormously grateful. I truly cannot imagine my time at Williams without the support, intellectual challenge, and laughter that Professor Israel has provided me over the past two and a half years.

Thanks also are due to Professor John Limon, who has known me from the start and has watched my love of American fiction grow and change over the years. It is only fitting that a professor so integral to my Williams experience should be able to participate in this process, and I am delighted to have had him as my ever-thoughtful second reader. To Professors Liz McGowan,

Jim Shepard, Magnus Bernhardsson, Alexandra Garbarini, Justin Crowe, Catherine Howe, Emily

Vasiliauskas, and all the others who have guided me in various ways and seen me through this process, I am extremely grateful.

I am indebted as well to Josh Lambert for sharing with me both his considerable insight into the world of Jewish American fiction and his incredible mental repository of relevant sources. Most notably, I thank him for pointing me to Elisa Albert’s story, which gave me so much, both intellectually and personally.

Thanks are due also to Daniel Goldfarb for sending me his unpublished script and allowing me to use it in my thesis, Joshua Cohen for his direct insight into the world of contemporary Jewish American writing and for the address I will maybe one day build up

enough courage to use, and Eric Sundquist for supplying me with additional sources about Philip

Roth’s representation of the Holocaust.

I am thankful for the unending support of my friends. Ranana Dine has been with me every step of the way, and I could not have done any of it without her encouragement and insight

(thanks for letting me share your thesis advisor). I am indebted as well to my dear friends

Cristiana Wurzer, Evan Ringel, Kayla Shore, Jessica Bernheim, Annabel Coleman, Elizabeth

Dunoff, Marissa Levin Shapiro, Abraham Kirby-Galen, and Avishai Gebler for their wonderful friendship, support, advice, and willingness to hear me rant and rave about Philip Roth on a near- daily basis throughout this process.

And, of course, to the Cooper-Siegel clan, for steadfast patience, tolerance, support, and love. I would, quite literally, be nothing without you.

Introduction

Who or what is “the Jewish writer?” In 2016, The Jewish Writer is a large-format coffee- table book featuring glossy black-and-white photographs of seventy-five different Jewish writers.1 Fiction writers and poets are featured alongside critics and essayists, and many are pictured at their writing desks. It is significant that in this book, the Jewish writer’s image, and not his or her (arguably more individual and characteristic) writing, is the focal point: the photographs are accompanied by short blurbs about each writer, but the book is largely visual

(indeed, it is the work of a photojournalist). Before the mid-twentieth century, however, “the

Jewish writer” was hardly a category substantial enough to merit essays and anthologies, let alone an object of popular decor. As Sanford Pinsker notes, “One can turn the 1,000-plus pages of the first edition of The Literary History of the United States (1948) without encountering a single Jewish-American fictionist.”2 By the mid-1960s, however, that had changed drastically, and now, in the early part of the twenty-first century, one is hard-pressed to find an anthology of twentieth century American fiction that does not devote considerable space to the likes of Philip

Roth, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malamud. So what changed? How did “the Jewish writer” come to be such a recognizable image, and for that matter, how did he come to earn a definite article?

The burgeoning definition of the Jewish American writer was transmitted through many channels in the 1960s and 1970s: popular culture (such as Truman Capote’s infamous statement), literary and intellectual culture (such as essays by Karl Shapiro, Irving Howe, and Alfred Kazin), representations by non-Jewish writers (such as John Updike’s Henry Bech stories) and, most interestingly and impactfully, in works written by Philip Roth, himself a Jewish American writer on the rise. Roth participated in the cultural discourse surrounding the Jewish American writer

1 Jill Krementz, The Jewish Writer (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1998). 2 Sanford Pinsker, Jewish American Fiction 1917-1987 (New York: Twayne, 1992), ix.

by using his fiction to encourage its canonization as a specific character—at times a caricature— possessing not only the traits that critics had noted but additional characteristics of his own.

These characteristics were quite literally his own: he shaped the Jewish American writer in his own image. This was one of his most interesting achievements in this context, and has certainly had a lasting effect on Jewish American fiction. Images of Roth—to use the obvious trope in

Roth scholarship, Roth’s “ghost writers”—continue to populate contemporary fiction; several

Jewish American writer characters in short stories, films, and plays happen to closely resemble

Philip Roth (when they are not explicitly identified as such). This is undoubtedly a mark of the success of Roth’s fictional project of making the Jewish American writer a character, in all senses of the word, and of tying that character inextricably to himself. That Roth has made himself a giant in Jewish American fiction is undeniable. But what are the implications of his influence—specifically, his influence on the Jewish writer character and his casting of himself in that role—for contemporary writers? In what ways does it serve as a signpost for the future of

Jewish American fiction, a future whose viability has been doubted by critics for decades?

Chapter I: The Jewish American Writer as a Rothian Creation

Critical Perspectives on the Jewish American Writer

In the 1960s and 1970s, the proliferation of American literary fiction by Jewish writers propelled a flurry of essays among cultural and literary critics of the time, including Karl

Shapiro, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe. Their critical pieces—with titles like “The Jewish

Writer in America” and “The Jew as American Writer”—introduced this category of writers as a distinct type. What that type was, per se, was one of the first questions these critics asked: were people such as Henry Roth, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malamud American writers who were Jewish, or Jewish writers in America? Could this vary by individual writer?

What made them interesting?

In his essay, Karl Shapiro raises a question that would confound intellectuals and provide the structure for critical discourse on the subject for decades:

What is an American Jewish writer? To me the answer is—an American Jewish writer is a Jew who is an American who is a writer. Everybody knows what an American is; everyone knows what a writer is; but very few people seem to know what a Jew is, including Jews, and including American Jewish writers.34

Although the initial answer he provides seems to obviate the question or at least render it ridiculous, his assertion that “very few people seem to know what a Jew is” adds a layer of nuance that is essential to understanding if not the answer to this question then at least the reason it is asked so importunately. Irving Howe suggested that Jewishness “invoke[s] a spectrum of

3 Karl Shapiro, “The Jewish Writer in America,” in In Defense of Ignorance (New York: Vintage, 1965), 209. 4 I do not entirely agree with Shapiro’s suggestion that “everybody knows what an American is”; on the contrary, that has been the subject of as much if not more literary and cultural criticism than what Jewishness is. As such, however, it is beyond the scope of this thesis. For my purposes, the question of what Jewishness is in the context of the America these writers encounter is the crucial one, and the one that many writers and critics have treated.

styles and symbols, a range of cultural memories” as opposed to the “coherent tradition of belief and custom” invoked by “Judaism.” 5 The nature of “Jewishness” remains a central subject for those asking what American Jewish fiction is, or what an American Jewish writer is, to this day.

For Shapiro, Jewishness inasmuch as it is a defining aspect of the literature created by

American Jewish writers is largely a consequence of external, rather than self-, categorization.

He connects the twentieth century emergence of this group of writers to the (sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit) anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism of literary high modernism, such as that of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. He argues that Jewish writers in America who grew up steeped in this British literary tradition are unable, whether or not it is their intention, to shake their

Jewishness: “Whatever Jewish consciousness I possess today I can trace to the writings of the

American Classicists who made it their business to equate “American” and “Jew” as twin evils.”6

He goes on to argue that it is this Jewish consciousness above all else that makes a piece of

American Jewish literature Jewish, and that American culture is uniquely well-positioned to support the expression of this Jewish consciousness, albeit only recently.7 For Shapiro, then, the heart of American Jewish literature is the consciousness of the writer as Jew and American. We have here the beginnings of an intellectual and critical tradition focusing on the identity and character of the Jewish American writers as something distinctly worthy of attention: who are these people, how does that manifest in their writing, and why is that interesting?

Other critics and members of group known as the “New York intellectuals,” including

Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe, writing in 1966 and 1977 respectively, begin to answer precisely those questions. Like Shapiro, Kazin discusses the anti-Semitism inherent in British literature of

5 Irving Howe, Introduction to Jewish-American Stories (New York: New American Library, 1977), 10. 6 Shapiro, “The Jewish Writer in America,” 207. 7 Ibid.

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, exemplified by Henry James.8 He notes that during that era, “not many immigrant Jews saw themselves as writers in English.”9 A little over a decade later, Howe was to show just how far these writers had traveled away from that perspective: “even as they still bear the marks of old-world and immigrant Jewish culture, they are indisputably American writers. They write in English. They live and publish in America.

Their work is usually set in this country.”10 He even goes a step further, suggesting that they are ultimately less Jewish writers than American writers: “while their novels, stories and poems cannot finally be understood without some awareness of their Jewish origins, still, they are not part of any Jewish literature.”11 The fact that they wrote in American English, he argued, was essential in distinguishing these Jewish American writers from, say, their Yiddish predecessors, or early modern Hebrew writers: “there were now Jewish novelists who, as writers, had mastered the complex resources of the modern novel, who wrote English lovingly, possessively, masterfully, for whom the language and the form, the intelligence of art, had become as natural a way of living as the Law had been to their grandfathers.”12 For Kazin, then, the issue of

Jewishness (which Shapiro believed constituted the central question for the Jewish American fiction writers) had taken a backseat to the question of Jewish Americanness.

Irving Howe begins to provide a picture of the American Jewish writer’s situation, his concerns, and how these influenced his style and themes. Howe understands this blossoming genre as a sort of “regional culture,” “probably... one of the last this country is going to have,” which he defines first and foremost by “the novelists and story writers whom we call the

8 Alfred Kazin, “The Jew As American Writer,” Commentary, April 1966, 2. 9 Kazin, “The Jew As American Writer,” 3. 10 Howe, introduction to Jewish-American Stories, 2. 11 Ibid. 12 Kazin, “The Jew As American Writer,” 16.

American Jewish writers.”13 He does not attempt at first to identify either formal or thematic values or characteristics of the fiction itself (as a critic writing about, for instance, American

Renaissance or American modernist literature might). Rather, for Howe, Jewish American fiction was very much defined by American Jewish writers. This critical position was to become essential to how the Jewish American writer became understood as such a distinct character within American culture and fiction. Like Kazin, Howe attempts to explain what marks this character and how that manifests in his writing; from the outset, the assumption of these early critics writing about Jewish American literature is that the person of the Jewish American writer is essential to, even inextricable from, his writing. This seemingly simple assumption—the habit of defining the content and style of Jewish American fiction by the character and experiences of its creators—in fact profoundly shaped how Jewish American fiction as a genre became so tied to the mythic Jewish American writer as a character.

The experience of Jewish immigrants in America provided abundant literary and artistic inspiration for these writers. Critic Stephen Whitfield tracks the struggle for Jewish cultural incorporation through Jewish American literature, beginning as early as the late nineteenth century:

Already in Abraham Cahan’s 1896 novella, Yekl, Jake announces: “I am an American feller, a Yankee—that’s what I am.” In his adopted land, he adds, “a Jew is as good as a Gentile.” And when Cahan’s David Levinsky is asked: “Are you a Russian?”, the response of this successful commercial person testifies to the faith in self-invention: “I used to be. I am an American now.” By the half-century mark, the process was completed, as [Saul Bellow’s] Augie March introduces himself: “I am an American, Chicago-born.”14

13 Howe, introduction to Jewish-American Stories, 2. 14 Stephen J. Whitfield, “Portraits of America in Jewish Culture,” in Why Is America Different?: American Jewry on Its 350th Anniversary, ed. Steven J. Katz (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010), 237.

This process of “becoming American” involved a double sense of double alienation: these immigrants and, especially, their children, were caught at two separate crossroads. First, they had to contend with the cultural divide between Jewishness and Americanness. Second, they had to confront the specter of the Holocaust, which, as I will explain, affected both their sense of

Jewishness and their sense of Americanness, reinforcing the fact that they were American Jews alienated from other Jews, and Jewish Americans alienated from other Americans. While these two terms may seem like a distinction without a difference, the question of whether Jewish should modify American or American should modify Jewish carries with it this weight of differentiation: which kind of alienation should be the primary definer of these peoples’ identities?15 The cultural aspect of this predicament of double alienation, and how it operates as a literary influence, is also taken up by Irving Howe in his 1946 essay “The Lost Young

Intellectual.”

Howe frames the young Jewish American intellectual’s predicament in terms of intergenerational conflict.16 He explains that the first-generation immigrant Jew—the father—has conflated intellectual achievement with professional achievement, internalizing the flawed ideal of the American Dream success story: for him, “learning is an end in itself, provided it is not an

15 It is not because I think this distinction is unimportant, but rather because I think it is important, that in this thesis I use “Jewish American” and “American Jewish” somewhat interchangeably. As I argue in this and the following few paragraphs, the alienation of being Americans who were Jews and of being Jews who were American were both powerful forces in the sense of marginalization Jews in America felt. Thus, it seems unfair for me to arbitrarily decide to use one term over the other and thus imply that one source of alienation was more powerful than the other in shaping identity; my use of both terms denotes my assertion that both sources of alienation were equally important and, specifically, equally influential in shaping Jewish American fiction and the Jewish American writer character. 16 This sentence and the rest of this paragraph were taken from Miranda Cooper, ““Philip Roth Reconsidered” Reconsidered, Or Why Irving Howe Is Wrong,” for Jewish America, December 14, 2014: 2-3.

end in itself, provided it helps his son become a teacher or a doctor.”17 Yet his son “has rebelled against the standards of bourgeois capitalist society” and thus “cares little about professional success; he wishes to be a great novelist or immerse himself in a great cause, neither of which are particularly remunerative occupations.”18 For Howe in 1946, this generational divide was the premise of avant-garde Jewish American intellectual culture. Howe views the Jewish intellectual as “a new social type [that] has appeared in recent years on the American Jewish scene” and gives examples of subtypes, including “the struggling young author who has published a few stories—perhaps even a novel!—or written a few reviews for obscure magazines.”19 This intellectual is culturally untethered: he has “largely lost his sense of Jewishness” and as such has a “marginal status” and a “sense of estrangement in [his] relation and attitude toward both general American society and [his] own Jewish background.”20 And despite his complicated relationship with Jewishness, he “suffers, of course, from the same sense of alienation that beset

Jews as a group.”21 There is, then, a double alienation at work: Howe notes that “for the kind of contemporary intellectual of whom we write, it is difficult to be a Jew and just as difficult not to be one.”22 This is largely the same predicament that Kazin, and Howe himself thirty years later, would represent as the situation that provided Jewish American fiction writers with much of their literary inspiration.

Kazin and Howe agree that these many dichotomies of alienation—the old country and the United States, the shtetl and the Lower East Side, Yiddish and English, the father and the son, Judaism and secularism—provided artistic inspiration for these writers. Contemporary

17 Irving Howe, “The Lost Young Intellectual,” Commentary, October 1946, 364. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 361. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 362.

critics, too, viewed the Jewish American writer’s project as an attempt to reconcile his many sets of conflicting urges: David Brauner writes, “Wherever a Jewish writer is active, a battle of opposites is always at work: for every shade of light, there is a counterpart of darkness, for every yes a no.”23 In the work of Philip Roth in particular, he says, “The struggle between vulgar reality and refined art, between the two types of authenticity, between the writer and the Jew, continues unresolved.”24 Many of these “battle[s] of opposites” were rooted in generational difference. Even as these sons of immigrants turned a deaf ear to the call of tradition, they were called back to it, unable to ignore its vibrations. Howe wrote that “Tradition as discontinuity— this is the central fact in the cultural experience of the American Jewish writers.”25 This characterization has lingered, such that many contemporary critics of Jewish American fiction feel the need to respond to Howe’s claim, even decades removed from it. For instance, Victoria

Aarons, a contemporary critic, agrees, adding that this “seeming contradiction” (the idea of tradition as discontinuity) “points to a paradox that governs the fiction of American Jewish writers. It’s both the paradox of American Jewish fiction and the paradox expressed by the characters who inhabit the stories of American Jewish writers.”26

Kazin describes a second kind of alienation, however: the experience of being a Jew in

America who had not directly faced the horrors of the Holocaust and either lived with that survivors’ guilt or was haunted by the event itself. As Kazin puts it, these were “people to whom existence has often been a consciously fearful matter, who have lived at the crossroads between

23 David Brauner, Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Connections (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 29. 24 Ibid., 163. 25 Howe, introduction to Jewish-American Stories, 13. 26 Victoria Aarons, A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 8.

the cultures and on the threshold between life and death.”27 Witnessing the fate of the Jews of

Europe forced many American Jews to reconsider the meaning of their own religious and cultural identities and confront the tenuousness of their existence both as Jews and as Americans: how much one practiced Judaism or considered oneself Jewish, or how much one participated in the larger civil sphere, meant nothing whatsoever to Hitler and the Nazis. For the Jews of

Europe, Jewish was Jewish; watching this from afar, American Jews could no longer hide from their own Jewishness. Nor could they hide from their Americanness; they were survivors simply by virtue of it.

As American, rather than European, Jews, their Jewishness was far less visible than that of those who experienced Nazism firsthand; they were merely helpless secondary witnesses.

They were not victims as they would have been in Europe, and this itself was another sort of alienation. As Hana Wirth-Nesher puts it, the work of Philip Roth in particular “is marked by the discomfort of American Jews who have never suffered as a result of their Jewishness, but are heirs to a tradition that, from their point of view, is characterized by suffering.”28 In addition, the

American “melting pot” concept might have made them think, briefly, that their Jewishness could be made invisible in America, but the Holocaust had proved this impossible for the Jews of

Europe. Jews in America were thus marked by their Jewishness much less than their European counterparts had been, and so this very fact in a sense marked them as American Jews. And yet, in America, where non-Jews did not have this acute sense of Jewish secondary witness, they felt marked as Jewish Americans. Thus, the Holocaust spurred an additional set of split identities: it laid bare their Americanness in the context of their Jewishness and their Jewishness in the

27 Kazin, “The Jew As American Writer,” 8. 28 Hana Wirth-Nesher, “From Newark to Prague: Roth’s Place in the American Jewish Literary Tradition,” in What Is Jewish Literature?, ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994), 222.

context of their Americanness, emphasizing the modifiers in both American Jews (Jews who were American, not European) and Jewish Americans (Americans who were Jewish, not any other religion or ethnicity) and thus exacerbating this sense of difference.

As Kazin explains, this additional sense of torn identity that resulted from this tragedy provided a source of literary inspiration for Jewish writers in America. He thought it natural that such people would be compelled to create art. For these newly American Jews who “believe[d] that their lives were a triumph over every possible negation,” art was uniquely capable of both containing such multitudes and allowing the creator to separate himself from his experiences, particularly those that were traumatic.29 As he poignantly puts it, “There are experiences so extreme that, after living them, one can do nothing with them but put them into words. There are experiences so terrible that one can finally do nothing with them but not forget them.”30 Writing became a way for Jews who had fled Europe and Jews who had been raised in America alike to express the horrors—or lack of horrors—they had experienced.

Growing up in immigrant households, moreover, these writers had what Irving Howe called a “double experience of language,”31 and how better to express their double experiences of identity than by trying to locate a distinct voice for themselves at the intersection of their two languages? This understanding of the Jewish American writer as shaper of language is present in

Cynthia Ozick’s vision, in which she calls for the creation of a “Yavneh” in America, brought on by the creation of a “New Yiddish”:

Already English merits every condition of New Yiddish, with the vital exception of having a mature literature. But even now for Jews the English vernacular is on its way toward becoming Jewish; already there are traces (in the form of novels) of a Jewish liturgical literature written in English.... As we more and more pour not merely the

29 Kazin, “The Jew As American Writer,” 7. 30 Ibid., 9. 31 Howe, introduction to Jewish-American Stories, 3.

Jewish sensibility, but the Jewish vision, into the vessel of English, we achieve the profoundest invention of all: a language for our need, our possibility, our overwhelming idea. If out of this new language we can produce a Yavneh for our generation within an alien culture, we will have made something worthwhile out of the American Diaspora, however long or short its duration.32

Ozick’s vision of Jewish American literature differs significantly from mine in key ways: she believes that any authentically Jewish literature must be “liturgical,” 33 and she envisions

America as simply a temporary refuge, a layover while the Jews await the plane that will bring them home from the Diaspora, rather than its own culture in which Jews might flourish and create a unique subculture. Nevertheless, her framework—this need for American Jews to create their own language—is familiar. Similarly, in the book she devoted entirely to exploring “the multilingual dimension of Jewish American writing,”34 Hana Wirth-Nesher points out that such writing occupies its own unique lingual space:

Whereas Jewish writing has always been transnational and multilingual, American Jewish writing, when read in the framework of American literature, has often been regarded as one among other European ethnic literatures of the United States, and when read in the framework of Jewish literature, it has often been detached from the American literary and cultural forces that have also shaped it.35

And just as, in her words, “neither of these approaches exclusively can account for the unique contribution of Jewish American writing” to the languages of both American and Jewish literature, these writers had to formulate a language sufficient to express both their Americanness and their Jewishness. 36 Thus, as writers such as Malamud, Bellow, and Mailer gained prominence, so the “new language” of American Jewish literature came into being.

32 Cynthia Ozick, “America: Toward Yavneh,” in What Is Jewish Literature?, ed. Hana Wirth- Nesher (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994), 33-34. 33 Ibid., 32. 34 Hana Wirth-Nesher, Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), xii. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid.

The actual prose styles of these writers, then, reflected their situations at this double crossroads. As Irving Malin and Irwin Stark put it in 1964, in their Introduction to an anthology of then-recent Jewish American literature, “American-Jewish fiction is engaged with numerous dualities which are frequently expressed in extreme, melodramatic modes. Alienation and acceptance, power and humility, disbelief and faith, suffering and joy are dealt with in styles which are themselves charged with tensions. Form and theme become dialectical.”37 Howe characterizes the “American Jewish style, which comes to climax and perhaps conclusion in

Bellow,” as “a yoking of opposites, gutter vividness with university refinement, street energy with high-culture rhetoric... in short, the linguistic tokens of writers who must hurry into articulateness if they are to be heard at all, indeed, who must scrape together a language.”38

Kazin attributes much of this “gutter vividness” to the influence of Jewish vaudeville performers and musicians, suggesting that “the Jewish American writer emerged from so-called low culture rather than intellectual culture. He drew his inspiration from the mundane, the vulgar, and the irreverent.”39 40 He points to the “consciously grotesque style of parody”41 of such figures as the

Marx Brothers, Al Jolson, and Fannie Brice as a major influence for the generation of Jewish writers whose ultimate success would lie in the fact that “they were influenced more by the language of the street than by the stilted moralism that has always been a trap for the Jewish

37 Irving Malin and Irwin Stark, introduction to Breakthrough: A Treasury of Contemporary American-Jewish Literature, eds. Irving Malin and Irwin Stark (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), 16. 38 Howe, introduction to Jewish-American Stories, 15. 39 Kazin, “The Jew As American Writer,” 4. 40 For a sharp and comprehensive treatment of the role of obscenity and the vulgar in American Jewish culture more generally, see Josh Lambert, Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2013). 41 Kazin, “The Jew As American Writer,” 5.

writer.”42 By combining “an American belief in the ‘tradition of the new’ with their own moral tradition and their passion for the Europe of the great thinkers,” these writers established a unique style borne out of a combination of the seemingly irreconcilable languages and cultures that formed the backdrop of Jewish immigrant life in America. 43 They were thus able to solidify

“the positive, creative role of the Jew as modern American, and above all as a modern American writer.”44

Kazin explains precisely how American Jewish prose reflected these dichotomies both formally and thematically: “There was an intensity, a closeness to many conflicting emotions, that often seemed unaccountably excessive to other peoples. The need to explain himself to himself, to put his own house in order, was a basic drive behind many a Jewish writer.”45 This description is an early conception of the frenzied verbosity and self-reflexivity that would come to be associated with, and even define, not only the Jewish American writer’s prose but his character. To tell one’s own story, and to do so in the new language of American Jewishness or

Jewish Americanness that contained within it the complex set of conflicts that comprised that identity and those stories, seems to have been less an option than a compulsion for these writers.

In that way, the “excess” of such writing is indeed “accountable” insofar as it reflects the Jewish

American writer’s compulsive “need to explain himself to himself.” Later critics such as Sanford

Pinsker, writing fifteen years after Howe, also echo this sentiment: although Jews were represented both in America and in American fiction, the fact remained that “the task of telling their own story, in a language somewhere between the Yiddish they brought with them and the

42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 14. 44 Ibid., 3. 45 Ibid., 8.

English they learned, fell to the ‘huddled [Russian Jewish] masses’ of New York City’s Lower

East Side.”46

This conception of the American Jewish writer as vulgar and irreverent cultural critic reads like a prophecy when one considers the publication only three years later of Philip Roth’s

Portnoy’s Complaint. Philip Roth more than anyone would come to represent the type of

American Jewish writer described in Kazin’s essay. The compulsive, excessive, frenzied prose that stemmed from these manifold identity conflicts would become defining characteristics of

Roth’s fiction in particular. Also evocative of Roth is Kazin’s suggestion that “the real drama behind most Jewish novels and plays... is the contrast between the hysterical tenderness of the

Oedipal relation and the “world”; in the beginning there was the Jewish mother and her son, but the son grew up, he went out into the world, he became a writer. That was the beginning of his career, and usually the end of the novel.”47 Regardless of the fact that Roth had only published

Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go at the time of this essay, Kazin’s depiction of both style and content seems almost to anticipate what Roth would later write. Perhaps no work of fiction could be more appropriately described as embodying the “hysterical tenderness of the Oedipal relation” than Portnoy’s Complaint. As for the son whose success as a writer was his one-way ticket out of his provincial Jewish immigrant household, Roth’s ubiquitous protagonist Nathan Zuckerman certainly fits the bill. In this way, Philip Roth and his work would come to confirm Kazin’s account of the Jewish American writer type, his concerns, and how he expressed them in his writing. It is as if Roth was stepping into a mold that these essays had created for him. Indeed, he did so with intention: as he made explicit in The Anatomy Lesson (which I will explain in further detail in a following section), he was no stranger to the ideas and writing of the New York

46 Pinsker, Jewish American Fiction 1917-1987, xii. 47 Kazin, “The Jew As American Writer,” 11.

intellectuals. Having read these critics’ characterizations of the Jewish American writer, Roth was able to use them as fodder for his own fictional characterizations. His fiction can thus be understood as a contribution to the conversation that defined the Jewish American writer, and as

I will argue, his ultimately became the single most important voice in that conversation.

The Jewish American Writer in Non-Jewish Literary Culture

It was not only literary and cultural critics who in the 60s and 70s were becoming aware of this new figure in American letters. Non-Jewish writers, too, detected this shift in the literary landscape and responded to it in various ways. Cynthia Ozick skillfully summarizes some of these responses in a 2014 review of a new collection of Malamud’s fiction:

Who were these upstarts, these pushy intruders (as Gore Vidal had it), who were ravishing readers and seizing public space? Surveying American publishing, Truman Capote railed that “the Jewish mafia has systematically frozen” gentiles “out of the literary scene.” In a 1968 essay, “On Not Being a Jew,” Edward Hoagland complained that he was “being told in print and occasionally in person that I and my heritage lacked vitality . . . because I could field no ancestor who had hawked copper pots in a Polish shtetl.” Katherine Anne Porter, describing herself as “in the direct, legitimate line” of the English language, accused Jewish writers of “trying to destroy it and all other living things they touch.” More benignly, John Updike invented Bech, his own Jewish novelist, and joined what he appeared to regard as the dominant competition.48

Had Kazin written his essay after these writers had charged Jewish writers and their ancestors with “trying to destroy [the English language] and all other living things they touch” and

“hawking copper pots,” perhaps he would not have been so sure that “it is plainly a certain success that has been resented, not the Jew.”49 The shades of anti-Semitism in some of these expressions of jealousy of Jewish writers are hard to ignore. Regardless, these non-Jewish writers’ resentment of the Jewish writers indicates a conception of the American Jewish writer as

48 Cynthia Ozick, “Judging the World: Library of America’s Bernard Malamud Collections,” The New York Times, 13 March 2014. 49 Kazin, “The Jew As American Writer,” 16.

a specific persona with a particular agenda, set of characteristics (“these pushy intruders”), set of concerns, and undeniable significance in the broader literary landscape. The title and very premise of Hoagland’s essay, “On Not Being a Jew,” even seems to mock or parody the proliferation of essays with titles like Shapiro’s and Kazin’s. During that historical moment, the idea of being a Jewish writer in America was a truly important cultural subject, a specific experience enough worth writing about that it had spawned numerous narratives, so much so that the publication of an essay about not being a Jewish writer—that includes lines like “I went to a kind of Yeshiva called Deerfield Academy”—would be understood ironically in literary circles.50

To Hoagland, it seemed that all of American literary culture—certainly New York literary culture—had become Jewish.

John Updike’s Henry Bech stories are a unique example of this phenomenon: why would

Updike, an American novelist whom many view as a quintessentially WASP writer, choose to create a Jewish American novelist for a recurring protagonist? Adam Kirsch argues that this was

Updike’s way of dealing with the sudden emergence of the Jewish American writer as a dominant figure in American fiction:

For Updike the arch-WASP to become Bech the Jew is a stunt, a knowing joke, before it is a confession or even the creation of a character. More, it is an opportunity for Updike to explore the same uneasy mixture of emotions that Ozick hinted at in “Levitation”: the fascination and alienation of a Gentile writer in a literary milieu dominated by Jews.51 52

Indeed, Updike’s invention of Bech indicates an early moment of literary self-consciousness about the emerging character of the Jewish American writer. Just as Roth capitalized upon 1960s

50 Edward Hoagland, “On Not Being a Jew,” Commentary, April 1968. 51 Adam Kirsch, “John Updike the Jew,” Tablet, June 27, 2012. 52 In “John Updike the Jew,” Tablet, June 27, 2012, Kirsch describes “Levitation,” a short story by Cynthia Ozick, as “Ozick’s seriocomic attempt to imagine what it might be like to be a Christian in a midcentury New York literary world largely populated by Jews.” For a synopsis of the story, see Kirsch’s piece.

and 1970s critical writings about the Jewish American writer and transformed the perspectives expressed in those writings into a character he designed—and designed as himself—Updike too capitalized upon them for his own fiction. This is suggestive of just how important the Jewish writer was becoming as a figure in the Jewish American literary landscape.

Bech displays many of the characteristics of the Jewish American writer as the critics defined him. Describing the differences between himself and Bech, Updike upholds the critics’ view of the Jewish writer as a distinctive emergent type: “Instead of being married with four children, he’s a bachelor; instead of being a gentile, he’s a Jew—of course, a Jewish writer is almost as inevitable as an Italian gangster (emphasis mine).”53 This discussion of Bech, which takes place outside the fiction itself, continues in this vein: “I’ve never been warmly treated by the Commentary crowd—insofar as it is a crowd—and I made Bech its darling.”54 “The

Commentary crowd” is Updike’s shorthand for the group that came to be known as the New

York intellectuals, the group that included Kazin and Howe and was associated with progressive politics (later to turn neoconservative), art and literary criticism, and cultural discourse of the sort published in Commentary, Dissent and The Partisan Review. Stephen Whitfield quips about “the leftish Jewish New York intellectual (labels that are so frequently stitched together that they could be pronounced as though one word.”55 Indeed, the New York intellectual was by then an established a cultural type in much the same way the Jewish writer was beginning to be, and they were associated with one another. Malcolm Bradbury expresses Updike’s intentionality in crafting Bech as part of this milieu, rather than Updike’s own:

53 Quoted in Malcolm Bradbury, introduction to The Complete Henry Bech (New York: A. A. Knopf, 2001), xi. 54 Ibid., xii. 55 Whitfield, “Portraits of America in Jewish Culture,” 234.

The New Yorker, where Bech first saw light, has always been [Updike’s] magazine of first resort. Bech by contrast is in the tradition of Jewish-American modernism, in line with the fiction of angst, alienation and protest. His literary culture is the world of Partisan Review and Commentary; he comes from the counter-strand of American fiction, the dissenting, immigrant, anguished and extreme.56

Bech also resembles the Jewish American writer type in other significant ways. He is, of course, a philanderer; particularly in the stories concerning his overseas exploits, he nearly always pursues some woman.57

With the Bech stories, then, Updike uses a fictional alter-ego who is not quite a true alter- ego to connect himself to the ever-more important trope of the Jewish American writer. The existence of Henry Bech makes evident just how important the Jewish writer was becoming in the 1960s and 1970s as a figure in American letters: even a writer as removed from Jewish literary circles as Updike wanted to participate in this act of characterization. Thus, the cultural climate of the 60s and 70s, along with literary criticism on the subject, contributed to the actualization of the American Jewish writer as a cultural type, setting the stage for him to become a literal character within American fiction by Jews and non-Jews alike.

Roth’s Jewish American Writer: Introduction

Postwar Jewish American fiction was shaped to a great extent by the many sets of conflicting values and urges that Jewish writers faced in their lives in America. The fact that so many critics have cited this dichotomized identity as a source of fictional inspiration, manifesting itself both stylistically and thematically, is particularly relevant when it comes to Philip Roth. In his characterizations of Nathan Zuckerman and of Philip Roth himself, he adopted and ultimately

56 Bradbury, introduction to The Complete Henry Bech, xii. 57 Updike published his Bech stories over the course of three decades, during which Roth’s career flourished. As a result, Updike’s Bech over time seems to acquire specific similarities to Philip Roth, especially in the interactions between the narrator and his author. Unfortunately, a discussion of how Updike characterizes Bech as specifically Rothian is beyond the scope of this thesis.

coopted the Jewish American writer persona that these critics laid out (and that the often derisive comments of non-Jewish writers reinforced) as a distinct type.

As we understand from Shapiro, Kazin, and Howe, the Jewish American writer is a figure who feels that he both bears the burden of and wants to escape from the past (whether that be the

Holocaust, the experience of first-generation Jewish immigrants, or the sheltered suburban home of his childhood); who is caught in the double bind of being alienated from his Jewishness because of his Americanness and alienated from his Americanness by his Jewishness; whose

“double experience of language” leads to a prose that mixes immigrant street lingo and vulgarity with intellectuality and high culture; whose prose is, relatedly, frenzied and verbose as the

Jewish writer engages in extreme self-awareness and excess as he attempts to “explain himself to himself.” Primarily through the character of Nathan Zuckerman, and later through Philip Roth in

Operation Shylock, Roth uses his work to respond to and ultimately take charge of this Jewish

American writer characterization.

Zuckerman is introduced for the first time in The Ghost Writer, the very title of which suggests “that behind each fiction is another story writer or another fiction.”58 This notion is central to Roth’s work, which displays an interest in the tenuous borders between fiction and reality. It is particularly essential to the Zuckerman novels and to the way Roth constructs the

Jewish American writer type. On paper, Zuckerman and Roth are remarkably similar; for instance, both grew up in Newark, and both attended the University of Chicago. Zuckerman’s career also mirrors Roth’s, we learn in Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson: each published a successful short story collection (Higher Education; Goodbye, Columbus) that launched his career, and later a controversial novel (Carnovsky; Portnoy’s Complaint) for which

58 Sam B. Girgus, The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 127.

he was criticized (particularly from within the Jewish community) and his character denigrated on the basis of the character he created. Using this character, Roth affirms and then adds to the qualities perpetuated by Shapiro, Kazin, and Howe.

Through his fiction, Roth constructs a Jewish American writer character who is plagued by a fear of impotence, brought on by a phallic anxiety linked to his dual need to transgress through both writing and sex. This character understands himself as part of a literary family tree of Jewish fathers and sons whom he resents and admires at turns. Finally, one of Roth’s most important legacies for American fiction is that he shapes this character in his own image by making one of the Jewish American writer character’s qualities that of being Philip Roth. He achieves this in an incredibly complex manner involving several layers of both nonfictional and fictional posturing, which I explain in the section entitled ““He Frequently Turns Out To Be

You”: Roth’s Jewish American Writer as Philip Roth.” This last consideration is particularly significant for understanding Roth’s influence on contemporary Jewish American fiction.

The Dual Phallic Anxiety of Roth’s Jewish American Writer:

Transgression and Virility of the Penis and the Pen

Roth enforces a characterization of the Jewish American writer as a hedonistic philanderer who is obsessed and preoccupied with sex, especially sexual acts that seem transgressive or taboo. In addition, this character is particularly interested in non-Jewish women

(“shiksas”). Although many who are familiar with Roth’s fiction are likely aware of the sexually transgressive nature of his infamous protagonist Alex Portnoy, it is particularly interesting to consider how he draws upon similar themes in the specific context of the Jewish American writer. Zuckerman too has sexual encounters with a variety of women, most non-Jewish, and

these sexual encounters are rarely just that: they are often sources of anxiety or obsession that constitute major plot points. A chronicle of all of Roth’s Jewish American writer protagonists’ sexual deeds, desires, adventures, and misadventures—while extensive—is far less interesting than an examination of how the Jewish writer’s experiences of sexuality and masculinity reveal an essential trait of Roth’s conception of the Jewish American writer as writer.

In his 1946 essay, Howe discussed the young Jewish intellectual’s predicament as a consequence of (in the astute words of Roth) the divide between “the coarse-grained Jewish fathers whose values had developed in an embattled immigrant milieu and their bookish, nervous

American sons.”59 The Americanized son is possessed by a need to transgress: to transcend the limits of the father’s American Jewishness in favor of the son’s new, creative kind of Jewish

Americanness. To do, the son must destabilize the father, and thus he employs his masculinity.

For the Jewish American writer character, masculine power takes two essential forms: writing and sex. Both the pen and the penis, these twin phallic tools, contain the potential for transgression. But both the pen and the penis as such are subject to the phallic anxiety that attends fragile masculinity: impotence. One critic suggests that “Roth’s main characters—almost all men—express much anxiety about the various masculinities they inhabit.”60 Zuckerman’s masculinity is singular, and singularly defined by literary and sexual output. The Jewish

American writer character locates his masculinity within a twofold virility: that which issues from his pen and his penis. What is Zuckerman without his fiction? What is Zuckerman without his erection?

59 Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson in Zuckerman Bound (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985), 476-477. 60 Brett Ashley Kaplan, Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 2.

The two are closely connected for Zuckerman. This becomes clear very soon after we are introduced to him, as he expresses his conception of himself as a Jewish writer (and, as I will discuss in a later section, a Jewish writer who by virtue of being a Jewish writer is linked to other

Jewish writers): “For when I came upon Babel’s description of the Jewish writer as a man with autumn in his heart and spectacles on his nose, I had been inspired to add, “and blood in his penis [...].”61 Another early scene in The Ghost Writer, in which the young writer masturbates

“on the daybed in E.I. Lonoff’s study” as Amy Bellette undresses in a room on the floor above his, also reveals the beginnings of this sensibility: “She moved through the hallway and up the carpeted stairs... The rest of what I’d been waiting up for I had, of course, to imagine. But that is easier work by far than making things up at a typewriter.”62 With this last sentence, seemingly a throwaway comment, Roth actually sets up the thematic bond between Zuckerman’s sexual impotence and literary inspiration, drawing a comparison between masturbatory fantasy and literary creativity. The centrality of these concerns for Zuckerman, and their inextricability from one another as he understands them, is to become evident in The Anatomy Lesson and The

Counterlife, in which impotence becomes a crucial issue.

Throughout The Anatomy Lesson, Zuckerman battles chronic pain that makes him unable to write. The novel opens, “When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she’s not around, other women must do.”63 By positioning “other women” (who, we learn soon thereafter, are indeed sexual partners) as substitutes for the mother, Roth evokes the Oedipal theme that is familiar from Portnoy’s Complaint. By linking disease to sexual desire and frustration in this same sentence, Roth reinforces the theme of obsession with physical virility. From the very

61 Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer in Zuckerman Bound (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985), 49. 62 Ibid., 112. 63 Roth, The Anatomy Lesson, 409.

outset of The Anatomy Lesson, then, the ideas of the son’s virility, impotence, and frustration, and the mother’s relationship to all of these, are established as significant themes.

Zuckerman, we learn, is dealing with intense pain that “ran from behind his right ear into his neck, then branched downward beneath the scapula like a menorah held bottom side up.”64

The result of this pain is that Zuckerman is suffering severe writer’s block: “Writing the last page of a book was as close as he’d ever come to sublimity, and that hadn’t happened in four years.

He couldn’t even remember when he’d written a readable page.”65 His predicament is thus expressed in distinctly sexual terms: for four years he has been unable to experience the climactic, near-ecstatic sensation that accompanies finishing a book. His writer’s block, then, is a kind of impotence, and his pain is in large part responsible for this impotence. Zuckerman actually tries writing by hand to see if that works better for him, but that too fails: “Writing manually was no better.... He held the pen too tight. He clenched his teeth and made agonized faces.”66 With this actual image of a pen with which Zuckerman cannot write, and with this sensory description of the intense physicality that attends the writing process, Roth once again reinforces the idea of writer’s block as a form of impotence, and the pen and the penis as twin unproductive phalluses.

Surprisingly, Zuckerman is still virile despite his pain:

He tried from the playmat to dictate fiction to a secretary, but he hadn’t the fluency for it and sometimes went as long as an hour without a word to say.... The sessions were torture for both of them, and generally ended with the secretary down on the playmat. Intercourse, fellatio, and cunnilingus Zuckerman could endure more or less without pain, provided he was supine and kept the thesaurus beneath his head for support.67

64 Ibid., 410. 65 Ibid., 412. 66 Ibid., 413. 67 Ibid., 417.

But as Roth’s language reveals, these sexual encounters serve only as reluctant substitutes for productivity in writing: they are the inevitable, last-resort results of failed writing attempts.

Roth’s descriptions of Zuckerman’s sexual encounters are thus an illuminating juxtaposition to his use of the language of sexual impotence when describing Zuckerman’s writer’s block. The two caveats to Zuckerman’s ability to have sex—the supine position and the thesaurus—function as evidence of how sexual potency has actually lost its value as a source of masculinity, with writerly potency a preferable but unattainable source of masculinity. “On his back he felt like their whore:”68 sex has actually become emasculating for Zuckerman because his pain, that which inhibits his writing, forces him to take what he views as a female, submissive sexual position. The image of the thesaurus supporting Zuckerman as he engages in sexual acts is also vivid in this respect: a book of words other people have written, that a writer turns to only when his own vocabulary fails him, has become an essential structural part of sex, which in turn

Zuckerman only turns to when writing fails him. Zuckerman may not suffer from sexual impotence, but sex has become a mere outlet for his frustration as a writer. In this way, the fact that Zuckerman is not in fact sexually impotent actually reaffirms how central the problem of impotence is for the Jewish American writer: writing has actually superseded sex to become more important a source of masculine virility (and, by the same token, phallic anxiety) for

Zuckerman. In this way, sexual and intellectual impotence become inextricably linked.

The writer’s mother becomes an important figure in this paradigm as well, both reinforcing and complicating the parallel Roth has established between virility and writing as forms of transgression. This construction of the mother as an obstacle to the Jewish writer’s need to transgress is reminiscent of Kazin’s claim that “the real drama behind most Jewish novels and

68 Ibid., 418.

plays [...] is the contrast between the hysterical tenderness of the Oedipal relation and the

“world”; in the beginning there was the Jewish mother and her son, but the son grew up, he went out into the world, he became a writer. That was the beginning of his career, and usually the end of the novel.”69 But Roth complicates this theme and weaves it into his paradigm by making the

Jewish mother a source of not only intellectual impotence but sexual impotence—not just a writer’s block but a cockblock, so to speak—whom the Jewish writer must escape if he is to become a writer, that is, to achieve either kind of virility.

As discussed earlier, Roth introduces the Oedipal element of Zuckerman’s predicament by placing the mother on the same syntactical level as the women he has sex with as substitutes for writing. He reinforces the mother’s role in this paradigm by adding to Zuckerman’s physical pain and writer’s block (expressed in terms of sexual impotence) an additional kind of paralysis brought on by the burden of his mother’s final bequest to him. Asked by her neurologist to write her name on a piece of paper, she has written simply the word “Holocaust.”70 Zuckerman keeps the piece of paper, unwilling or unable to discard it: “‘I didn’t want to throw it away,’ the neurologist had said to him; “not until you’d seen it.’ Nathan had thanked him and put it in his wallet; now he couldn’t throw it away.”71 As Wirth-Nesher puts it, Zuckerman’s writer’s block is

“exacerbated by his mother’s legacy to him, the scrap of paper with the word Holocaust on it.

Symptomatic of the relation of the American Jewish writer to recent Jewish history, it has a grip on the writer’s consciousness disproportionate to its meager presence in his own life.”72 Eric

Sundquist, scholar of Jewish studies and American literature, agrees, citing Roth’s own comments on the subject:

69 Kazin, “The Jew As American Writer,” 11. 70 Roth, The Anatomy Lesson, 447. 71 Ibid., 465. 72 Wirth-Nesher, “From Newark to Prague,” 221.

Without that word, Roth observed in his London Sunday Times interview, the Zuckerman trilogy of The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound, and The Anatomy Lesson, to which we may add the trilogy's epilogue, The Prague Orgy (1985), as well as later Zuckerman novels, would not exist. The deathbed message left Zuckerman by his mother "isn't just a scrap of paper," Roth remarked to Clive Sinclair in a 1984 interview. "It's history." Just as some people are said to be in terrible trouble, Zuckerman is "in terrible history."73

While the ubiquity of the Holocaust as a specter in Jewish American fiction and art is a subject in its own right (and has been treated as such in numerous scholarly works74), this overt symbol is most interesting to me insofar as it suggests the Jewish American writer’s fervent need and frustrating inability to write past the Holocaust. For Zuckerman, the Holocaust is not simply a horror too great for anything but art to contain, as Kazin suggests, but an obstacle to creating something original. Critic Janet Handler Burstein claims that “the dilemma of becoming oneself in Roth’s work is deeply connected to his awareness of what happened in Europe.” 75 Sundquist argues that Zuckerman was not alone in being unable to discard that piece of paper, that it catalyzed Roth’s own exploration of the Holocaust in later fiction:

Zuckerman's mother dies in 1970, and her mysterious bequest, along with Milton Appel's plea for Zuckerman's assistance, retrospectively marks the start of Roth's attention to the instrumentalizing of the Holocaust's "terrible history," which, far from receding into the past, was projected ever more virulently into the future in the years following the Six- Day War. The next Zuckerman novel, The Counterlife (1986), would find Zuckerman embroiled in the attempt of a lunatic American Jew to hijack an Israeli airliner and fly to Berlin as a way to publicize his campaign to "FORGET REMEMBERING," a plan to "solve the last Jewish problem" by dismantling Yad Vashem, abolishing references to Hitler, and creating a "Zionism without Auschwitz"—a burlesque variation on the frequently noted postwar paradox of anti-Semitism without Jews. This project assumes even more outlandish form in Operation Shylock (1993), in which an imposter named Philip Roth, doing battle with an author named Philip Roth who narrates the novel, is

73 Eric J. Sundquist, "Philip Roth's Holocaust," The Hopkins Review 5, no. 2 (2012): 229. 74 For a comprehensive treatment of the role of the Holocaust in Roth’s oeuvre in particular, see Eric J. Sundquist, "Philip Roth's Holocaust," The Hopkins Review 5, no. 2 (2012): 226-256. 75 Janet Handler Burstein, Telling the Little Secrets: American Jewish Writing Since the 1980s (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 15.

engaged in a campaign of "Diasporism" intended to resettle Israeli Jews in Europe and thus reverse the consequences of the Holocaust.76

Roth himself affirmed the claim that this inability to throw away that scrap was not limited to

Zuckerman: in a 1984 interview, he said, “Who can? Zuckerman isn’t the only one who can’t throw this word away and is carrying it with him all the time, whether he knows it or not.

Without this word there would be no Nathan Zuckerman, not in Zuckerman’s fix.”77

If this is true for Roth, it is taken to the extreme for Zuckerman. That scrap of paper haunts Zuckerman not as an American Jew suffering secondary trauma or even survivors’ guilt but as a writer suffering from lack of creative inspiration: he needs to break free from the

Holocaust not as a fact but as a theme. As Irving Malin and Irwin Stark wrote in 1964,

“Although it is impossible to say that there is something distinctively American or Jewish about recollection, it is striking that ‘historic memory’ recurs so frequently in the work of American-

Jewish writers.”78 It is this that Zuckerman feels he must break from and that his mother’s legacy ties him to. To realize his full creative potential as a Jewish American writer coming to terms with his own complicated selfhood, in other words, Zuckerman needs to transgress, to pave new roads on the landscape of Jewish American fiction rather than traversing old ones, and he is maddeningly frustrated by his inability to do so. Once again, Howe’s depiction of the lost young intellectual is relevant: the son needs to break away from the American Jewishness of his parents’ generation. Here, the oppressive legacy in question is not that of the father but the mother: like Portnoy, Zuckerman must escape the stifling Jewish mother. If Portnoy achieves this by masturbating, Zuckerman must do so by writing, and writing something other than the

76 Sundquist, "Philip Roth's Holocaust," 229. 77 Philip Roth, Interview with the Londay Sunday Times in Reading Myself and Others (New York: Vintage, 2001), 117. 78 Malin and Stark, introduction to Breakthrough, 10.

Holocaust: that which his mother has literally written. Zuckerman’s impotence as a writer, then, is an inability to fulfill his role as the transgressive son who can escape his parents’ legacy.

But Zuckerman’s complaint is not a mere analogue to Portnoy’s; it is nearly the same.

The writer’s block imposed in large part by his mother makes him unable to either write or have sex in the ways he is used to. His sexual encounters serve mostly as disappointing stand-ins for writing. Literary inspiration is thus linked to sexual arousal for Zuckerman, making his mother an obstacle in much the same way as Mrs. Portnoy is an obstacle for her son. From the novel’s very first sentence, the complex role played the Jewish mother in her son’s sex life (whether as

Oedipal figure, obstacle to sexual independence, or both), which is already familiar as a Rothian theme from Portnoy’s Complaint, is established as an important theme in The Anatomy Lesson as well. But the addition of mother-induced writer’s block, a kind of intellectual impotence that becomes inextricable from physical and sexual impotence, adds yet another layer of complexity to this tangled Freudian web. The result is that, from Portnoy’s Complaint to the Zuckerman novels, the Jew obsessed with sex who battles the impotence that seems to be his heritage has become the Jewish writer obsessed with sex and writing who battles the dual impotence that his heritage threatens him with.

This theme continues after The Anatomy Lesson ends. Wirth-Nesher points out that, in

The Prague Orgy, “Zuckerman contemplates making love to Olga [the lost Yiddish writer’s wife] as a means toward retrieving a bit of Jewish literary history.”79 Once again, Zuckerman perceives a link between his sexuality and his role as a Jewish writer. And although I will fully explore Zuckerman’s relationship to this older Yiddish writer in the section entitled “‘New

World Cousin[s] in the Babel Clan’: Roth’s Jewish American Writer as Literary Son,” the

79 Wirth-Nesher, “From Newark to Prague,” 227.

Oedipal aspect of this theme is reinforced through the fact that because Zuckerman understands himself as the Yiddish writer’s literary son, he is considering having sex with his would-be mother. Finally, the importance of the link between sexuality and writing for the Jewish writer is evident simply in the title of The Prague Orgy: sex, for Zuckerman, is central to a story entirely about literature. And in The Counterlife, a marvelously complex narrative that contains several parallel universes and actually takes as one of its most important themes the nature of fictional narrative, Zuckerman voluntarily chooses to undergo risky open-heart surgery for the sole reason that the alternative is indefinite impotence. In an interesting contrast to The Anatomy Lesson, it is in The Counterlife that we see Zuckerman at his most literarily creative. The two alternate destinies for his brother Henry, which the reader encounters as the two first sections of the novel, are revealed in the final section to be none other than, as Henry discovers after his brother’s death from this elective surgery, Zuckerman’s manuscripts for a future novel. It is only when

Zuckerman has decided that sex is worth more than his life—when sexual impotence has literally become the ultimate issue of his existence—that we see him at his most creative and productive as a fiction writer. He has written multiple brilliant versions of a story, has become “a virtuoso of self-multiplication” through writing, and has managed to do so only in a state of impotence.80

Whereas sex was merely an unsatisfying substitute for writing in The Anatomy Lesson, the opposite is true in The Counterlife: even as he enjoys virility as a writer, sex is the unattainable goal for which Zuckerman is willing to sacrifice his life. Sexual virility and literary accomplishment are thus equally strong poles of attraction in Zuckerman’s life, which, it seems, has been a constant game of tug-of-war between the two. For Roth’s Jewish American writer,

80 Eugene Goodheart, “Yiddishkeit and the American Jewish Writer: The Breakthrough Reconsidered,” in Why Is America Different? American Jewry On Its 350th Anniversary, ed. Steven J. Katz (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010), 248.

then, sex and writing are both crucial forms of virility and phallic success, and both are subject to the threat of impotence that in many cases is brought on by the Jewish mother.

“New World Cousin[s] in the Babel Clan”: Roth’s Jewish American Writer as Literary Son

Another quality that Roth establishes as essential to the Jewish American writer, primarily through Zuckerman, is the search for a literary forefather of sorts: an attempt to steep oneself in, reckon with, and ultimately break from the legacy of Jewish American writers past. In this way, another critical part of the Jewish American writer character is his identification with older Jewish American writers. In The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman’s relationship with the older writer E. I. Lonoff exemplifies this. The legacy of the Lonoff figure—and the Zuckerman/Lonoff dichotomy it consequently presents—thus becomes engrained in the Jewish American writer character that Roth has written. Zuckerman, at this point a young writer on the brink of an illustrious career, ventures to the Berkshires to stay with the reclusive older writer, “to submit myself for candidacy as nothing less than E. I. Lonoff’s spiritual son.”81 It quickly becomes evident that Zuckerman’s place within the Jewish literary tradition is important to his understanding of himself as a Jewish American writer, and that, moreover, his conception of his relationship to this tradition takes the form of a sort of family tree. He is overjoyed by the feeling that he is becoming part of this family: “Zuckerman, with Lonoff, discussing Kafka: I couldn’t quite get it, let alone get over it.”82 Lonoff is not the only Jewish writer he conceives of as a literary father, however: “I should mention here that some three years earlier, after several hours

81 Roth, The Ghost Writer, 10. 82 Ibid., 47.

in the presence of Felix Abravanel, I had been no less overcome.”83 Zuckerman proceeds to explain that he had previously searched for the father-son relationship with another older Jewish

American writer, Abravanel, who saw great promise and merit in Zuckerman’s work but “was clearly not in the market for a twenty-three-year-old son.”84 There is, then, a family tree of

Jewish American writers (and Jewish writers more broadly) in Zuckerman’s mind, and he very much wants to locate himself in this family tree. This is further revealed in a conversation between Zuckerman and Lonoff:

“[Isaac Babel] is a sort of Abravanel with the self-absorption drained away. And if you drain away, enough, well, in the end you arrive at Lonoff.” “And what about you?” “Me?” “Yes. You haven’t finished. Aren’t you a New World cousin in the Babel clan, too? What is Zuckerman in all of this?”85

Zuckerman views the older writer as

the most famous literary ascetic in America, that giant of patience and fortitude and selflessness who [...] had virtually no readership or recognition, and invariably would be dismissed, if and when he was even mentioned, as some quaint remnant of the Old World ghetto, an out-of-step folklorist [...]. [...] Even among his readers there had been some who thought that E. I. Lonoff’s fantasies about Americans had been written in Yiddish somewhere inside czarist Russia before he supposedly died there (as, in fact, his father had nearly perished) from injuries suffered in a pogrom.86

Although Zuckerman distinguishes himself from these ignorant readers who mistakenly believe

Lonoff to be a dead Yiddish writer, the image of the Jewish American writer’s forefather as the old (and indeed often dead) Yiddish writer, as a source of inexplicable authenticity (“quaint remnant of the Old World ghetto”), persists throughout fictions about the Jewish American writer. Zuckerman is part of a new generation of Jewish American writers who feel the need to

83 Ibid., 57. 84 Ibid., 66. 85 Ibid., 49. 86 Ibid., 10.

be more transgressive, indeed, more American, than their fathers: as Irving Howe expressed in

“The Lost Young Intellectual,” which Roth later fictionalized in The Anatomy Lesson as the work of Milton Appel (the effects of which I discuss in the section about the Jewish American writer as Roth), the young intellectual’s predicament derives in large part from his experience of the divide between “Jewish fathers” and “American sons.” The image of the older Jewish writer as seen through the eyes of these younger Jewish American writers is a nostalgic portrait, as if these younger writers are striving to immortalize an age of greater authenticity that existed only in the world of yiddishkheit and the shtetl.

Zuckerman himself seems to fall into this paradigm in the epilogue of Zuckerman Bound,

The Prague Orgy, in which he sets out to save the work of Sisovsky, a lost Yiddish novelist. As

Wirth-Nesher writes, “The goal of retrieving the fiction of a Jewish writer from anonymity and seeing to its publication is a most appropriate action for an American Jewish author anxious about his link to the Jewish history of loss and to Jewish literary fathers. It is also parallel to

Roth’s own goal of publishing the work of Eastern European writers in his “Other Europe” series.”87 Indeed, Zuckerman admires Sisovsky greatly, and even Sisovsky engages in the conversation about Jewish literary fathers and sons as he compares the younger writer to Kafka, the literary forefather of so many Jewish writers: “When I studied Kafka, the fate of his books in the hands of the Kafkologists seemed to me to be more grotesque than the fate of Josef K. I feel this is true also with you. This scandalous response gives another grotesque dimension, and belongs now to your book as Kafkologine stupidities belong to Kafka.”88 It is significant that

Kafka’s main role as a literary forefather for Sisovsky, one of Zuckerman’s literary forefathers in

87 Wirth-Nesher, “From Newark to Prague,” 227. 88 Philip Roth, The Prague Orgy in Zuckerman Bound (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985), 703.

turn, is as an object of misreading: the fate Zuckerman himself knows so well. Despite the differences between the “Jewish father” and the “American son,” then, Roth links these generations of Jewish writers together: all are fated in some way to be misunderstood or misread, and every younger Jewish writer is hyperaware of those who preceded him.

Indeed, in The Counterlife, Zuckerman encounters Jimmy Ben-Joseph, a younger (and, as it turns out, somewhat deranged) Jewish writer who views Zuckerman as his own literary father of sorts: “It’s really you! Here! Great! I’ve read all your books! You wrote about my family! The

Lustigs of West Orange! In Higher Education! That’s them! I’m your biggest admirer in the world! Mixed Emotions is your best book, better than Carnovsky! [...] I’m your greatest fan. I know everything about you. I write too. I wrote the Five Books of Jimmy!” 89 Zuckerman is somewhat alarmed by Jimmy’s enthusiasm and by the idea that his work could do for a younger writer what the work of Lonoff and Abravanel did for him; when they are by chance seated together on a plane returning from Israel, Jimmy says to him, “You’re a real father to me,

Nathan. And not only to me—to a whole generation of pathetic fuck-ups. We’re all satirists because of you. You led the fucking way. I went around Israel feeling like your son. That’s how

I go through life.”90 The idea that he is a literary father to Jimmy disturbs him especially after

Jimmy attempts to hijack the plane to make an ideological statement against what he views as the pereptual self-victimization inherent in Holocaust remembrance projects. 91 But the Jewish

American writer is fated to be part of an ongoing family tree, whether he likes it or not. An aging

Zuckerman finds that he cannot remain just a literary son; he is now a literary father to yet another generation of Jewish American writers, some of whom may be as crazy as Jimmy.

89 Philip Roth, The Counterlife (New York: Vintage, 1986), 91-92. 90 Ibid., 169. 91 Ibid., 167.

The specific relationship of the Jewish American writer to literary fathers from the Old

World, though, is an interesting subject to trace through the Zuckerman novels. Zuckerman may be descended from Abravanel and Lonoff, but they are descended from Babel. Sisovsky, another

Old World Jewish writer, links Zuckerman to Kafka. By connecting himself to these Ashkenazi writer fathers, Zuckerman assuages some of the guilt that stems from his need to break from his past by creating an original, transgressive, American kind of Jewish literature.

The real Roth, like Zuckerman, actually engaged in a project to rescue the work of

Ashkenazi writers, as Wirth-Nesher noted.92 Mark Shechner suggests that “In all this delectable comedy of fathers and sons, Roth too has played his part, more consciously than Howe, for his image of himself as perennial Jewish son would seem to be at the very core of his identity. It surely has everything to do with his attachment to Kafka, another Jewish son with a painful and debilitating relationship to fatherhood.” 93 Indeed, Roth wrote extensively about his own admiration for Kafka, most interestingly in his essay-story hybrid “I Always Wanted You To

Admire My Fasting; Or, Looking at Kafka.” In this piece, he first provides some biography of the real Franz Kafka and then imagines an alternate reality in which Kafka moved to America and became a Hebrew school teacher in New Jersey, never publishing any fiction. Despite the fact that Roth, by making Kafka an aging bachelor and not a great modernist writer, strips away much of Kafka’s glory, the essay nonetheless retains an air of deference. He simultaneously links himself to and separates himself from the Czech writer: “[B]y beginning his text with the actual recounting of Kafka’s life, he insists on the fictionality of his comic alternative history, which is

92 Wirth-Nesher, “From Newark to Prague,” 227. 93 Mark Shechner, “Philip Roth,” in Critical Essays on Philip Roth, ed. Sanford Pinsker (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1982), 119.

drawn from a background similar to his own and which pales beside the narrative of the “real”

Kafka.”94

Wirth-Nesher eloquently characterizes Roth’s vision of Kafka, this real instance of a younger Jewish writer grappling with the legacy of an older Jewish writer, developed here through a work of fiction: “He has identified in Kafka a literary father, his European alter ego, the writer who bridges both Jewishness and Western modernism and who is locked into a battle with his father that takes on mystical and mythical proportions in his art. [...] So Roth can claim him as a literary father and then minimize that threat by making Kafka an unpublished author.”95

This could just as easily serve as a description of the general Jewish American writer character’s typical relationship to older Jewish writers, which Roth himself reinforces through his fiction.

Wirth-Nesher argues that Roth’s self-definition as a literary son is essential to his self-definition as a Jewish writer, despite the ways those identifications seem to be complicated for Roth: “Roth has continued to seek the artistic means to remain a Jewish writer without admitting to the charges leveled against him. To do so, he has had to see himself as part of a Jewish literary tradition.”96 His placement of himself within the Jewish literary tradition, she points out, involved publicly drawing parallels between himself and other Jewish writers: “Despite his resistance to the label of American Jewish writer, he has reviewed his own work in relation to other authors regularly included in that corpus. For example, he linked Portnoy’s Complaint with

Bellow’s The Victim and Malamud’s The Assistant.”97

For Roth as for Zuckerman, then, being a Jewish American writer relies upon linking oneself with the older writer type; this is evident not only in Roth’s actual statements but in

94 Wirth-Nesher, “From Newark to Prague,” 223. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid., 219.

Looking at Kafka. Roth himself pays his respects to the Old World Jewish writers in several ways: with his Other Europe series, by writing so many stories of the Jewish American writer’s relationship to his literary fathers, by writing Looking at Kafka. Joseph Voelker describes how the scene where Zuckerman eavesdrops on Lonoff and Amy Bellette reflects this tendency of

Roth’s:

In an emblematic scene, Nathan climbs on the desk of Maestro E. I. Lonoff in order to eavesdrop on the sexual fall of a symbolic father, apparently taking place in the room upstairs. When the desk proves too low, Nathan slides a fat volume of Henry James’s short stories onto it. [...] As autobiography, the emblem is sound. Philip Roth has done some daring and at times awkward balancing acts on the fictions of his literary fathers.98 99

Roth thus exists within the same structure that he creates for Zuckerman, underscoring even more this need to reckon with Old World/Eastern European history and literature in order to move past it as a Jewish American writer. (This placement of himself within the Jewish literary family, a subject that comes up repeatedly in his Zuckerman novels, is just one of many ways in which Roth deliberately shrinks the distance between himself and Zuckerman. The effect that that has upon characterizing the Jewish American writer is the subject of the next section.)

Zuckerman’s specific relationship to his Ashkenazi literary forefathers is explored most interestingly in The Prague Orgy, the epilogue to the three novels that comprise Zuckerman

Bound, in which Zuckerman journeys to Prague to save the work of a forgotten Yiddish writer from obliteration and oblivion. Why would Zuckerman, who has been extraordinarily self-

98 Joseph C. Voelker, “Dedalian Shades: Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer,” in Critical Essays on Philip Roth, ed. Sanford Pinsker (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1982), 89. 99 In this passage, Voelker also invokes the Oedipal overtones of the scene. This reading of Nathan’s desire to witness the “sexual fall of a symbolic father,” none other than his literary father, fits nicely into my understanding of the Zuckerman/Roth character’s conflation of sex and writing. As I described in the previous section, Oedipal conflicts often come into play in this context as the writer son strives to defy his parents through sexual and literary transgression. Here, Voelker shows how this Oedipal theme operates within the framework of a scene that, as I described in that section, exemplifies this strange conflation of sex with writing.

absorbed in the previous novels, want to take on such a project? His motives are more self- serving—or at least self-involved—than they may initially seem. Saving the work of another

Jewish writer is a way for Zuckerman to affirm his own claim to the title of “Jewish writer;” part of being a Jewish American writer is being involved in this international family of Jewish writers: “A major effect of helping to reconstruct a lost literary tradition is that it may provide a literary father for Zuckerman/Roth.”100 Just as he had to contend with the oppressive legacy of the written word “Holocaust” in order to continue defining himself as a Jewish American writer, he must engage with the milieu of his Old World Jewish literary forefathers and pay his respects to their legacy in order to break from that legacy and create his own: “In The Anatomy Lesson and The Prague Orgy... the search for a literary father in the context of being an American

Jewish writer is developed even further as Nathan Zuckerman inherits that scrap of paper with the word Holocaust on it.”101

Zuckerman’s relationships to these many other Jewish writers demonstrate the importance for Roth’s Jewish American writer of this conception of oneself as the heir to a patrilineal tradition of Jewish writers. It is a quintessential part of being a Jewish writer in

America, much in the same way that part of being a son of Jewish immigrants in America is reckoning with those legacies. And it is so crucial a trait of the Rothian Jewish American writer that, as I discuss in the following chapter, it is present in many contemporary portrayals of the

Jewish American writer (including all three of the examples I explore in depth in that chapter), most interestingly when younger writers experience themselves as literary sons of Roth.

“He Frequently Turns Out To Be You”: Roth’s Jewish American Writer as Philip Roth

100 Wirth-Nesher, “From Newark to Prague,” 227. 101 Ibid., 224.

“[...] On the other hand there is the dangerous, potentially destructive Jewish writer poised to misrepresent and ruin everything; and that Jewish writer isn’t any old Jewish writer, but, because you are inclined to be funny and ironical about things one is supposed to be for or against— because, paradoxically, it is your Jewish gift to make things look ludicrous, laughable, or absurd, including, alas, even the Jew’s vulnerable situation—he frequently turns out to be you.”102 - Zuckerman’s friend Shuki on the political impact of the Jewish American writer

In “The Lost Young Intellectual,” Howe argues that the Jewish intellectual “often cannot take even his own misery with complete seriousness” and thus internalizes “a biting sense of irony,” believing he has an obligation to “observe his own ridiculousness,” and as a result taking on “an internal split in personality” and a tendency to “watch… his own personality as if it belonged to someone else.”103 104 Philip Roth read and was very moved by this article, as he makes clear in The Anatomy Lesson (the context for and effects of which I discuss later in this section). Thus it is no surprise that these descriptions extremely accurately characterize the tone and content of both Roth’s Zuckerman novels and Operation Shylock: while the essay was written decades before those novels, Roth intentionally drew upon Howe’s characterization of the young Jewish American intellectual in creating his characters. The unique result of Roth’s particular obsession with “watch[ing]... his own personality as if it belonged to someone else” is the creation of one more essential trait of the Jewish American writer character: being Philip

Roth.

In the simple act of creating a protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman, who as a Jewish American writer can be easily construed as a sort of doppelganger or alter ego for him, Roth creates a fictional outlet for working out his own identity. And in his “confessional” Operation Shylock, he, Philip Roth, must confront a Philip Roth imposter who makes him question his sense of self.

102 Roth, The Counterlife, 161. 103 Howe, “The Lost Young Intellectual,” 366. 104 This sentence is taken and reworked from Miranda Cooper, ““Philip Roth Reconsidered” Reconsidered,” 3-4.

The very creation of Philip Roth as a fictional character whose absurd adventures could easily be taken for those of Nathan Zuckerman—which is an interesting twist on the usual phenomenon of

Zuckerman being taken for Roth—adds to Roth’s characterization of the Jewish American writer as Philip Roth. In both cases, Roth narrows the distance between himself and the Jewish

American writer characters he creates, thus “mix[ing] up the worlds of fiction and reality in a way that turns his works into studies of the issue of fiction and the fiction-making process."105

By fictionalizing himself in this manner, he thus pushes along the “characterization” process of the Jewish American writer as himself: if Roth, or an alter ego who closely resembles

Roth, can be Roth’s Jewish American writer character, then Roth’s Jewish American writer character can be Roth. Roth thus begins to shape himself as the Jewish American writer character even aside from the actual traits of the character he has established. Through this use of alter- egos, Roth both fits into Kazin’s model of the Jewish American writer bent on “explaining himself to himself” and actually adds his final, and perhaps most consequential, touch to the renovated Jewish American writer character: the Jewish American writer character as Philip

Roth.

Roth often achieves this intentional merging of writer and character by having

Zuckerman discuss that very issue—by “[...] turning the American Jewish writer’s problem into the central issue of the fiction”—and thus adding to the reader’s instinct to conflate the author with his protagonist.106 Critic David Brauner describes how Roth deliberately creates this confusion over his relation to Zuckerman and the relation of his autobiography to his fiction:

Much of Roth’s later work, like Nathan Zuckerman’s, is ‘an ever-recurring story that’s at once [his] invention and the invention of [him],’ an increasingly tangled skein of

105 Sam B. Girgus, The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 127. 106 Wirth-Nesher, “From Newark to Prague,” 224.

autobiographical fictions and fictional autobiographies, of ‘self-protective writing postures’ and ‘merciless self-evisceration.’107

Brauner’s analysis is particularly appropriate in that even the quotes he uses to support his argument are indicative of the “increasingly tangled skein of autobiographical fictions and fictional autobiographies”: the first quote within the passage comes from The Prague Orgy, as

Zuckerman describes his situation as a writer, and the second and third quotes come from The

Facts, Roth’s supposedly autobiographical work in which he sets out to set the record straight about what is fiction and what is fact. Brauner thus beautifully expresses the brilliance that is

Roth’s blurring of the lines between himself and Nathan Zuckerman: even Roth’s description of himself in a work of nonfiction and Zuckerman’s description of himself in Roth’s fiction are so similar as to be indistinguishable. Brauner’s analysis is, in a sense, the critical equivalent of what

Roth does all along: the use of both direct content and indirect implication within that content to express this as a theme. Brauner explains this phenomenon further:

Early on in his career Roth was dismayed by the popular identification of Alexander Portnoy... with himself, denouncing as absurd that ‘a novel in the guise of a confession was received and judged [...] as a confession in the guise of a novel.’ Later he treats the theme in his fiction (Nathan Zuckerman is repeatedly taken for his fictional Portnoy-like protagonist, Carnovsky, in the Zuckerman Bound novels), and deliberately blurs the lines between fiction and autobiography in which Zuckerman appears (The Facts) and publishing a book that presents itself as a confession in the guise of a novel (Operation Shylock).108

Once again, Brauner has identified the parallelism between Roth the flesh-and-blood author and the Jewish American writer characters he creates (including Philip Roth): the real Roth was upset at being confused with Portnoy, and in The Anatomy Lesson Zuckerman expresses outrage at being conflated with Carnovsky. The reader is thus compelled to understand Zuckerman’s

107 Brauner, Post-War Jewish Fiction, 158-159. 108 Ibid., 158.

frustration at being conflated with his characters as an apparent challenge to her assumption that

Zuckerman is Roth.

But the belief that Zuckerman’s outrage at being taken for his characters signals Roth’s outrage at the same (a belief which is buttressed by the fact that Roth’s statements on the subject outside the fictional realm are similar to Zuckerman’s own) is inherently reliant upon a conflation of Zuckerman with Roth. Because of the similarities between Zuckerman’s responses to this biographical fallacy and Roth’s own public responses to the same, Roth ultimately leads the reader back to the starting point assumption that Zuckerman is, in fact, just a thinly veiled portrayal of Roth. He thus suggests that the biographical fallacy is not a fallacy at all—but by this point, Roth has torn up the contract between author and reader so many times that the reader is likely to remain skeptical and unsure of Roth’s position in relation to Zuckerman. Roth

“achieves comic effects by building the reader’s expectations and then collapsing the structure;

[...] he constructs and then deconstructs fictional premises—all the while reminding the reader of the work’s artifice.”109 The dissonance between Roth’s outrage at being taken for Portnoy and the fact that he deliberately blurs the lines between autobiography and fiction by having

Zuckerman express rage at being taken for Carnovsky has the effect of confusing even the most discerning reader to the extent that she truly does not know whether or not to read Zuckerman as

Roth. This, too, is part of Roth’s genius; because the reader becomes his mere pawn in the chess game of collapsing the distance between himself and Zuckerman (or Philip Roth in Operation

Shylock), he disarms readers and critics from being able to expose any kind of link between his life and his work that he has not already anticipated. Roth thus seizes control once and for all of

109 Elaine B. Safer, Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006), 18.

the narrative of the Jewish American writer and the extent to which he himself is or is not that character; regardless of what the reader ends up believing, that belief is by Roth’s design.

One particularly significant instance of this is Zuckerman’s ire at being attacked by the literary critic Milton Appel in the pages of Inquiry, “the Jewish cultural monthly that fifteen years earlier had published Zuckerman’s first stories.”110 According to Zuckerman, Appel had

“unleashed an attack upon Zuckerman’s career that made Macduff’s assault on Macbeth look almost lackadaisical.”111 This attack was aimed at Zuckerman’s recent novel Carnovsky, which

Appel found to be vulgar and, moreover, detrimental to the Jewish community:

Fourteen years on, following the success of Carnovsky, Appel reconsidered what he called Zuckerman’s “case”: now the Jews represented in Higher Education had been twisted out of human recognition by a willful vulgar imagination largely indifferent to social accuracy and the tenets of realistic fiction. Except for a single readable story, that first collection was tendentious junk, the by-product of a pervasive and unfocused hostility. The three books that followed had nothing to redeem them at all—mean, joyless, patronizing little novels, contemptuously dismissive of the complex depths. No Jews like Zuckerman’s had ever existed other than as caricature; as literature that could interest grown people, none of the books could be said to exist at all, but were contrived as a species of sub-literature for the newly “liberated” middle class, for an “audience,” as distinguished from serious readers. Though probably himself not an outright anti-Semite, Zuckerman was certainly no friend of the Jews: Carnovsky’s ugly animus proved that.112

Zuckerman is angered at having been thus misread by Appel, particularly given the fact that

Zuckerman had related to and loved his earlier writing, most especially an “early Partisan essay, written when he was just back from World War II,” which “had been cherished reading among

Zuckerman’s friends at the University of Chicago circa 1950” and concerned “the gulf between the coarse-grained Jewish fathers whose values had developed in an embattled immigrant milieu and their bookish, nervous American sons.”113

110 Roth, The Anatomy Lesson, 474. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid., 475. 113 Ibid., 476-477.

This early essay, according to Zuckerman’s characterizations, recalls Irving Howe’s real essay “The Lost Young Intellectual.” Similarly, the recent critique of Zuckerman’s work resembles Howe’s “Philip Roth Reconsidered.” Furthermore, Higher Education is easily recognizable as Goodbye, Columbus and Carnovsky as Portnoy’s Complaint. For a reader who is familiar with Roth’s biography and the trajectory of Howe’s criticism about Roth, it is tempting to view this conflict between Zuckerman and Appel as a thinly veiled reference to the real conflict between Roth and Howe and the real charges of vulgarity and self-hatred that Roth faced following the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint. It is difficult to separate the content of The

Anatomy Lesson from the actual dispute between Roth and Howe (or Roth and the Jewish establishment more generally): after the “outburst of rage occasioned by the publication of

Portnoy,” “Roth’s’ art began to turn inward so that the drama between the Jewish writer bent on freely expressing his desires in his art and moralistic readers bent on denouncing him becomes the central subject of his fiction.”114 In other words, it is tempting to conflate Roth with

Zuckerman, and therefore to engage in exactly the sort of misreading that seems to be the root of most critiques of Zuckerman’s work, including Appel’s. Zuckerman scorns Appel for believing him to be Carnovsky, and the reader is compelled to believe that Roth too would scorn someone who conflated him with his own characters—but, as I have discussed, such a belief is itself based on that very conflation.

This is best expressed in Zuckerman’s wry comment—dripping with the “biting irony” that Howe noted in 1946 as characteristic of the second-generation Jewish American intellectual, which as I have suggested was a precursor to the developing Jewish American writer type—that

“Yes, illness had done it: Zuckerman had become Carnovsky. The journalists had known it all

114 Wirth-Nesher, “From Newark to Prague,” 221.

along.”115 Here, Zuckerman’s sarcasm and derision attempts to preclude the reader from making such a naïve assumption as believing Roth to be Zuckerman, but such a reading in fact relies on that very assumption, as the reader necessarily ascribes Zuckerman’s thoughts and feelings to

Roth. In this way, Roth blurs the lines between himself and Zuckerman even as he seems to insist on their intransience. Not in spite but because of the fact that Zuckerman so vehemently denies charges that he is his characters, when Roth has had to do the very same, Roth compels his readers to conflate him with Zuckerman. Sam Girgus articulates this eloquently:

Roth’s penchant for including a great deal of his public self and autobiography in his novels further blurs the distinctions between fiction and reality. Thus, when Nathan Zuckerman complains in Zuckerman Unbound that people keep confusing him, the successful author, with the creations of his novels, we can assume that Roth is joking. In the novel Zuckerman must contend with a public who will not let him forget that he wrote a sensational book that sounds very much like Portnoy’s Complaint. Zuckerman Unbound therefore confirms Roth’s intention to diminish the barrier between fiction and reality.116

To which I would add that this diminished barrier, which puts Roth and his characters on the same level, in effect renders Roth himself a fictional character and thus allows Roth to perpetuate the image of the Jewish American writer character as himself.

If this were not sufficient to erase the boundaries between Roth and his protagonists, thereby allowing Roth to become the Jewish American writer character and the Jewish American writer character to become Roth, there is an element of crossover between Roth’s otherwise discrete fictional worlds that engages in this same process. Zuckerman is, in fact, a character invented by Peter Tarnapol, who is in turn Roth’s lesser-known Jewish American writer, the protagonist of My Life as a Man. Girgus describes how this operates:

Roth’s development of his fiction as a continuous search for a center or a “real” author conforms with the desperate search of his characters for a sense of self. An example of

115 Roth, The Anatomy Lesson, 514. 116 Girgus, The New Covenant, 127.

Roth’s experiment to combine this technique of fiction and his theme of the lost or uncertain self can be found in My Life as a Man. In this novel, two stories, “Salad Days” and “Courting Disaster,” are entitled together “Useful Fictions” and concern the character of Zuckerman. Both stories and Zuckerman himself are deemed the creation of Peter Tarnapol, the hero of the “autobiographical” third part of the novel which is called “My True Story.” Thus, the fictional process of creating a “real” self is sustained by the attempt in the novel to find the real author.117

The search for the self is certainly an important theme of Operation Shylock and The Counterlife, and those novels too put forth the question of who is the real author. But the fact that Zuckerman is conceived of as a creation of another of Roth’s Jewish American writer characters deepens the question of authorship: who is the actual author of the Zuckerman stories and novels and therefore of the Jewish author type? By making Tarnopol responsible for the act of authorship that the reader would otherwise assume to be Roth’s own, Roth encourages a conflation of himself with Tarnopol. And that very act of authorship—the creation of Zuckerman as a character—lays the foundation for the many conflations between Roth and Zuckerman that are to come. With these layers of complexity, Roth places himself on the same level as his characters, and in so doing, he effectively fictionalizes himself.

Roth’s blurring of the lines between autobiography and fiction and between himself and the Jewish American writer character is carried even further in The Facts, the presumably autobiographical work in which Roth claims he will explain what “the facts” of his life are and, in doing so, uphold the distance between himself and Zuckerman, debunking the myths that critics and readers have perpetuated. But within the pages of The Facts, Roth actually narrows that distance even further by describing how entire scenes of his life in fact served as inspiration for his fiction and were reproduced in writing almost exactly as they really happened.118 More importantly, and most interestingly, Roth completely destroys that distance by bookending The

117 Ibid., 125. 118 Philip Roth, The Facts (New York: Vintage, 1988), 74.

Facts with correspondence between Roth and Zuckerman in which Roth solicits Zuckerman’s opinion on the manuscript of The Facts and Zuckerman comments on Roth’s narrative techniques. Roth explains his reasoning for writing this autobiography: his breakdown (which, further blurring the fiction/autobiography boundary, he is to fictionalize not a decade later in

Operation Shylock) made him feel “[in]capable of remaking myself,” and so he embarked on a the project of writing The Facts, of “rendering experience untransformed.”119 He did so, he explains, “so as to fall back into my former life, to retrieve my vitality, to transform myself into myself.”120 But this transformation of himself into himself—this process in writing of explaining himself to himself, perhaps—is just as much that as it is a transformation of himself into

Zuckerman, insofar as the overarching impact of The Facts is to further confuse the reader as to what extent Zuckerman’s experiences are actually Roth’s. Indeed, even within the letter, he explicitly conflates himself with Zuckerman by referencing his fiction as an analogue for his life:

Like you, Zuckerman, who are reborn in The Counterlife through your English wife, like your brother, Henry, who seeks rebirth in Israel with his West Bank fundamentalists, just as both of you in the same book miraculously manage to be revived from death, I too was ripe for another chance. If while writing I couldn’t see exactly what I was up to, I do now: this manuscript embodies my counterlife, the antidote and answer to all those fictions that culminated in the fiction of you. If in one way The Counterlife can be read as fiction about structure, then this is the bare bones, the structure of a life without the fiction.121

In so doing, Roth encourages further conflation between himself and Zuckerman, which in turn encourages the characterization of the Jewish American writer character in Roth’s own image.

By having Zuckerman comment on the effectiveness of Roth’s structure, by having Roth compare himself to Zuckerman, and by in the first place introducing a fictional character into a supposedly nonfictional work, Roth reminds the reader that The Facts is by no means a candid

119 Ibid., 5. 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid., 6.

autobiography but a constructed work that is at least part fiction. Additionally, the insertion of

Zuckerman into this book further detracts from its status as memoir or nonfiction; much like

Looking at Kafka transcends the boundaries of essay or biography when it evolves into a counterfactual story, The Facts can no longer be taken as nonfiction when Zuckerman appears on the same level of authority as Roth. As Elaine Safer suggests, the effect of Zuckerman’s role here is that “readers are being challenged directly to understand and to accept the game that is being played.”122

Finally, Zuckerman in his letter confronts Roth about the control Roth yields over

Zuckerman’s life, expressing fear that the unfortunate events of Roth’s life are Zuckerman’s destiny too. This encourages the reader’s conflation of Roth with Zuckerman; Zuckerman believes that Roth’s fate is his own fate, and the reader, with the knowledge that Roth created this fear for Zuckerman, is compelled to wonder if Roth himself understands Zuckerman in this way, as a fictional representation of his real self.

Operation Shylock, Roth’s “confessional” novel featuring Philip Roths as its flesh-and- blood author, implied author, narrator/protagonist, and antagonist, further blurs the lines between autiobiography and fiction. By making Philip Roth into a character several times over, Roth promotes the literal characterization of the American Jewish writer as himself. Once again, it is not only the act of creating of a Jewish American writer character (or even, in Operation

Shylock, the specific act of characterizing that Jewish American writer as himself) that allows

Roth to have such influence on the creation of the character of the Jewish American writer. Even more complex and interesting is the meta layering within the novels that have such a character as their protagonist: Roth’s Jewish American writer characters consistently contemplate their own

122 Safer, Mocking the Age, 12.

roles as Jewish American writers and the permeability of the boundary between their lives and their work. For instance, the “real” Philip Roth in Operation Shylock explains how the bizarre discovery of a Philip Roth imposter is literally stranger than his fiction:

Although the idea probably originated in Aharon’s remark that he felt that he was reading to me out of a story I’d written, it was nonetheless another ridiculously subjective attempt to convert into a mental event of the kind I was professionally all too familiar with what had once again been established as all too objectively real. It’s Zuckerman, I thought, whimsically, stupidly, escapistly, it’s Kepesh, it’s Tarnopol and Portnoy—it’s all of them in one, broken free of print and mockingly reconstituted as a single satirical facsimile of me. In other words, if it’s not Halcion and it’s no dream, then it’s got to be literature—as though there cannot be a life-without ten thousand times more unimaginable than the life within.123

Roth thus has the character of Philip Roth ruminate on the lack of distance between his life and his work, and the form that that takes is that he begins to imagine himself as his own protagonists, some of whom are Jewish American writers who in their stories often dealt with this issue of the distance between themselves and their characters. On several levels, then, Roth has enmeshed his own Jewish American writer characters with himself such that the distinctions between himself and his characters, and the boundaries between fact and fiction, are nearly impossible to discern. This allows him to completely collapse any differences between himself and the fictional Jewish American writer, completing that character’s conversion into Philip

Roth.

One particularly unique method by which he achieves this in Operation Shylock actually takes place outside of the confines of the novel itself—or does it? Roth capitalizes on that very ambiguity, working just on the fringes between fiction and reality to further collapse the space between himself and the fictional Jewish American writer character. The main sites of this are the title, the Preface, and the Note to the Reader at the end of the novel. The novel’s full title is

123 Philip Roth, Operation Shylock (New York: Vintage, 1993), 34.

Operation Shylock: A Confession, which immediately raises the question: who is confessing?

Which Philip Roth—the real one, the fictionalized one who narrates this novel, or the imposter— is really responsible for this novel? From the outset, then—before the reader even opens the book, perhaps—the distinctions between the real Roth and the characters are fuzzy, which adds to the reader’s sense that Roth is a true fictional character.

The preface operates similarly. It comes after the novel’s dedication and epigraph, but before Chapter 1 begins, which puts it in the unusual role of being technically part of the novel but apparently separate from it. In this Preface, Roth provides “background” information and context for the novel, stating that “the book is as accurate an account as I am able to give of actual occurrences that I lived through during my middle fifties and that culminated, early in

1988, in my agreeing to undertake an intelligence-gathering operation for Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad.”124 He claims that his “commentary on the Demjanjuk case”

(which is the setting for much of the novel’s action) “reflects accurately and candidly what I was thinking in January 1988.”125 Of course, this claim to accuracy and candidness can hardly be debated: regardless of the fictionality or nonfictionality of the book’s events, it is likely still true that the novel reflects his thought processes at the time. Finally, the Preface includes a disclaimer of sorts: “For legal reasons, I have had to alter a number of facts in this book. These are minor changes that mainly involve details of identification and locale and are of little significance to the overall story and its verisimilitude. Any name that has been changed is marked with a small circle the first time it appears.”126 Although the language of this paragraph echoes the dull legal jargon that can usually be found in fine print on a novel’s copyright page, and thus the reader is

124 Ibid., 13. 125 Ibid. 126 Ibid.

almost predisposed to skim over it, in this case it is essential to Roth’s project of blurring fiction with nonfiction and the character with himself.

In the first place, it serves to remind the reader from the very outset of the contrived nature of the novel and of fiction in general; before the reader even knows what the story is about, she is primed to consider and challenge its apparent verisimilitude. It is also a brilliantly vague statement: the changes Roth has made “mainly involve details of identification and locale”

(emphasis mine); what else might be changed? But perhaps the most interesting way Roth uses this disclaimer is through the way it actually manifests itself in the novel. He does indeed use small circles to mark changed names—but the names he changes are not those of people that the reader knows to be real, of which there are several, but those of minor characters whose existence is unbeknownst to the reader.

For instance, the names of Roth’s cousin Apter and his Palestinian college friend George

Ziad are marked as having been changed, but the names of actual people such as Israeli novelist

Aharon Appelfeld (another of Roth’s literary fathers, who also referenced Kafka as one of his influences)127 and Ted Solotaroff, a literary critic and editor of Commentary (who, amusingly, has a blurb on the novel’s back cover), are kept as is. This is counterintuitive: it seems that the characters whose privacy it would be most important to protect would be the well-known writers and public figures Roth encounters, not his random friends and cousins.

By fictionalizing the names of people who may already be fictional, but keeping the names of those who are not, Roth further confuses the boundaries between fiction and reality. In so doing, he provokes uncertainty as to whether this book is fiction or memoir. This question is reinforced too by the fact that late in the novel, the character of Roth discusses the compilation of

127 Ibid., 56.

these stories, agonizing over what to keep and what to leave out and considering including the disclaimer that labels the story a work of total fiction and thus absolves him of responsibility. He mentions that, to protect Israeli national security, he has had to leave one chapter out entirely:

“the contents of chapter 11, ‘Operation Shylock,’ were deemed by [Smilesburger] to contain information to seriously detrimental to his agency’s interests and to the Israeli government.”128

Instead, Smilesburger suggests that Roth fictionalize his “confession,” engaging in a “sacrosanct prank of artistic transubstantiation,” 129 but Roth replies that “calling fiction fact would undermine everything.”130 By making the question of fictionality a direct issue in the novel— even more overtly than he makes the public’s conflation of writer and character an issue in The

Anatomy Lesson—Roth, just as in that earlier novel, both compels the reader to consider how it relates to the real Roth and in so doing actually reinforces the reader’s belief that Roth and the fictional Roth are one and the same. Of course, the fact that doppelgangers and cases of mistaken identity are central to the novel’s premise—played out through both the Philip Roth/Moishe

Pipik storyline and the Demjanjuk trial—only intensifies the effect of these subtle ways Roth raises that question in regards to himself. If the novel deals with this theme internally, how should we read what appear to be external comments on it?

The “Note to the Reader” at the end of the novel brilliantly and simply furthers this uncertainty in the service of collapsing the space between the real Roth and the fictional Roth.

On the novel’s very last page, which is not even numbered—as with the Preface, in a place that seems to be neither fully in the novel’s fictional world nor fully outside it—Roth (the fictional one? the real one?) writes yet another statement that looks like a legal disclaimer:

128 Ibid., 357. 129 Ibid., 361. 130 Ibid., 387.

This book is a work of fiction. The formal conversational exchange with Aharon Appelfeld quoted in chapters 3 and 4 first appeared in The New York Times on March 11, 1988; the verbatim minutes of the January 27, 1988 morning session of the trial of John Demjanjuk in Jerusalem District Court provided the courtroom exchanges quoted in chapter 9. Otherwise the names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. This confession is false.131

The genius of this passage lies in its final line: which confession is false? Roth seems to be admitting that the confession of Operation Shylock: A Confession—in other words, the entire novel—is fictional, and yet it is also possible to read all of the preceding sentences in this disclaimer as the antecedent of “this confession.” And depending on which confession Roth is admitting to be false—indeed, what he is confessing to—there is a question of which Roth is confessing.

If we take this passage at its word, and believe “this confession is false” to be referring to the novel, it seems that we are reading the voice of the real Roth and thus can take his word as fact rather than fiction. But that simple final sentence complicates even that reading: by adding into the equation, at the last moment, ambiguity regarding the difference between fiction and nonfiction, the real Roth allows the fictional Roth to have the last word. Roth thus uses both the novel and its seemingly standard, reality-based accouterments—disclaimers, prefaces, author’s notes—to encourage a conflation of him with the fictionalized version of him. This is all the more effective because of the fact that this takes place in contexts whose fictionality or nonfictionality are already questionable. Like the letters between Roth and Zuckerman that bookend The Facts, it is not just the content of these pieces but their status as something between fiction and fact that conveys this theme.

131 Ibid., 399 (after pagination).

As in The Anatomy Lesson, the reader thus resignedly yields to Roth the power of deciding whether or not Roth is his characters. And by deferring to Roth on that subject, the reader makes Roth the ultimate arbiter of who the Jewish American writer character really is and whether or not he is Philip Roth. In other words, Roth seizes ultimate authorship of the narrative that charts the Jewish American writer’s development (and process of transformation into Philip

Roth himself) throughout American fiction.

Roth’s fictions and nonfictions established Roth/Zuckerman as a new character that further developed and responded to the burgeoning cultural type described by critics such as

Howe, Kazin, and Shapiro. And thus if we accept Kazin’s assertion that the “need to explain himself to himself” and fixation on the “necessity of telling his own story” is a condition of being a Jewish American writer, perhaps the most interesting way that this manifests for Roth is through writing himself into the role of the Jewish American writer character. 132 The Jewish

American writer “character” is not just a generally male, oversexed, neurotic, verbose literary son with an obsessive need to “explain himself to himself”; often, he is literally Philip Roth, or

Nathan Zuckerman. In response to a fitting instance of Zuckerman’s experiences and thoughts about his own position as a transgressive Jewish writer, which mirrors Roth’s own reflections about himself as a writer, Zuckerman’s friend Shuki expresses this truth: after all, “that Jewish

[American] writer isn’t any old writer.” He is not even just any old Jewish American writer with the traits Roth has given him. No: he frequently turns out to be Philip Roth.

132 Kazin, “The Jew As American Writer,” 8.

Chapter 2:

Roth’s Ghost (Writer)s: Contemporary Portrayals of the Jewish American Writer

Introduction

Given the historical specificity of the traits that critics like Howe and Kazin assigned to the Jewish American writer character, it seems likely that such a character would be short-lived.

After all, the qualities that set him apart in the first place were the product of his particular historical moment. His character, his concerns, and even his prose were defined by the many tensions that gave texture to the life of the second-generation Jewish immigrant. The longevity of this character was thus linked to the longevity of American Jewish particularism; cultural incorporation was his death sentence. Or so it seems based on the logic of some of these early critics; Howe stated this implicitly in 1977 when he wrote that “a subculture finds its voice and its passion at exactly the moment that it faces disintegration,”133 and, more explicitly and more famously, that “American Jewish fiction has probably moved past its high point.”134

Howe was not alone in this sentiment. As soon as American literary critics announced the birth of Jewish American fiction, they began writing its obituary: “almost as soon as it had begun to establish itself as a real force in American literature, the demise of American-Jewish fiction was being confidently prophesied.”135 Certainly, according to the logic of these “prophets,”

133 Howe, Introduction to Jewish-American Stories, 3. 134 Ibid., 16. 135 Brauner, Post-War Jewish Fiction, 23.

assimilation was a death knell for the Jewish American writer character as well. But the continued existence and growth of original fiction by Jewish American writers well into the twenty-first century reveals the logic to be false. Not only has Jewish American fiction continued to thrive; it has continued to take as a frequent subject the character of the Jewish American writer.

What is strange, however, is that the Jewish American writer portrayed in contemporary fiction, a half-century after his inception, still “frequently turns out to be [Philip Roth].” Roth’s characterization left an indelible mark on Jewish American fiction; the Jewish American writer still exists in the mold in which Roth created him, and Jewish American literary fiction is still rife with Rothian representations of the Jewish American writer. An examination of some of these newer works will show how Roth’s fictions established the Jewish American writer character as a specific type, one of the characteristics of which is in fact that of being Roth himself, that would be drawn upon by Jewish American fiction writers for decades to come.

In recent literary works as diverse as Sam Apple’s short story “The Butcher of Desire; Or

Imagining Philip Roth,” Daniel Goldfarb’s stage play Legacy, and Alex Ross Perry’s film Listen

Up Philip—all from 2014 and 2015—Philip Roth appears repeatedly, either explicitly as himself or as a thinly veiled caricature. In every one of these cases, both the protagonist’s characteristics and the story’s concerns are unmistakably Rothian. If these works are any indication, the model that Philip Roth created was a lasting one. The Jewish American writer character that Philip Roth wrote into being, the character that “frequently turns out to be [him],” has not only outlived the critics who doubted his longevity; he will likely outlive Roth himself.

Ensuring a Future for the Jewish American Writer: Legacy

Legacy, a 2015 stage play by Daniel Goldfarb, features as its protagonist an aging Jewish

American writer named Neil Abrams, who a theater critic aptly describes as “a sexagenarian writer (with the emphasis on sex), whose career has waned since the days when he shocked the reading public with daring, masturbation-depicting novels like “Foreskin.”136 We are introduced to Neil as he is disgruntled to read that his latest novel, titled “Legacy,” received a poor review in

The New York Times. Among the charges leveled against him is that “the world in which he writes becomes more and more antiquated and culturally irrelevant.”137 Discouraged, he suggests to his wife Suzanne that they have a child, an idea that Suzanne had championed but given up on a few years previously because of Neil’s hesitation. The rest of the play’s action revolves around their attempt to do so through unconventional methods, and the role—which is more significant than originally intended—of Neil’s student Heart as their surrogate mother.

The parallels between Abrams and Roth are obvious. His body of work is much like

Roth’s, from a Portnoy’s Complaint analogue to a Zuckerman-like character; he is a womanizer, and believed to be such largely as a result of his fiction; he is often conflated with his fiction in general; he is sometimes the one to encourage that conflation. He thus displays several of the qualities of the Jewish American writer and, specifically, of Roth.

Abrams’ career as a writer, it seems, closely resembles that of Roth. The audience learns from secondary characters that his scandalous, transgressive past as a writer includes novels like

“King of the Jews” and “Foreskin.” The way that Abrams’ student (and, later, surrogate-turned-

136 Ben Brantley, “Review: ‘Legacy,’ an Uneasy Comedy of Morals at Williamstown Theatre Festival,” The New York Times, July 26, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/08/theater/review-legacy-an-uneasy-comedy-of-morals-at- williamstown-festival.html. 137 Daniel Goldfarb, “Legacy” (play, Williamstown Theater Festival, 2015), 4.

biological mother of his child) describes his work is laden with terms familiar from criticism

(both positive and negative) of Roth, particularly Portnoy’s Complaint and “Defender of the

Faith,” for which he was most frequently accused of betraying the Jews. She references “the splash he made with King of the Jews. And the crazy backlash with Foreskin. I mean, he was vilified.”138 Of “Foreskin,” she says, “I know many consider that one wildly self-loathing and telling tales out of school. But to me, it’s the best, and just way ahead of it’s [sic] time [...] I knew that I was reading something genuinely irreverent, tragic, comic, and fearless.” 139

Relatedly, Suzanne admits to Heart that she knew of Neil’s reputation for philandering: “I had read about his peccadilloes, especially when it came to the opposite sex. He just steam rolled me.

And the template was established.” 140 Goldfarb thus adds the characteristic of infamous womanizer, undoubtedly exacerbated by conflations of the writer with his characters, to Abrams’ litany of Rothian characteristics.

If these indications were not enough to show just how easily Abrams fits into Roth’s mold, the audience learns that Abrams has a Jewish American writer alter-ego, a Zuckerman of his own. His name is “Rotman,” an Ashkenazi Jewish name meaning “red,” of which one variation is none other than “Roth.”141 His first name, furthermore, is Abraham: a variation of

Abrams. 142 Abrams’ fictional alter ego, then, is one part himself and one part Philip Roth. Just as

138 Ibid., 20. 139 Ibid. 140 Ibid., 17. 141 Heinrich W. and Eva H. Guggenheimer, Jewish Family Names and Their Origins: An Etymological Dictionary (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1992), 640. 142 The fact that both the writer and his imaginary alter-ego have names that are variations on “Abraham” is notable given the overall thematic arc of the play: a modern retelling of the Akedah, or the Binding of Isaac. Goldfarb emphasizes this also at the end of the play, when we learn at the very end that Abrams’ child has been named Isaac. Indeed, by leaving that as the play’s literal last word, he leaves the audience to ruminate on the implications of Neil naming his child Isaac and to consider how the play parallels the story of Abraham and Isaac.

Sam Apple will do in “The Butcher of Desire,” which I discuss later in this chapter, Goldfarb not only creates a Jewish American writer character who has a Jewish American writer character alter-ego but creates links between his character, his character’s character, and Roth. In so doing, he further complicates the web of real and imaginary Jewish American writer characters both within and outside the fiction. And again like Apple, he connects himself to Roth on yet another level simply through the creation of this web.

It is not only through the creation of a Zuckerman for Abrams that Goldfarb reinforces the parallels with Roth; it is through the fact that even those closest to Abrams—in fact, all the other characters in the play—seem to conflate him with Rotman. Heart says to Abrams, “I want the Abe Rotman Neil Abrams, not the weepy mama’s boy. Let’s just be in the moment. Like

Norman Mailer.”143 (The reference to Norman Mailer, of course, is yet another example of the self-referential nature of this play and the contemporary context of which it is part; fiction about

Jewish American writers must necessarily include copious reference to other Jewish writers.)

When Neil approaches Dr. Goodman with a question, Goodman says, “Is this for a book?”144 and when Neil tells him that he is the father of Heart’s unborn twins, Goodman says disbelievingly, “This isn’t one of your novels.”145 Suzanne asks Neil if he ever slept with Heart, assuming (probably correctly) that the affair will end up in one of Neil’s novels and will be a fictionalization of a real event: “I’d rather you tell me now than read about it in your book.”146

Heart, after learning she is pregnant, comments to Abrams, “So—Rotman has a baby.”147

Similarly, Suzanne tells him, “I think fatherhood is going to open a whole new window into your

143 Goldfarb, “Legacy,” 43. 144 Ibid., 57. 145 Ibid., 59. 146 Ibid., 95. 147 Ibid., 68.

creative life. Abe Rotman’s most exciting adventure yet – maturing out of adolescence, finally, at 60 something. It’s gonna be your masterpiece.” And in perhaps the most important instance,

Neil himself reinforces the conflation of himself and his life with his characters and his novels as he replies, “The baby or what I write about it?”148 Neil, like Roth, like Zuckerman, is complicit in the blurring of lines between himself and his characters; this, too, is part of being the Rothian

Jewish American writer.

Neil and Suzanne’s fertility doctor, displaying his “alarmingly facetious bedside manner,”149 reminisces about reading “Foreskin”:

I grew up reading your novels, Mr. Abrams, and, let me just say, you’re sick! Man, I got myself into all kinds of trouble. My mom gave me King of the Jews to read when I was ten. Cut to: my sister, catching me with her bra tied around my shmeckl. Still have a hard time living that one down! I don’t think I really followed the plot or got the comedy or even read it straight through. While we’re at it, maybe you can explain it to me. No, really, because of that book, I never had a wet dream. [...] One of my great regrets. Started masturbating too soon and too often. Damn you, Neil Abrams! Sometimes I wish I was a Hassid, you know? Those guys must have the craziest wet dreams. Or a priest. Suicide bomber? Man, good times.150

This monologue is cringe worthy in its bluntness and shock value; it is reminiscent of Lionel

Trilling’s 1961 assertion that “No literature has ever been so shockingly personal as that of our time—it asks every question that is forbidden in polite society.”151 And perhaps no work of literature better exemplified that phenomenon than 1959’s Portnoy’s Complaint, for which “King of the Jews” is an unmistakable analogue. The brilliantly titled “Foreskin,” Abrams’ masterpiece, evokes both Jewishness and phallic obsession in a single word, also invoking Portnoy’s

Complaint. The fact that Dr. Goodman calls Abrams himself (not just his fiction) “sick” seems to

148 Ibid., 64. 149 Brantley, “Review: ‘Legacy,’ The New York Times, July 26, 2015. 150 Goldfarb, “Legacy,” 29. 151 Lionel Trilling, “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 385.

imply also that Abrams is subject to the same kind of misunderstanding that Roth dealt with following that novel’s publication, in which readers accused him of being Portnoy.

But as in Roth’s novels, the question of whether or not the characteristics and experiences

Abrams assigns to his characters are, in fact, his own—and whether or not he wants his readers to believe that they are—is left unanswered. Abrams is in some respects a Portnoy-like character.

For instance, he comments to Heart that his penis “has been moisturized religiously since I was nine.”152 In addition, he laments to his wife, “I think I pinched a nerve. Can’t jerk off sitting up anymore. Something else age has taken from me.”153 In the same scene, his wife gives him her mother’s handkerchief to wipe semen off of his pants; this image, in its uncomfortable juxtaposition of mothers and semen, seems unmistakably Rothian, unmistakably Portnoy- esque.154 Abrams’ horror upon discovering his ejaculate where it should not be is reminiscent of a scene in Portnoy’s Complaint in which Alex describes how

[...] the trajectory of my ejaculation reaches startling new heights: leaving my joint like a rocket it makes right for the light bulb overhead, where to my wonderment and horror, it hits and hands. Wildly in the first moment I cover my head, expecting an explosion of glass, a burst of flames—disaster, you see, is never far from my mind. Then quietly as I can I climb the radiator and remove the sizzling gob with a wad of toilet paper. I begin a scrupulous search of the shower curtain, the tub, the tile floor, the four tooth-brushes- God forbid!- and just as I am about to unlock the door, imagining I have covered my tracks, my heart lurches at the sight of what is hanging like snot to the toe of my shoe. I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off—the sticky evidence is everywhere! Is it on my cuffs too? in my hair? my ear?155

Goldfarb thus constructs Abrams as a Roth type by ascribing to him several of the Rothian

Jewish American writer’s characteristics, by inventing for him a body of work very similar to

152 Goldfarb, “Legacy,” 39. 153 Ibid., 26. 154 Ibid., 25. 155 Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Vintage, 1994), 20.

Roth’s, which includes a Zuckerman-like alter ego, and by having him and the other characters blur those lines between Abrams and his alter ego.

But the most original way that Goldfarb engages with the largely preformed Jewish

American writer character is through the play’s main theme: fatherhood and, eponymously, legacy. What is interesting is that Neil’s suggestion that he and Suzanne have a child immediately follows, as if naturally, Neil’s discouragement about the reception of “Legacy” and his musings about his lack of inspiration for future writing. From early on in the play, then, reproduction and writing are linked. It is as if, for Neil, becoming a father is a substitute for leaving a literary legacy: in this model, writing and fatherhood are twin acts of creation and means to achieving some kind of immortality. By the same token, having a child becomes equivalent to writing a novel; one’s writing is as much a product of oneself as would be a child.

This connection, of course, is emphasized by the fact that the unsuccessful last novel’s title is

“Legacy.”

This creates an interesting link from the character of Neil to Philip Roth. Roth famously never had any children, a fact that was thrown into sharper relief by the many times his work dwelled on fatherhood, from Zuckerman’s quest to make Lonoff his literary father to

Zuckerman’s decision to become a father in one section of The Counterlife to Roth’s memoir about his own father, Patrimony (which, significantly, is believed to have been inspired by his literary father Kafka’s “Letter to His Father.”)156 Goldfarb’s engagement with the theme of fatherhood, then, takes on a particular significance situated as it is in a literary work whose protagonist is so Roth-like. By combining the theme of fatherhood with a protagonist who displays many traits that are, due to Roth, associated with the Jewish American writer, Goldfarb

156 Michael Kimmage, “Fathers and Writers: Kafka's “Letter to His Father” and Philip Roth's Non-fiction,” Philip Roth Studies 9(1) (2013): 27.

makes evident just how successful Roth has been in becoming both the ultimate creator of and prototype for the Jewish American writer.

While the linkage between paternal and literary legacies as a theme in the Western literary tradition certainly predates Goldfarb, or Roth, by centuries, I would like to suggest that in

Legacy, it takes on a unique shape that is possible only because of Roth’s influence. The duality of reproduction and writing as possibilities for establishing a legacy might be understood as an extension of the Rothian connection between sexual virility and writing, the Jewish male writer’s dual phallic tools for transgression. Just as sex and writing were nearly interchangeable for

Zuckerman, for instance, the same becomes true for Abrams: when “Legacy” is a flop, and only then, he decides on fathering a child as a means of securing his legacy.

But what are the implications of the Jewish American writer desperately wanting a child?

In addition to its function as a way to assuage his anxiety about both sexual and literary impotence—if he cannot leave behind a meaningful legacy as a writer, he can at least leave behind a continuation of his genetic line, and then no one can question at least that part of his virility—having a child is perhaps an indication of the Jewish writer’s exhaustion. Perhaps sexual and literary output are no longer sufficient to placate his insatiable appetite for transgression and creation. Perhaps he feels he has no power left to transgress through his writing. The next-best option is then to bestow that power upon a new generation, one who will nonetheless bear his name and carry his influence, so that he need not relinquish that power entirely.

If this is indeed the implication of Abrams’s need to shift from literary production to genetic reproduction, if there is no creative process left for Abrams other than having a child, it perhaps implies a shift back to literal geneology—the biblical geneology in which Abraham

begat Isaac, as happens here—rather literary geneology. If we adopt, for a moment, Howe’s apocalyptic model of Jewish American literature, in which a hyphenated-American fiction exhausts itself as soon as the hyphenated culture assimilates—“a subculture finds its voice and its passion at exactly the moment that it faces disintegration” 157—this return to basic fatherhood, rather than literary fatherhood, perhaps suggests an attempt on Abrams’ part to revitalize Jewish

American life by reproducing so that Jewish American literature, too, can continue its legacy.

Indeed, Abrams must return to the Abraham and Isaac story, to a pre-modern period in Jewish literature—indeed, a completely pre-literary time in Jewish culture, before the Torah, before the

Law—in order to promote this continuity. To ensure the continued survival of Jewish literature, the continuity of Jewish life must first be ensured. Perhaps Goldfarb would agree with Cynthia

Ozick’s advocacy for a return to Yavneh; if he is indeed suggesting that Jewish American literary creativity can only be revitalized through a turn to religious sources, he may share her ideas of what constitutes “authentic” Jewishness.

Listen Up Philip

Alex Ross Perry’s 2014 film Listen Up Philip, like Legacy, represents a character who is a clear Philip Roth/Nathan Zuckerman prototype without explicitly being defined as such. Philip

Lewis Friedman is a young and extremely narcissistic Jewish American writer who is just starting his career but is certain of his genius and assured success: he is, according to a New York

Times reviewer, a “comically obnoxious youngblood New York novelist.” 158 New York, as it so often is in this context, functions as a synonym for “Jewish.” To begin with the obvious, the main character’s name (and the filmmakers’ choice to give him that name) is telling. Even if he

157 Howe, Introduction to Jewish-American Stories, 3. 158 Nicolas Rapold, “Eternal Regard for a Self-Obsessed Id: ‘Listen Up Philip’ Attests to Roth’s Allure for Filmmakers,” The New York Times, Oct. 9, 2014.

had a different name, it would be difficult to miss the likeness between him and Philip Roth; as it is, it is impossible.

Friedman is a Rothian writer character to begin with: his mix of narcissism and self- deprecation, the verbosity of his speech, his identity as a literary son in search of a father, and his womanizing establish him squarely within the tradition. In addition to this, however, the film is nearly an adaptation of The Ghost Writer: its main premise is that Friedman decides to leave

New York and spend the summer living and writing at the rural home of an older, established

Jewish writer whom he admires greatly, because as the older writer, Zimmerman (the Lonoff to

Friedman’s Zuckerman), tells him, “You’ll need a country retreat if you want to get anything done.”159

From the first scene, it is clear that Philip is self-obsessed. As the star of what one critic describes as “this year’s most unpleasant movie I’ve nonetheless thoroughly enjoyed,” he is an

“antihero, a self-absorbed shmuck of a novelist” and a “toxic narcissist” who “is nearly unbearable to spend time with, for the other characters onscreen as much as for the audience.”160

Meeting an old girlfriend at a bar, he is nasty to her, insulting her and boasting about his talents and success. As a result, the viewer dislikes him almost immediately. The way that he speaks is somewhat jarring, seeming almost unfit for the film medium due to its sheer verbosity and excess. It is almost too literary in nature. In this manner, Philip’s voice is much like the very familiar style that has, in part due to Roth, become a defining feature of Jewish American prose through the voice of the Jewish American writer. It mimics Roth’s “sustained exercise in self- analysis,” a brand of self-analysis that according to Mark Shechner operates “on a scale otherwise unknown in American literature since Hawthorne, and Roth would appear to have the

159 Listen Up Philip, directed by Alex Ross Perry (2014). 160 Dana Stevens, “Philip, Stark,” Slate, Oct. 17, 2014.

advantage over Hawthorne in both his imagination and his knowledge of neurosis, having read both Freud and Kafka.”161

Of course, Philip would not be the quintessential Roth Jewish American writer character if he were not a womanizer. Within the film’s short 108 minute runtime, Philip manages to be romantically associated with four women: his former girlfriend, Mona; his current girlfriend,

Ashley; an intern at the firm that publishes his books, who he sleeps with while still with Ashley; and Zimmerman’s daughter, who he pursues unsuccessfully. It may seem amazing that he manages to attract so many women given that he is so extraordinarily self-involved, but this, as we have seen, is standard for the Roth character.

In addition, certain visual aspects of the film are cleverly used to the effect of furthering this characterization. For instance, the film title is rendered in a typeface that is very familiar from Portnoy’s Complaint and other early Roth novels.162 Similarly, the credits sequence of the film features several images of covers of both Friedman and Zimmerman’s books, many of which look aesthetically like early editions of Roth novels.163 According to Perry, while he did not base any of the titles on real books, “They just all needed to sound real. I hate it in movies when the titles of books the characters are meant to have written just don’t feel right. Every one of these titles, I had to imagine it on my shelf next to Philip Roth’s novels, or Saul Bellow’s, or

Richard Yates’.”164

Perry and the designer of the covers, Teddy Blanks, confirmed that it was “the prevalent design tropes of the 70s and 80s, when most of Zimmerman’s books were supposed to have been released,” that served as his influence. Indeed, “I, Zimmerman apes the cover of Roth’s

161 Shechner, “Philip Roth,” 121-122. 162 See Figure 1. 163 See Figure 2. 164 David Haglund, “The Brilliant Fake Novels of Listen Up Philip,” Slate, Oct. 21, 2014.

autobiography, The Facts.”165 166 This, along with the fact that Listen Up Philip is set in the present, makes Zimmerman’s closest analogue not Bellow or Malamud but Roth. This does interesting work on the construction of Philip as a Roth prototype and on the structure of the literary father/son relationship: if Zimmerman, the Lonoff/literary father character, is a representation of Roth, then who is Philip a representation of? The answer that the movie seems to insist upon, as I have described, is Roth. Roth the literary father has as his son none other than

Roth. It is as if Roth cannot fail to create more Roth prototypes to fill the Jewish American writer’s role. Roth has fully stepped into the role of literary father here, but his literary son still

“frequently turns out to be” him.

The film’s “hyper-reflective voice-over” (which, as it happens, is done by none other Eric

Bogosian, the same actor who a year later played Neil Abrams in the stage production of Legacy) serves as “a parallel to the marathon monologues of a Roth book,” exemplifying how Roth made that frenzied narrative prose style essential to the Jewish American writer.167 But, as a film reviewer points out, it also serves to promote the uncertainty of whether Zimmerman or

Friedman is more the Roth character:

Philip’s story is accompanied by a voice-over—and not your run-of-the-mill, first-person, premise-establishing voice-over. The voice is Eric Bogosian’s, speaking in the third person and the past tense, with a degree of insight into Philip’s (and, sometimes, other characters’) internal states that hints at narrative omniscience. Is this, perhaps, the narrator of a future Philip Friedman book, in which an older, wiser author looks back on the story of his awful younger self? Or could it be an unpublished manuscript by Ike Zimmerman (a very fine Jonathan Pryce), the equally insufferable older novelist who becomes Philip’s mentor and surrogate father? (Zimmerman, a prolific hermit on semihostile terms with his family, seems modeled at least in part after Philip Roth.)168

165 Ibid. 166 See Figures 3 and 4. 167 Stevens, “Philip, Stark,” Slate, Oct. 17, 2014. 168 Stevens, “Philip, Stark,” Slate, Oct. 17, 2014.

Yet again, several boundaries have become blurred: between Roth and his literary fathers and sons, between Roth and his characters, between the imaginary Roth prototype and his character, between Roth and the imaginary Roth prototype. And once again, it is none other than Roth who made this pattern so familiar.

But Philip’s unpleasantness raises the stakes of this portrayal. For all the Roth character’s specific traits, he remains a sympathetic character; Zuckerman is never really unlikable. Philip, on the other hand, is undeniably unpleasant. In addition to reinforcing the familiar schlemiel or

“little man” trope of protagonist as antagonist that persists throughout Yiddish and Jewish

American literature, this negative characterization of Philip has an interesting effect: it implies that the Roth character is, perhaps, anachronistic. What may have been subtle and therefore acceptable misogyny in the 1970s has, in 2014, become unambiguous and unacceptable. The insistent self-reflexivity that in the Zuckerman novels referred to the particular identity politics of being the son of Jewish immigrants has, in 2014, become simply obnoxious and unnecessary.

Perhaps contemporary culture mandates that we listen up and apply a contemporary critical lens to this character, rather than romanticizing him. Listen Up Philip thus suggests that there is a fundamental incompatibility between the Roth character and contemporary culture. The third chapter of this thesis will, in part, investigate the truth of that claim.

Sam Apple Imagines Philip Roth Imagining Philip Roth:

“The Butcher of Desire”

Of the contemporary works under consideration here, “The Butcher of Desire; Or

Imagining Philip Roth” does the most interesting and complex work on the Philip Roth character and his role as a literary father for current Jewish American writers. “The Butcher of Desire” is a

counterfactual short story that renders Philip Roth not as a writer but rather a kosher butcher with a knack for storytelling. Sam Apple, the real writer of the story but also apparently its narrator— as in Operation Shylock, the story is written from the real author’s perspective but is still obviously fictional—meets Roth, is floored by his storytelling talent (which the reader is privy to through a frame narrative or story-within-a-story, a literary technique much used, significantly, by both Roth and Kafka)169, and encourages him to attend the writing workshop he teaches at

Penn. Apple helps Roth to literary fame, and by the story’s end, Phil the butcher has become a successful writer whose career is much like the actual Philip Roth’s. The story thus bridges the gap between fiction and fact: it begins in a distinctly imagined world in which Philip Roth did not become a writer, but ends in a world not so different from the real, the fictional Roth having caught up to the real Roth and fulfilled the destiny of the latter. In this way, Apple takes on the very Rothian project of working in the space between fiction and reality, thus reinvigorating the process by which Roth becomes the Jewish American writer character.

Apple’s piece, which is divided into numbered sections, begins with a lament based in reality: Philip Roth has announced that he is retiring from writing.170 The narrator is assuaged only by the existence of Claudia Roth Pierpont’s biography of Roth, Philip Roth Unbound. As early as the second paragraph of the piece, then, we have evidence of just how successful Roth’s project of creating the Jewish American writer as himself has been. In the first place, the biography’s title is an allusion to Zuckerman Bound; Pierpont’s substitution of “Roth” for

169 Kafka uses the frame narrative with his insertion of “Before the Law” into The Trial, for instance. Roth uses a frame narrative of sorts in Portnoy’s Complaint, which at the end is revealed to be possibly no more than a long joke, the protagonist’s preface to his real complaint, the real reason for his visit to Dr. Spielvogel. 170 Roth’s “retirement announcement” can be found in http://www.lesinrocks.com/2012/10/07/livres/philip-roth-nemesis-sera-mon-dernier-livre- 11310126/

“Zuckerman” reaffirms Roth’s constant blurring of the lines between himself and his characters.

But the fact that the narrator would find reading a biography of Roth almost as satisfying as reading one of his novels is even more telling in this respect. The extent to which the narrator of this piece imagines Roth as a fictional Jewish American writer—indeed, as the Jewish American writers Roth has created in his fiction—is clear even before he admits that

In some cases I couldn’t remember whether the protagonist had been Zuckerman or Kepesh. Having read Roth’s two memoirs, The Facts and Patrimony, I couldn’t even remember if some of the scenes I recalled were from the novels or from Roth’s own life. The overarching effect was one the author of The Counter Life [sic] and Operation Shylock might have appreciated: There were a dozen different Philip Roths swimming in my head, and I no longer knew which, if any, were real.171

As I discussed in the previous chapter, the confusion that the narrator experiences is precisely the means by which Roth gained control of the Jewish American writer type and wrote himself into that character. This anecdotal description of the narrator’s confusion establishes early on the permeability of the boundary between Roth and his characters as not just a feature of Roth’s work but a real effect for his readers.

Apple’s story, however, is not (like Legacy and Listen Up Philip, perhaps) a mere representation of Roth complete with the characteristics Roth himself established as quintessential traits of the Jewish American writer. It does not just acknowledge the success of

Roth’s project or even just challenge aspects of its relevance in contemporary culture. Rather, it establishes itself as a product of Roth’s legacy—and Apple as a literary son of Roth—through a complex set of not just thematic but formal and structural features, both explicit and implicit, that affirm Apple’s indebtedness to Roth.

171 Sam Apple, “The Butcher of Desire; Or Imagining Philip Roth,” Tablet, June 9, 2015, http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/190901/the-butcher-of-desire-philip-roth.

Apple’s basic characterization of Roth the butcher adheres to the stereotypes of the

Jewish American writer that Roth himself constructed. Roth’s narrative style in telling the story of another butcher’s tragicomic romantic pursuit is one important way that Apple reinforces

Roth’s prototypical characterization of the Jewish American writer: the fictional Roth is frenzied and verbose in his style. Take, for instance, his description of Smolensky the butcher’s infatuation:

The back of a neck. What is the back of a neck to Smolensky? Never in his life has he noticed the back of a neck. But the back of Marcy Rosenblatt’s neck he can’t shut up about. Every time we drive to the wholesale market together I have to hear about the back of that neck: the little layer of goose feather—this is his term, “goose feather”—that remains behind even after the rest of the hairs have been pulled into the ponytail; the crescent of white skin he is amazed to discover between the hairline and the back of her ears. It’s 5:30 in the morning. I haven’t had a cup of coffee yet, and I have to hear about the skin behind Marcy Rosenblatt’s ears.172

The voice that Apple ascribes to Roth is extraordinarily vivid. It has a distinct strain of Yiddish syntax, which in part seems to account for the frenzied quality. It exemplifies descriptions by both Kazin and Howe of the new mode of expression that Jewish American writers, the children of immigrants, crafted from their “double experience of language”:173 a language forged from the intersections of Yiddish and English, “gutter vividness” and “university refinement,” “street energy” and “high-culture rhetoric.”174 It possesses “an intensity, a closeness to many conflicting emotions, that often seemed unaccountably excessive to other peoples.” 175 It is “in short, the linguistic tokens of writers who must hurry into articulateness if they are to be heard at all, indeed, who must scrape together a language.”176 In this way, Apple draws upon a well- established tradition that became, with Roth’s help, a characteristic of the Jewish American

172 Ibid. 173 Howe, introduction to Jewish-American Stories, 3. 174 Ibid., 15. 175 Kazin, “The Jew As American Writer,” 8. 176 Howe, introduction to Jewish-American Stories,15.

writer character; it is fitting that he makes use of such a style in a literal characterization of Philip

Roth.

Apple links himself to Roth on one level by using the structure and premise of Roth’s “I

Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting; or Looking at Kafka.” By imagining a humbler profession for the older Jewish writer father, Apple engages in exactly the same project that Roth pursued in that piece and thus links himself to Roth through this similarity. It becomes clear even before reading Apple’s story that he seems to be intentionally alluding to Roth’s piece: syntactically, their titles are nearly identical. Their grammatical parallelism is made evident primarily by the fact that both have a semicolon, which calls the reader’s attention to the fact that the grammar of each title is unusual for a piece of fiction (as opposed to, for instance, an academic essay). Perhaps the difference between the verbs after the semicolons is telling: while

Roth “look[s] at Kafka,” Apple “imagin[es] Philip Roth.” Roth attempts to represent Kafka frankly and candidly, so much so that he depicts a world in which Kafka leaves no literary legacy whatsoever. Roth’s Kafka is a lowly Newark Hebrew school teacher who dies alone. By contrast,

Apple’s Roth ends up discovering his talent late in life, with the help of a younger Jewish

American writer.

It is interesting to consider the implications of this difference: while Roth takes away

Kafka’s writerliness, Apple enables Roth’s, portraying him in a manner that is almost reverent.

Within the framework of the Rothian link between virility and writing, “Looking at Kafka” becomes a sort of castration of the father, a twisted Oedipal sequence in which Roth bolsters himself by disarming his literary father. In Apple’s story, however, Roth still ends up a writer of great renown. This is indicative of the sheer enormity of Roth’s legacy: it is impossible for Apple to conceive of a literary landscape, particularly a Jewish American literary landscape, without

Roth. It is appropriate, then, that he imagines rather than looks at Roth: Roth has gone from historical figure, or real person able to be looked at objectively, to mythic persona who can only be imagined. Indeed, Roth has done this intentionally by literally making himself a character. To say that he occupies a crucial role in the contemporary Jewish American literary imagination is no figure of speech.

The narrator lets the reader into the thought process that resulted in this story. He discovers in Pierpont’s book a quote from Roth about his own writing process: “I generally spend a lot of time in the ‘what if’ stage.”177 This idea of “what if” reminds him of Roth’s

“Looking at Kafka,” confirming the intentionality behind the apparent allusion in the title. He then moves into a description of that piece, about which he makes several astute observations that actually serve as characterizations of “Imagining Philip Roth’ as well: this “literary hybrid of sorts,” part essay and part story, moves from essay to story and then ends with “a subtle turn back to the voice of the essayist.”178 The same might be said of his own story. Even on the subtle level of diction, Apple links himself and his piece to Roth and “Looking at Kafka”: in the story part of “Looking at Kafka,” he explains, “Roth imagines a world in which Kafka, having survived both his tuberculosis and the Nazis, ends up a Hebrew-school teacher in New Jersey”

(emphasis mine).179 With the use of “imagine,” his titular verb, as the operative verb that drives

Roth’s piece, he again suggests a parallel between Roth’s piece and his own piece and between

Roth and himself.

The second numbered section of the piece expounds upon the first, with the narrator continuing to flesh out the thought process of “what if”s that led him to the story’s premise: what

177 Quoted in Sam Apple, “The Butcher of Desire,” Tablet, June 9, 2015. 178 Sam Apple, “The Butcher of Desire,” Tablet, June 9, 2015. 179 Ibid.

if Roth, in an attempt to help support his family, had dropped out of Rutgers rather than transferring to Bucknell and had become a kosher butcher? He furthers the parallelism established in the first section simply by this lengthy explanation of the thought process that inspired this story. Apple’s discussion early in the first section of Roth’s writing process and construction of the “what if” pattern as Roth’s inspiration for “Looking at Kafka” is situated within his description of his own thought process and inspiration for his story. Thus, just as Roth has blurred the lines between himself and his characters, painting himself and them in the single unifying shades of “Jewish American writer” and ultimately “Philip Roth,” Apple begins to blur the lines between himself and his characters and thus by extension between himself and Roth.

Apple achieves this multilayered blurring through several channels. First, the uncertain characterization of the narrator throws the distance between the real Apple and the fictionalized

Apple into doubt, which in turn collapses the distance between Apple and Roth. Although the first-person nature of the narration means that the narrator is never explicitly named, it is implied that he is Sam Apple. I refer to him as such for the sake of simplicity, but with the caveat that the

Sam Apple who is the story’s narrator is not the real Sam Apple but a fictionalized version. This is an obviously Rothian technique, as we have seen in Operation Shylock. As in Roth, elements of the author’s biography are written into the story: the narrator is a creative writing professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a fiction writer of limited success, like Apple. But, as in

Roth, to mistake likeness for mimesis is to play directly into the author’s hands. In this way,

Apple not only blurs the lines between himself and this fictionalized version of him, but in so doing blurs the lines between himself and Roth, because Roth did the exact same thing in his fiction.

The story-within-a-story that Roth tells about Smolensky not only serves to further the plot of “The Butcher of Desire” and characterize Apple’s Roth within Roth’s Jewish American writer mold, but also, in its formal execution, reinforces Apple’s larger project of stepping into

Roth’s shoes: not simply by representing him as a character but through his voice as the implied author. There are minimal quotation marks used to separate Roth’s story from the narrator’s own comments. This creates ambiguity in who is speaking, thus blurring the lines between the Roth and Apple of the story. It also blurs the lines between the real Roth and the real Apple insofar as

Apple once again makes use of a fictional technique of which Roth himself is a master. Although

Chapter 1 deals extensively with the many ways Roth’s oeuvre blurs the lines between writer and character in general, the most specific example of this particular phenomenon may be The

Counterlife. In that novel, the reader, in the absence of any indication from the implied author, is left to her own devices to determine that each section concerns a new narrator and a new alternate reality (a “counterlife”). Apple thus utilizes several formal techniques—the punctuation and syntax of the story’s title; the use of the frame narrative itself; the ambiguous transition from narrative to dialogue—that reinforce his connection to Roth by doing what Roth himself does best. Apple blurs the lines between himself and Roth, between himself and his narrator, and between the real Roth and his fictional Roth, by subtly mimicking Roth’s technique—which is, itself, to blur the lines between himself (the real Roth) and his characters, some of whom are doppelgangers, imitations, or versions of none other than Philip Roth.

Apple not only establishes parallels with Roth by juxtaposing “The Butcher of Desire” with “Looking at Kafka;” the fictional Apple explicitly connects his fictional Roth to Kafka.

After discovering Roth’s immense talent for storytelling, Apple begins to fancy himself as the

Max Brod to Roth’s Kafka:

If I wasn’t going to be the Kafka, I could be the next best thing, the Max Brod, the discoverer, the man who saw a genius where others saw a sad assessor of insurance claims. [...] Kafka. It was almost too perfect. Kafka’s grandfather had been a kosher butcher; and, though Phil’s story couldn’t have been more stylistically different from a Kafka nightmare, wasn’t there something Kafkaesque in Smolensky’s desperate hopefulness?180

By suggesting this similarity between Roth and Kafka, Apple reinforces Roth’s characterization of the Jewish American writer as a self-declared Jewish literary son. As I have discussed, Roth not only made this one of Zuckerman’s characteristics but seemed genuinely to care about it himself; he “has made repeated efforts to express his filial relationship to Kafka in print.”181 Just as “characteristically, Roth invokes a great literary precedent to justify his own fictional practice,”182 Apple implicitly invokes Roth as his own literary precedent for invoking a literary father, who this time happens to be Roth. He is therefore doubly indebted to Roth. And because

Apple has made specific stylistic and structural choices to blur the lines between himself and the real Roth—and, as I will show, between his fictional alter-ego and the fictional Roth—this has the effect of constructing a sort of lineage of Jewish writers that he and Roth are both part of.

Recall Zuckerman’s conception of a family tree of Jewish writers that includes himself, Lonoff,

Abravanel, and Isaac Babel;183 by linking himself to Roth (through both his fictional structure and his affirmation of Roth’s vision of the Jewish American writer character) and Roth to Kafka,

Apple engages in much the same project. This is yet another way in which Roth’s specific construction of the Jewish American writer character (in this case, as literary son) has taken hold; evidently, it has had the potency and longevity that it defines such characterizations even in

2015.

180 Ibid. 181 Daniel Medin, “Liebliche Luge?: Philip Roth’s “Looking at Kafka”,” Comparative Literature Studies 44, no. 1 (2007): 39. 182 Brauner, Post-War Jewish Fiction, 158. 183 Roth, The Ghost Writer, 49.

Overt sexuality is another vehicle for Apple’s very Rothian characterization of Roth.

Near the end of the story, Apple begins to suspect that Roth is having a sexual relationship with one of the other writing workshop students, Melissa. Prepared to find out that no such liaison exists and is instead a figment of his own paranoid imagination, Apple confronts Phil, who unabashedly tells him, simply, “She blew me.”184 This rather absurd liaison, between a seventy- something man and a twenty-one-year-old student, is precisely the sort of illicit sexual relationship that Roth often invents for Zuckerman and other of his characters; it fits well into his model of the Jewish American writer as philanderer. Yet the dialogue between Roth and Apple that follows does particularly interesting work on this characterization, transforming Apple’s portrayal of Roth from a simple stereotype of the Jewish American writer as sexually deviant to a multilayered conception of him as someone who links sex with writing.

“Would you please stop looking so amazed,” I say. “This isn’t Newark in the 1940s.” “Nobody told me.” “Nobody told you that you could get a blow job in 1984?” “Nobody told me there’s such a thing as sex without struggle. Nobody told me that nowadays when you tell a story the response is not a polite applause or a congratulatory pat on the back but a tug on your zipper.”185

Crucially, Apple’s Roth has this revelation no sooner and no later than he becomes a writer. He is well on his way, we learn, to publishing his first story collection, and precisely at that moment, he is inducted into the world of casual sexual encounters and random fellatio. He is endearingly naïve—until, of course, he becomes a writer. Indeed, he explicitly connects the two: “Nobody told me that nowadays when you tell a story the response is [...] a tug on your zipper.”186 In this way, Apple reinforces the connection between sexual virility and success as a writer as a Roth trait.

184 Sam Apple, “The Butcher of Desire,” Tablet, June 9, 2015. 185 Ibid. 186 Ibid.

Apple’s finishing touch in making his imagined Philip Roth into precisely the sort of character that the real Philip Roth invented lies in his discussion of the books he creates for Roth:

“the first story collection—The Butcher of Desire” and “the first novel—about a butcher who is befriended by a professor.”187 Even in Apple’s counterfactual universe, Roth’s fictions are, evidently, attempts to “explain himself to himself;” they feature protagonists who look a lot like

Philip Roth but may or may not actually be him. (The fact that Apple does not name Roth’s protagonists furthers and emphasizes this ambiguity; the reader can easily imagine his protagonists as Roths, or, for that matter, Zuckermans.)

In the real “The Butcher of Desire” as in the imagined one, then, the archetypal Jewish

American writer “turns out to be [Roth].” If, as Wirth-Nesher argues, Roth made himself into a

Jewish writer by virtue of his “preoccupation with the self-reflexive theme of his work’s reception and with his own identity as a Jewish writer”—and, as I have argued, in turn made this self-reflexivity into a trait of the Jewish writer—Apple has made his imagined Roth into a

Rothian Jewish writer in part by the very same means.188 By having Roth the butcher create Roth prototypes as his protagonists and stories that draw heavily on real experience, Apple proves yet again how well Roth himself has convinced us of “the impossibility of Philip Roth’s not being a

Jewish writer, given his need to document imaginatively every comic and tragic nuance of his own displacement.”189

In The Butcher of Desire, we learn, Apple “has been reimagined as a compulsive masturbator who is as interested in the butcher for his ready supply of raw livers as for his

187 Ibid. 188 Wirth-Nesher, “From Newark to Prague,” 228. 189 Ibid.

literary gifts.”190 This addition, included almost as an afterthought, brilliantly furthers the blurring of lines between Roth and his characters, thus promoting Roth’s own model of the

Jewish American writer. On the simplest level, the allusion to Portnoy’s Complaint (both the characterization of “compulsive masturbator” and the infamous liver that Portnoy uses to pleasure himself serve as a nod to that novel) blurs the lines between the real Roth’s work and

Apple’s Roth’s work even further, ascribing the former to the latter in a blurring of fiction and fact that is itself very Rothian. The effect of this is heightened by the fact that, just as the fictional Roth’s protagonists are left unnamed, Portnoy’s Complaint is not mentioned by name; the seamlessness between the real Portnoy’s Complaint and the fictional The Butcher of Desire is emphasized by the seamlessness with which Apple slips content from Portnoy’s Complaint into the real “The Butcher of Desire.”

Even more interestingly, the fact that it is Apple—not Roth—who becomes the

“compulsive masturbator” blurs these lines even further. Because Roth is so often conflated with

Portnoy, Apple’s Roth’s “reimagin[ing]” of Apple as the Portnoy character in turn conflates

Apple with Roth. And because the entire story is a conflation of the real Roth with an imaginary

Roth, we are left with a structure in which every single Jewish American writer in the story is some version of Philip Roth, which is precisely in line with Roth’s own project. This once again emphasizes the extent to which Apple is indebted to Roth not only for his content but for the entire fictional mold in which he is working.

The use of the verb “reimagined,” too, operates this way; by ascribing to his fictional

Roth the same verb that Apple, through his story’s title, uses to characterize his own fictional project, Apple draws yet another parallel, this time between himself and the fictional Roth.

190 Sam Apple, “The Butcher of Desire,” Tablet, June 9, 2015.

Recall that he used the same verb to characterize the real Roth’s “Looking at Kafka;” he has, with this one verb, created a tangled web connecting himself, the imaginary Apple, the real Roth, the imaginary Roth, and Kafka. This web contains so many threads that it has become impossible to disentangle. This, in turn, is much like the confusing web of Roths and Zuckermans that Roth created, such that the reader, whether within the context of a novel’s fictional world or outside it, can no longer keep track of what is reality and what is fiction.

It is somewhat amusing, then, that one of Apple’s last words as a narrator is a halfhearted attempt to deny one such connecting thread: “In interviews, I laugh off the Brod comparisons, before accepting that, yes, in fact, there may be some parallels.”191 Ridiculous as any attempt at repudiation may seem, coming as it does at the end of a story that is so concerned—both in its existence as a text and within its own fictional world—with the patterns of literary influence that pertain, especially, to Jewish writers, this may actually be the perfect ending for such a story.

After all, as much as the Jewish writer admires and strives to imitate his literary fathers, so too must he break from those fathers’ legacies. This conflicted sense of inheritance is yet another of the marks Roth has left on the character of the Jewish writer.

Roth is for Apple what Kafka was for Roth, but Apple’s is a double tribute in that it owes not just content but form to its literary father. It is fitting, then, that Roth, who made the search for a literary father a quintessential trait of the Jewish American writer character, himself becomes a doubly important literary father for Apple. And it is fitting, in turn, that the manifestation of Apple’s relationship to Roth as a literary father contains a degree of ambivalence in his admission of indebtedness to the father such as we get at the end of the story.

191 Ibid.

Evidently, it is not just the representation by others of Roth as a character that makes clear the extent to which his project of becoming the character of the Jewish American writer was successful; it is also the phenomenon displayed here of such writers actually engaging in the same kinds of projects as Roth and thereby aligning themselves with him and even becoming him. Ultimately, Apple does not simply imagine Philip Roth; he imagines himself as Roth. Or, more accurately, he imagines himself as Roths plural, as the Jewish American writer who has created so many selves that it is impossible to know which one is the true self, who established a quintessential set of characteristics that defined the Jewish American writer, and for whom that process of self-creation and frequent re-creation became one of those very characteristics. As a result, not only can Philip Roth be Philip Roth, not only can Nathan Zuckerman be Philip Roth, but Sam Apple can be Philip Roth.

Conclusion

A question remains: what is the source of these writers’ common impulse to create Roth prototypes as their Jewish American writer characters? Why, when these writers could easily build new characters—perhaps with specific traits or conflicts that refer to the cultural landscape of the 2010s rather than the 1980s—do they instead choose to recreate Philip Roth? Evidently,

Roth has so effectively cast himself in the role of Jewish American writer that perhaps these contemporary writers feel that their Jewish American writer characters cannot help but be Roths.

But why? Why not resist the urge to engage in an act of creation that has arguably (to borrow a phrase from Irving Howe) already reached its high point in Roth’s own fictional recreations of himself?

Roth (and Zuckerman) so often seemed to locate authenticity in the figures of the older

Jewish literary fathers; by establishing himself as their son, he secured his place in their lineage and affirmed his role as an authentic Jewish American writer. Similarly, perhaps the Roth type is the only Jewish American writer character that feels authentic for writers such as Goldfarb,

Perry, and Apple: if they are to secure their place in that lineage, they must link themselves to

Roth by representing versions of him, just as Roth paid homage to older Jewish writers in order to solidify his ties with them and their authentic Jewish literary tradition. And these representations of Roth acknowledge his influence not simply by ensuring that his image lives on, but by seeing to it that Roth’s own self-fulfilling prophecy continues to be fulfilled, as the

Jewish American writer again and again looks just like Roth. Perhaps they view it as their filial duty to ensure that it continues to be true that “that Jewish writer isn’t any old Jewish writer [...] he frequently turns out to be you.”

From these examples of contemporary fiction about the Jewish American writer character, it is evident that Roth has left his mark on every level of that character, from the character’s traits, to the formal structure of the type of stories he ends up in, to the thematic content of those stories, to tiny details such as Blanks’ made-up versions of his iconic books.

Certainly an author has left a significant legacy if he has so many cultural signifiers that a typeface is recognizable as belonging to his works. Just as Hemingway’s short, declarative sentences or Faulkner’s vast, sprawling ones have become markers of their work such that their influence is immediately recognizable in the work of younger writers, Roth, too, has become part of—if not the defining figure in—the canon of Jewish American fiction, certainly of Jewish

American fiction about Jewish American writers. If it is true that “an author’s predominance can be gauged by the degree to which his influence exerts itself on the preeminent writers of later

generations,” Roth’s predominance is indisputable.192 His conception of the Jewish American writer character, which included the quality of being himself, has affixed itself so securely to that character that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between portrayals of Roth and portrayals of a general version of that character, as in Legacy and Listen Up Philip. It is Roth’s crowning achievement, perhaps, that the distinction does not seem to matter.

Chapter 3:

Challenging “The Father of Us All:” One Implication of the Roth Character

Literary Daughters?: The Jewish American Writer as Woman

In the previous chapter, I argued that Roth’s characterization of the Jewish American writer was so effective, so vivid, and so specific that ghosts of it—of him—still populate contemporary Jewish American fiction. From short stories to plays to films, Jewish American writer characters “frequently turn out to be [Roth].” Philip Roth in Operation Shylock and

Nathan Zuckerman in Zuckerman Unbound and The Counterlife turn out to be Roth. Sam Apple in “The Butcher of Desire” and Philip Roth in that same story turn out to be Roth. Neil Abrams and his Zuckerman-like alter ego, Abe Rotman, in Legacy, turn out to be Roth. Philip Lewis

Friedman and Ike Zimmerman in Listen Up Philip both turn out to be Roth.

Evidently, Roth’s character—the Roth character—is an easy mold for contemporary writers to fit their Jewish American writer characters into. Roth’s influence on this character is powerful, to be sure, but what are the effects of that legacy? Is it limiting or liberating for contemporary writers? The Roth character’s gender and sexuality, for instance, limit his universality, and if he is the most visible version of the Jewish American writer character, what

192 Medin, “Liebliche Luge?,” 38.

does that do to the representation of Jewish American writers who do not conform to that gender or sexual identity? Any male Jewish American writer can, it seems, be Philip Roth, and this is so by Roth’s own design. But can a woman be Philip Roth?

The Rothian character is undeniably and unambiguously male, and not simply because he happens to be a man. For the Jewish American writer, writing is ejaculatory. First, as I have previously discussed, the Jewish American writer conflates writing with sex, sexual virility, and reproduction; the penis and the pen become interchangeable phalluses with which he can transgress. Second, the Jewish American writer’s characteristic prose style is formally ejaculatory: it is garrulous, exclamatory, voluble, excessive. It is in this sense a sort of literary equivalent of the paintings of Jackson Pollock, arguably the foremost of the Abstract

Expressionists or (as they were called by Jewish American art critic and New York intellectual

Harold Rosenberg) “American Action Painters.” Pollock’s drip paintings and splatter techniques have become icons of that style and period, whose artists are overwhelmingly male. Critics have cited the ejaculatory quality of Pollock’s style as a reason for this: how can women artists partake in American Action Painting if its mode of expression relies upon turning the paintbrush into a phallus? Indeed, one woman artist, Shigeko Kubota, gained prominence in the art world for her 1965 performance piece Vagina Painting, an overt critique of the maleness of Abstract

Expressionism and of Pollock in particular. During the performance, she attached a paintbrush to the crotch of her underwear and moved, squatting, around a canvas laid on the floor. The awkwardness of the gesture—indeed, the lack of “gesture” in the sense popularized by Pollock et al—and the red paint she used, evocative of menstruation, allowed her to critique the exclusion of women from this movement.193 Kubota’s piece emphasized the way women, by virtue of their

193 See Figure 5.

female bodies, were unable to compete with the work of male artists whose anatomy allowed for a certain means of expression that was lauded as original and avant-garde. I would argue that the creation of the Jewish American writer character is similarly off-limits to women in that his defining characteristics disallow him from being female. Indeed, “when Martin Amis observes that ‘The twentieth century novel belongs to [...] Jewish Americans’ it is these male writers

[Malamud, Bellow, Mailer, Salinger, and Roth] he is referring to, rather than their female counterparts: Anzia Yezierska, Hortense Calisher, Tillie Olsen, Ozick, Paley et al.”194 Does the gendered specificity of the Roth character mean that the same is true of the twenty-first century

Jewish American novel?

A feminist critique of the paradigm I have laid out in which Roth’s hegemony dominates the Jewish American writer type might expound upon how the Jewish American writer has been an uninhabitable mold for women writers. It is certainly true that, as I have argued, “Jewish

American writer” immediately evokes “Philip Roth” as a result of Roth’s own machinations, meaning that no Jewish woman writer can achieve the same level of status within the genre. But, paradoxically, this shutting-out of women from the Jewish American writer character has engendered a new subset of fiction that confronts this problem directly, and has thus actually enabled the creation of original and interesting Jewish American women writer characters.

As detrimental as the impenetrable maleness of the Jewish American writer has been for women writers, it has also been generative. If Perry, Goldfarb, and even Apple felt in some way constrained by the Roth model, the woman writer’s unlikely advantage is that she must break out of that constraint. Those writers might be accused of unoriginality for representing a character invented decades before, rather than some new character more relevant to the contemporary

194 Brauner, Post-War Jewish Fiction, 114.

world. But writers who create women writers are immune to this charge; in so doing, they are by necessity creating a character radically different from Roth.

Roth does, in fact, represent one Jewish woman writer—and his representation of her is the exception that proves the rule. In The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman believes that Lonoff’s assistant, Amy Bellette, is actually Anne Frank in disguise. (Later, in Exit Ghost, it becomes clear that this is not the case.) Zuckerman makes it his mission to marry her, viewing her as his means to redemption within the Jewish community: how can anyone accuse him of having betrayed his people if he marries none other than Anne Frank?195 Thus Anne Frank, who is the writer of the Holocaust for many, especially young women, exists for Roth and for Zuckerman merely as an object of male desire and a means to a specific end. Is it any wonder that Jewish women writers feel left out of Roth’s representation of the Jewish writer?

Erica Jong’s novel Fear of Flying presents one kind of objection to the male hegemony— and to Roth’s hegemony—of fiction about Jewish American writers, but its capacity for subversion is limited by the fact that its premise is reliant upon the very paradigm it attempts to destabilize. Its Jewish American woman writer protagonist, Isadora Wing, deals with the gender problem largely by attempting to achieve the level of sexual freedom that is a necessary trait of the Jewish American writer—but that trait was in the first place determined by Jewish American male writers, especially Philip Roth, and thus she actually upholds the hegemony of the male version of the character. Isadora, a poet, is on a quest for a “zipless fuck,” the kind of no-strings- attached sexual encounter that men seem to have all the time but that she has been unable to achieve. At the time it was published, Fear of Flying was hailed as a groundbreaking feminist

195 Many critics have written extensively on the significance of Zuckerman’s desire to marry Anne Frank. For particularly nuanced and insightful criticism on the subject, see Sundquist, “Philip Roth’s Holocaust,” The Hopkins Review 5, no. 2 (2012).

work, which it undoubtedly was in 1973; its feminism is certainly less revolutionary by today’s standards.196 Regardless, it served as a sort of response to Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, a protest against the notion that the quintessential Jewish American novel was so wholly male. Indeed, none other than John Updike compared it to Roth’s novel, citing “a sexual frankness that belongs to, and hilariously extends the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and Portnoy’s Complaint.”197

In this way, the critique of some of Roth’s themes that Fear of Flying represents is an early version of the feminist critique a contemporary Jewish woman writer might aim specifically at

Roth’s definition of the Jewish American writer.

Others, too, have represented Jewish American women writers. Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife directly critiques the maleness of the Jewish American writer and the limiting effects that has upon women.198 Its protagonist is married to a successful Jewish writer who evokes the Roth model in his philandering and in the fact of how he met his wife: she was his student. At the end of the novella, we learn that the wife in fact wrote all of her husband’s fiction, for which he enjoyed international acclaim. The eponymous wife does, in fact have a name: Joan Castleman.

But her namelessness in the novella’s title speaks volumes: her husband, the only Castleman who matters, has rendered her nameless and invisible. The fact that it takes the wife fifty years to leave her husband, who has taken advantage of her and directly stifled her own would-be career as a writer, could potentially be subject to feminist critique. But, like Fear of Flying, The Wife is notable simply for its brave representation of Jewish American women writers in this context.

196 For a fuller analysis of the uncertain feminism of Fear of Flying, see Miranda Cooper, “To ‘live alone inside your own head’: The Real Feminism of Fear of Flying,” for Ethics of Jewish American Fiction, Williams College, May 20, 2014. 197 John Updike, review of Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong, The New Yorker, December 17, 1973, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/02/09/picked-up-pieces. 198 Meg Wolitzer, The Wife (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003).

Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls and Anya Ulinich’s formally innovative graphic novel

Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel (whose title references a Bernard Malamud story collection) also represent Jewish American writers. These works, the former more so than the latter, hint towards feminist critique of the definitively gendered character. On one level, simply to represent a

Jewish American writer as female—when, as I have argued, Roth has made the writer’s maleness so essential to his being—is to subvert the paradigm. But the creators of these works directly target this phenomenon, or directly target Roth, with varying levels of explicitness.

Dunham’s character on Girls, Hannah Horvath, is a twenty-first century equivalent of

Isadora Wing: her overt displays of female sexuality are often cringe-worthy, even to a Jewish feminist, which shows precisely why they are still transgressive and why they are therefore essential. Even in 2016, and even to the audience that should be most comfortable with it, the explicit sexuality of Isadora Wing and Hannah Horvath is uncomfortable. Horvath is a caricature of the millennial, apathetically feminist writer. As a result, she is often an unlikable character.

Significantly, Lena Dunham has faced a lot of backlash that seems to be premised on the idea that she is Hannah Horvath: although Hannah Horvath is nearly fifty years removed from Alex

Portnoy, Dunham is subject to the same fate as Philip Roth was for her representation of this character. (This conflation is, of course, likely exacerbated by the fact that Horvath is not simply

Dunham’s written alter-ego but her acted alter-ego: by playing her on television, Dunham represents herself as her character in the most explicit way possible.) And while subverting

Roth’s hegemony is hardly the point of Girls, Dunham enhances the subtle ways that the series does do this, by situating her character within the tradition of Jewish American male writers: in the most recent season, Hannah makes trouble for herself by teaching Roth’s Goodbye,

Columbus to her students, who are too young for it.199 Whether intentionally or not, therefore,

Dunham adds her voice to the conversation about the contemporary status of the Jewish

American writer and problematizing role of gender in that writer’s characterization.

Anya Ulinich’s Lena Finkle might rightly be accused of the same charges Isadora Wing has been brought up on: most of the plot of the graphic novel is centered around the protagonist’s infatuation with a man, so how does this do anything for Jewish American women writers beyond simply pushing against their underrepresentation? Admittedly, Lena Finkle struck me as a rather pathetic character; she does not simply vacillate between two men, as Isadora does, but she allows her infatuation with a love interest, Owen, to consume her, and the results are truly abject as she is transformed in the graphic novel’s panels into a sad, crying bird. (I am tempted to understand this as a reference to Isadora Wing and Fear of Flying, but I have found no corroboration for this anywhere.) But she is not wholly disempowered. Finkle, like Isadora Wing and Hannah Horvath, is forthright in her sexuality. The results are not always pretty—she is not always confident—but they are candid and frank, thus laying a feminist claim to the sexualized dimension of the Jewish writer character as well. In addition, when Finkle first encounters Owen, he is reading The Magic Barrel, and Ayelet Waldman notes in her New York Times review that, in this scene, “Ulinich depicts him as a kind of dream-version Philip Roth.”200 Ulinich thus situates Finkle within Malamud and Roth’s milieu, encouraging the reader to consider this woman writer’s role in such a milieu. And for what it’s worth, Waldman recognizes Ulinich’s work as equivalent to that of “the other [Jewish] writers who’ve immigrated [to America] from

199 Girls. “Good Man.” Season 5, Episode 2. Directed by Lena Dunham. Written by Lena Dunham. HBO, February 28 2016. 200 Ayelet Waldman, “Unmasters of Sex: ‘Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel,’ by Anya Ulinich,” The New York Times, August 8, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/books/review/lena- finkles-magic-barrel-by-anya-ulinich.html.

the former Soviet Union—Gary Shteyngart, David Bezmozgis and Keith Gessen.”201 This is no small achievement in contemporary Jewish American literature in which, as Elisa Albert expresses in a short story that I analyze later in this section, it is still male writers who are most prominent.

More specifically, however, by the end of the graphic novel, Finkle does transform back into human form, regaining her sense of herself apart from Owen. In addition, she vows to transform her pain into literature, empowered to mine beauty from the ugliness of her experience. “I’m going to write about you,” she says to him, and the voice inside her head

(represented by a miniature self that perches on her shoulder) cheers her on: “Wow, you’re a real writer, Finkle, if those are the first words out of your mouth.”202 She thus takes on the same literary project that Roth made into an essential habit of the Jewish American writer: drawing upon autobiography for the purposes of fiction and thereby using it to “explain [her]self to

[her]self.” Ulinich thus subtly asserts a feminist critique, even if it seems like a timid one. But immediately after he leaves, her desire to write fades, replaced by sadness: “all that mattered were the cool nonchalance of the orphan’s “good luck,” and that he was leaving, and that I wanted him to stay.”203 As a Jewish American woman writer worthy of taking on Roth, then,

Finkle still leaves something to be desired.

Elisa Albert “Tear[s] a Page from the Roth Playbook”

Evidently, therefore, some contemporary writers have moved towards a challenge of the gendered dimension of the Roth model. I want to focus, however, on Elisa Albert’s short story

201 Ibid. 202 Anya Ulinich, Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel (New York: Penguin, 2014), 358. 203 Ibid., 359.

“Etta or Bessie or Dora or Rose,” which I view as a nearly comprehensive—not to mention witty and vibrant—encapsulation of this problem. Constructed as a letter to Philip Roth, and situated

(like the epistolary parts of The Facts and the various author’s notes in Operation Shylock) at the end of a collection of short stories (her collection How This Night is Different), somewhere between fiction and nonfiction, the story is (again, like Operation Shylock, and also like “The

Butcher of Desire”) written from the perspective of a narrator who bears both the name of and some relation to the real author. Through these formal gestures and through the simple act of bringing the real Philip Roth into a work of fiction (that itself toes the line between fiction and nonfiction), Albert, as Apple did, aligns herself with Roth and furthers the Roth characterization both by engaging in the fictional tradition that he established as tantamount to the Jewish

American writer and by simply using Roth as a character. She thereby confirms his role as an essential feature of Jewish American fiction, as both real author and fictional character. But, as I will describe, her work goes far beyond this in its contribution to the literary conversation about the Jewish American writer.

Albert describes her difficulties as a young Jewish woman writer trying to write fiction that is original:

Yeah, so I’m a writer. Aspiring writer. And, could you have guessed...? I write fiction about Jews. Jews! Imagine that. When I queried agents I categorized myself thus: ‘A lobotomized Philip Roth writing chick lit.’ They liked that. I had a lot of offers of representation. I’m almost done with my debut collection, which has yet to find a publisher. And as for the inevitable debut novel, well. That’s a bit of an issue. I had an idea, see. [...] It was a good idea for a novel, a truly good idea, [...] after half a dozen years crafting clever little ten-pagers featuring women sitting shiva for relatives who had molested them, women sucking their first uncircumcised cock (then going out for bacon cheeseburgers, natch!), women feeling left out and misunderstood at Jewish sleep-away camp [...].204

204 Elisa Albert, “Etta or Bessie or Dora or Rose,” in How This Night is Different: Stories (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 179.

The reader thus immediately understands Albert as a female equivalent of Roth, and understands that that is her conception of herself as well. Her milieu parallels his: “My Camp Ramah might as well have been your Newark, fifty years later and in Southern California, for all its Jewish insularity and provinciality.”205 Her unabashed female sexuality and its intersections with her

Jewishness are in many ways reminiscent of Roth’s themes, particularly in Portnoy’s Complaint.

The “clever little ten-pagers” that she describes, self-mockingly, are genuinely transgressive, unique expressions of Jewish womanhood—but they lack originality because they are derivative of Roth and yet, because of their femaleness, lack Roth’s edge. She has “a lot of offers of representation” because she describes herself as a “lobotomized Philip Roth.” But because she is

“writing chick lit,” she is also a castrated Philip Roth. (Indeed, given the Rothian connection between writing and sexuality, lobotomy may be equivalent to castration in the first place.) Her femaleness is the only thing that differentiates her thematic concerns from Roth’s, and though they are certainly original in that the femaleness by nature transforms Roth’s themes in interesting and important ways, it seems that the Roth aspect of them is their only selling point.

She may have “a lot of offers of representation,” but she is not, in fact, represented; it is not her stories but Roth’s stories that the public wants to hear, even if they have already heard Roth’s stories multiple times.

Albert provides us with more context for her fictional sensibilities, and her sense of lack of representation, by explaining her relationship to Roth’s fiction. “It goes without saying that I love you,” she says, but after she read Portnoy’s Complaint,

It enraged me like it had enraged all the good dumb Jews thirty-odd years earlier. I was so idiotic, Philip. This, admittedly, had less to do with your much-maligned opus than with the relatively few years that had elapsed since the end of my own unfortunate, romantically unsuccessful tenure at a particularly vile Jewish sleepaway camp. All I

205 Ibid., 181.

could see in Portnoy was the specter of those pathetic fucking Jewboys who didn’t want to fuck me, Philip. [...] “Roth,” I would spit contemptuously whenever the subject of your books came up. “Yuck.” Yuck because in the defensively perceived shiksa-obsession and sexual dysfunction and casual dismissal of Jewish women and mockery of everything religiously, spiritually meaningful in Judaism itself, I was transported right back to Ramah, to being ignored and overlooked [...] Yuck because in Roth were Justin Steinberg and Eric Landsman and Ron Frank, those United Synagogue Youth fuckwads with their hemp necklaces and hackey-sacks and Phish tickets and body-hair aversion, and universal fetishization of Asian women. I didn’t matter. I was powerless. I was overlooked. I had to hate you. I had to play that easy, tired “misogynist” card.206

In other words, Albert had to hate Roth on the basis of his characters’ personalities: she had to engage in the biographical fallacy that may or may not be a fallacy. But within her hatred is buried the real problem for the would-be transgressive Jewish American woman writer: her particular brand of frustration and alienation, themes that Roth espoused and solidified as central to the Jewish American writer, is—due to its female context—by nature outside the Roth character’s concerns despite the fact that it clearly mirrors them. Thus, she wants her work to be recognized for its creativity because it builds upon a pre-established tradition, affirming that tradition’s importance while simultaneously subverting it in an interesting way due to its alternative perspective. But for the very reason of that alternative perspective, it can never achieve the same status as the Roth model. Albert’s frustration at this is underscored by the sardonic tone of the piece. For instance, she addresses Roth throughout the letter as “Philip;” with this very informal address, she expresses an intentional irreverence toward him, as if trying to level the playing field between the two writers.

Albert’s first novel, we learn, was a failed venture because, when she was already well into writing it, a novel by another Jewish woman with precisely the same premise—a historical novel about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and its (mostly Jewish) women victims—was published to wide critical acclaim. This is telling: there are limits to the stories Jewish women writers can

206 Ibid., 181-182.

tell, such that another woman had already written the book she wanted to write, whereas Jewish male writers have an abundance of material to draw upon—and even if they don’t, they can always turn to the Roth character and work within his tradition. She makes this evident in her discussion of her initial ambitions for the novel: “It was going to be great. The potential was endless and unbelievably exciting. I was out for some Safran Foer blood, man.”207 The structure of these sentences, short and declarative, one after the other, makes evident that her frustration at the success of Jewish American male writers like Safran Foer (a success that she views as having been achieved at the cost of her own success) is a primary motivation for her desire to write this novel.

This explicit naming of successful contemporary Jewish American male writers makes her critique particularly pointed. Crucially, the second such writer she names is also situated in the context of her discussion of this failed novel, this time after she has discovered that someone else has already written a novel about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire: “I’d felt something resembling this large-scale ‘FUCK’ once before, years ago, when I first read Nathan Englander’s heart-wrenching story about an agunah’s endless electrolysis and had no choice but to bury my own greatly autobiographical burgeoning novella about my own heart-wrenchingly endless hair- removal trials.”208 209 Implicit in this humorous tirade is a deeper critique: shouldn’t the struggle to reconcile the Jewish female aesthetic with mainstream American society’s preferred aesthetic of fair, hairless beauty be left to Jewish women writers to conquer in fiction? Why is this the fictional territory of Nathan Englander and not Elisa Albert? Of course, the truly heart-wrenching issue is not the hair-removal but the agunah, an Ultra-Orthodox woman who is chained to an

207 Ibid., 180-181. 208 Ibid., 187. 209 Albert is referring to Nathan Englander, “The Last One Way,” in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (New York: Vintage, 1999).

unhappy marriage by a husband who denies her a get (divorce recognized by Jewish law); devastatingly, such a woman would never be able to be the writer of such a story. Though Albert directs her annoyance at Englander’s imposition into the world of “endless hair-removal,” one could imagine her making a similar critique of Englander’s adoption of the agunah’s story: isn’t this, too—this, perhaps, most of all—a Jewish woman’s story to tell?210

Of course, there is a level of irony in Albert’s critique of Jewish American male writing having left no room for Jewish female particularity and originality. For if the narrator Elisa

Albert has been blocked from writerly success, the real Elisa Albert has not; she has produced something original simply in this piece. Thus, although Albert encourages conflation of herself with her narrator just as Roth so often does, the story itself serves as evidence against the truth of such a conflation. Already, then, we have a significant divergence from the Roth model. In addition, the narrator is not experiencing the same sort of writer’s block that plagues Zuckerman, which is linked to sexual impotence; rather, the source of her blockage is external, the product of a society and a literary culture that has left little room for Jewish female creativity. Albert makes evident her resentment of the constraints she experiences as a Jewish woman writer, many of which she views as the product of Roth’s legacy, but these constraints are not the same as

Roth’s: she may be subject to Roth’s legacy, but she is not subject to the same limits the Roth character suffers.

After describing her frustrated attempts to achieve success as a female Jewish American writer, Albert makes a strange proposition to Roth: she wants to have his child. She assumes that

210 I do not mean to suggest that any one writer, or any demographic, has claim to any fictional content; it simply seems to me that part of Albert’s rage at the Rothian hegemony of the Jewish writer character and the male hegemony of Jewish American fiction more generally stems from her sense that men have written even the fiction she feels she as a Jewish woman has unique emotional access to.

Roth wanted but was unable to have a child, citing as evidence the many places in his fiction where his characters express their unrealized desires for children. In this sense, she is as gullible as the critics that most enrage him, assuming fiction to be autobiography. She displays her belief in another aspect of the Roth character as well in her understanding of Roth’s paternal role: “So.

I am a young Jewish writer who idolizes you, cherishes your books, and reads them slowly, considers you the father of us all. Ah, yes: the father of us all—but not actually a father yourself,

Philip, so far as I know. Why is that? Do you yourself know? Is there an answer? [...] Again and again I find evidence of child longing in your books.”211 Her epithet for Roth, “the father of us all,” alludes to Roth’s thematic interest in literary fathers, once again suggesting that Albert has bought into the Roth character. She taunts him, unsubtly taking advantage of the Roth character’s sensitivity about impotence: “The big question, though, is whether you still have the capacity for ejaculation. Did prostate cancer leave you the way Zuckerman’s left him? Has cancer (or age) made, at long last, a cuddler of you? [...] We won’t get into the cosmic irony that may have wrested from the century’s most unabashedly virile writer (that was not meant pejoratively) his power to orgasm, his power, even, maybe, to get hard.”212 Thus, Albert’s plea for Roth to inseminate her not only serves her specific thematic purpose, as I will describe, but also serves as evidence for Roth’s success in engineering the Jewish writer character: Albert views the real

Roth as possessing precisely the characteristics that Roth invented for Zuckerman and for his fictionalization of himself.

There are distinct echoes of the Roth character in Albert’s character; not only the themes of her “clever little ten-pagers” but also her tone and style are extremely Rothian. The fury that seems to guide her writing, and its consequent loquacity, are much like Roth’s characteristic

211 Albert, “Etta or Bessie or Dora or Rose,” 183. 212 Ibid., 191-192.

style in which he “explains himself to himself.” In addition, Albert’s last word is overtly

Rothian:

“Fine. I’ll just tear a page from the Roth playbook and simply turn this letter into a kind of postmodern “story” (And I’ll even leave this part in to further confuse and complicate, to experiment with implicating myself, the “Elisa Albert” alter-ego, in all these ways you yourself are so adept with, see how it feels, how you must feel, when people assume fact is fiction and fiction fact, when people read your writing and assume they know you. Am I guilty of that, too? I suppose I am, and I’m sorry, Philip. It’s just that I love you). I’ll write it to Nathan Zuckerman from Audrey Rubens.”213 214

This send-up is, like the entire story, cuttingly sarcastic in tone, and it simultaneously expresses both deference and defiance. It references the fabricated correspondence between Roth and

Zuckerman that Roth includes in The Facts, and the complex nature of Roth’s setup of the biographical fallacy that may or may not be a fallacy. She thus links herself to Roth’s most significant contribution to the Jewish American writer character: his identity as Philip Roth, expressed through the lack of distance between the character and his author.

Perhaps the most interesting Rothian quality of “Etta or Bessie or Dora or Rose” is the way Albert’s narrative interweaves her discussion of her career as a young writer with her pleas for Roth to impregnate her. We do not know why Albert is bringing up Roth’s characters’ dreams of parenthood until seven pages later; in the intervening pages, she tells the story of her failed novel, and rails against the male dominance of Jewish American writing. There is little transition between the two narrative strands; they are intermixed as if, for her, they are one and the same. This presumed relation of writing to sexual virility or reproduction evokes the Roth model, as we saw also in Legacy (which was written nearly a decade after Albert’s story). The formal structure of the story thus mirrors its thematic purpose. This relation of writing to reproduction is underscored when Albert suggests that they name the hypothetical child “Dora,

213 Ibid., 195-196. 214 Audrey Rubens is the protagonist of Albert’s novel, The Book of Dahlia.

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or Celia. Or Etta. Pearl, too, or Yetta. Bessie’s nice. And Rose.”215 These are the names of victims of the fire, the names that initially inspired Albert’s novel idea; she would just as soon immortalize them by assigning them to her children as by writing a novel featuring them. (The fact that they serve, too, as the source of the story’s title, helps Albert in encouraging the Rothian conflation of herself with her narrator: both the fictional Albert’s potential novel and the real

Albert’s story are centered around these names.)

But in Albert’s specific feminist context, the link between writing and sex/reproduction operates on a level beyond this: by collapsing the thematic distance between her own fiction writing and this bizarre proposition, Albert suggests that becoming the mother of Roth’s child is her best chance at achieving prominence in the world of Jewish American writers and writing. It is not necessarily that she perceives her own fertility as linked to her ability to write transgressive

Jewish American fiction, but that she believes Roth’s mark on the Jewish writer character has limited her ability to transgress in writing so much that she can do no more than mix her genes with Roth’s. She cannot carry on his legacy as male writers might, by putting herself into his model and thus directly establishing herself as his literary descendant (as, for instance, Apple does): Roth has no literary daughters, only literary sons. The only option for a Jewish woman writer to link herself to Roth and thus to the dominant image of the Jewish American writer is, apparently, to carry on his genetic line. This conceit is, in a word, brilliant.

While this reduction of the Jewish woman writer to the mother of Roth’s son seems essentialist and, by modern feminist standards, therefore antifeminist, Albert’s portrayal of it is, as I have suggested, distinctly tongue-in-cheek; her sarcastic tone suggests her rage at the situation. And thus the greatest feminist achievement, and greatest creative achievement, of the

215 Albert, “Etta or Bessie or Dora or Rose,” 192.

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story is its rendering of Albert’s character. For even as she (and, to some extent, Jong, Wolitzer,

Dunham, and Ulinich) critiques Roth’s patriarchal domination of the Jewish American writer character, Albert creates a vivid and multifaceted Jewish American woman writer character who is absolutely memorable and who works within the Roth tradition without being a mere Roth ghost.

Conclusion

In his discussion of Roth’s use of Kafka in works such as The Breast and “Looking at

Kafka,” Daniel Medin suggests that “reading Kafka is not the objective of these stories, but their point of departure.”216 When it comes to contemporary stories that “read” Roth, of which

Albert’s is an exemplar, we might substitute “Roth” for “Kafka”—an exchange that is certainly fitting for fictions about Jewish American writers—in Medin’s statement, with an equally truthful outcome. Albert is subject to Roth’s influence, and her fiction reflects that, but she is not as confined by it as she may initially appear. Roth is simply her point of departure, her springboard for further creative development of the Jewish American writer character. Even if

Roth’s hold on the Jewish American writer character can sometimes feel like a stranglehold— and, for some of these women writers, it undoubtedly does—his lingering influence on not just male characterizations but female ones has generated and will doubtless generate further creativity. Discussing the mid-century rise of Jewish American fiction, Erica Jong writes, “As a group becomes restless and angry, it produces writers.”217 If she is right, we can look forward to

216 Medin, “Liebliche Luge?,” 49. 217 Erica Jong, “How I Got To Be Jewish,” in Who We Are: On Being (And Not Being) a Jewish American Writer, ed. Derek Rubin (New York: Schocken, 2005), 113.

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plenty of literature from Jewish American women writers. The work of his contemporary literary daughters and granddaughters, although some may wish to renounce him as a father, is as good evidence as any. The continued use of the Philip Roth character in contemporary Jewish

American fiction is indicative not of a lack of originality but precisely the opposite. These contemporary writers are the inheritors of a vibrant literary subculture that has developed for itself a robust canon. Accordingly, they work within and respond to that canon, which, like any national (or, as Howe would have it, “regional”) literature, has reached a level of intertextuality and has amassed a body of internal references that allows that new generation of writers to build upon it creatively. Indeed, Stephen Wade suggests that “contemporary Jewish-American writing has found renewal and impetus, paradoxically, in the historical experience that has shaped their forebears’ perceptions and identities.”218 With Philip Roth as forebear, this is certainly true.

218 Stephen Wade, Jewish American Literature Since 1945: An Introduction (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1999), 12.

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Conclusion

“One of the great attractions of being washed up on the shores of Jewish American literature is that with each new generation of writers, we as readers discover new fictional landscapes and new possibilities for imagining the Jewish experience.” – Derek Rubin, Introduction to Who We Are: On Being (And Not Being) A Jewish American Writer219

In 1969, Robert Alter argued that “The vogue of Jewish writing, quickly exhausting its artistic possibilities, offers many indications that it may be falling into a declining phase of unwitting self-parody.” 220 Responding to Alter, David Brauner notes that “it has been a critical commonplace that self-parody is the death-knell of a genre.” 221 Is the continued literary obsession with the Jewish American writer—and, particularly, the Roth image of him— indicative of a lack of creativity and vitality in contemporary fiction, a lack that supposedly accompanies Jewish American assimilation? One could certainly imagine the apocalypticist strain of Jewish American literary criticism—which has outlasted Alter and Howe, manifesting itself more recently in essays by William Deresiewicz (2007) and David Bezmozgis (2014)— making the claim that it is. But it is because, not in spite of, Roth’s persistence influence that we can happily and confidently say Alter, Howe, Deresiewicz, and Bezmozgis were all wrong: if the genre has indeed become self-parody, it has ascended rather than descended to that level, and it has done so wittingly rather than unwittingly. Indeed, the Jewish American novel—and the

Jewish American writer—is by definition self-parodying. Brauner agrees: “Rumours to the demise of the American-Jewish novel, like those of the death of Mark Twain, have been somewhat exaggerated. Self-parody can, after all, be knowing as well as unwitting, signifying

219 Derek Rubin, Who We Are: On Being (And Not Being) A Jewish American Writer (New York: Schocken, 2005), xix. 220 Quoted in Brauner, Post-War Jewish Fiction, 24. 221 Ibid.

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maturity, confidence and reinvigoration, rather than exhaustion.”222 The fact that contemporary writers and artists continually reassert the Roth character does not indicate a scarcity of ingenuity but an abundance of it—particularly when that character is in the hands of a writer like Albert, who is intent upon presenting a nuanced new perspective on that character. For what is better proof of a literary tradition’s longevity and influence than when younger writers in that tradition begin treating it like a canon?

222 Ibid.

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Bibliography

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109 Appendices contain copyrighted materials and have been redacted.