ROTH, Philip (Milton)

Nationality: American. Born: Newark, New Jersey, 19 March 1933. Education: Weequahic High School, New Jersey; Newark College, Rutgers University, 1950-51; Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, 1951-54; A.B. 1954 (Phi Beta Kappa); University of Chicago, 1954-55, M.A. 1955. Military Service: Served in the United States Army, 1955-56. Family: Married 1) Margaret Martinson in 1959 (separated 1962; died 1968); 2) the actress Claire Bloom in 1990 (divorced 1994). Career: Instructor in English, University of Chicago, 1956-58; visiting writer, University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1960-62; writer-in-residence, Princeton University, New Jersey, 1962-64; visiting writer, State University of New York, Stony Brook, 1966, 1967, and University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1967-80; general editor, Writers from the Other Europe series, Penguin, publishers, London, 1975-89; Distinguished Professor, Hunter College, New York, 1988-92. Awards: Houghton Mifflin literary fellowship, 1959; Guggenheim fellowship, 1959; National Book award, 1960, 1995; Daroff award, 1960; American Academy grant, 1960, 1995; O Henry award, 1960; Ford Foundation grant, for drama, 1965; Rockefeller fellowship, 1966; National Book Critics Circle award, 1988, 1991; National Jewish Book award, 1988; PEN/Faulkner award, 1993; Pulitzer prize for fiction, for American Pastoral, 1998. Honorary degrees: Bucknell University, 1979; Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 1985; Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1987; Columbia University, New York, 1987; Brandeis University, Massachusetts, 1991; Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, 1992. Member: American Academy, 1970.

Publications

Short Stories

Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories. 1959.

Penguin Modern Stories 3, with others. 1969.

Novotny's Pain. 1980.

Novels

Letting Go. 1962.

When She Was Good. 1967.

Portnoy's Complaint. 1969.

Our Gang (Starring Tricky and His Friends). 1971.

The Breast. 1972; revised edition in A Roth Reader, 1980.

The Great American Novel. 1973.

My Life as a Man. 1974.

The Professor of Desire. 1977.

Zuckerman Bound (includes The Prague Orgy). 1985.

The Ghost Writer. 1979.

Zuckerman Unbound. 1981.

The Anatomy Lesson. 1983.

The Prague Orgy. 1985.

The Counterlife. 1987.

Deception. 1990.

Operation Shylock: A Confession. 1993.

Sabbath's Theater. 1995.

American Pastoral. 1997.

I Married a Communist. 1998.

Play

Television Play:

The Ghost Writer, with Tristram Powell, from the novel by Roth, 1983.

Other

Reading Myself and Others. 1975; revised edition, 1985. A Roth Reader. 1980.

The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography. 1988.

Patrimony: A True Story. 1991.

Conversations with Roth, edited by George J. Searles. 1992.

*

Bibliography:

Roth: A Bibliography by Bernard F. Rodgers, Jr., 1974; revised edition, 1984.

Critical Studies:

Bernard Malamud and Roth: A Critical Essay by Glenn Meeter, 1968; "The Journey of Roth" by Theodore Solotaroff, in The Red Hot Vacuum, 1970; The Fiction of Roth by John N. McDaniel, 1974; The Comedy That "Hoits": An Essay on the Fiction of Roth by Sanford Pinsker, 1975, and Critical Essays on Roth edited by Pinsker, 1982; Roth by Bernard F. Rodgers, Jr., 1978; "Jewish Writers" by Mark Shechner, in The Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing edited by Daniel Hoffman, 1979; introduction by Martin Green to A Roth Reader, 1980; Roth by Judith Paterson Jones and Guinevera A. Nance, 1981; Roth by Hermione Lee, 1982; Reading Roth edited by A. Z. Milbauer and D.G. Watson, 1988; Understanding Roth by Murray Baumgarten and Barbara Gottfried, 1990; The Changing Mosaic: From Cahan to Malamud, Roth and Ozick edited by Daniel Walden, 1993; Beyond Despair: Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip Roth by Aron Appelfeld, 1994; The Imagination in Transit: The Fiction of Philip Roth by Stephen Wade, 1996; Philip Roth and the Jews by Alan Cooper, 1996; Silko, Morrison, and Roth: Studies in Survival by Naomi R. Rand, 1998.

* * *

Although Philip Roth is best known as a novelist, his early short stories earned him wide public attention and a reputation for controversy that has continued to dog his heels. If a writer like Bernard Malamud justified his aesthetic by insisting that "all men are Jews," Roth took a gleeful delight in proving the converse—namely, that all Jews are men. Indeed, he went about the business of being a satirist of the Jewish American suburbs as if he were on a mission from an angry Old Testament prophet. He enjoyed holding conventional Jewish American feet to the fire.

"Goodbye, Columbus" is, of course, the classic instance of social realism with an angry, satiric twist, but it is hardly the only case. Ozzie Freedman, the religious school rebel of "The Conversion of the Jews," seems at once a younger brother of Neil Klugman, the angry young Jewish man of "Goodbye, Columbus," and a foreshadowing of Alexander Portnoy. He is pitted against Rabbi Binder, a man bedeviled by Ozzie Freedman's embarrassing questions. Their names are, of course, meant to be symbolic, especially if one reads the story as a shorthand for Ozzie's wish-fulfilling dream of becoming a "freed man," no longer bound by his rabbi's parochialism.

The literal level of the story gradually fades into the background at the traumatic moment during "free-discussion time" when Ozzie again presses his point about why God "couldn't let a woman have a baby without having intercourse." After all, Ozzie argues, cannot God do anything? At this point Rabbi Binder loses patience, and Ozzie raises the psychic stakes by screaming, "You don't know anything about God!" When Rabbi Binder responds with an uncharacteristic but very authoritarian slap, Ozzie bolts from the synagogue's classroom to its roof, where his declarations take on the character of a rebellious id pitted against constraining superegoes. Considered mythically, Ozzie emerges as an ironic Joseph, one whose dreams are filled with authority figures bowing before his will. Indeed, all of the standard representatives of societal force are there—preacher, teacher, fireman, cop—and Ozzie, for the moment at least, reigns supreme: "'Everybody kneel.' There was the sound of everybody kneeling…. Next Ozzie made everybody say it [that God can make a baby without intercourse]. And then he made them all say that they believed in Jesus Christ—first one at a time, then all together."

The story's title comes from a line in Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" ("And you should if you please, refuse/"Till the conversion of the Jews"). Thus, Roth's vision combines a fantasized Day of Judgment with a symbolic death wish as Ozzie plunges into the very fabric of his dream—"right into the center of the yellow net that glowed in the evening's edge like an overgrown halo." No matter that "The Conversion of the Jews" was tightly structured or even highly poetic—many rabbis were not amused. Nor were Jewish-American veterans pleased with "Defender of the Faith," a story set in an army training camp that includes a cast of unpleasant (goldbricking) Jewish stereotypes. But it also includes—and this may be the more important point—a protagonist (Sergeant Marx) who comes to terms with the vulnerability of his nearly forgotten Jewishness and its potential to turn him into an exploited victim.

Indeed, the crux of "Defender of the Faith" revolves around the central question posed in nearly all of Roth's short stories—namely, what are other Jews to me or me to them that they should expect, even demand, preferential treatment? "Eli, the Fanatic" complicates the matter further by forcing its protagonist to choose between his assimilated Jewish neighbors and members of an Ultra-Orthodox yeshivah. As one of the former puts it, "Tell this Tzuref where we stand, Eli. This is a modern community." As a lawyer familiar with zoning restrictions and the like, Peck is the logical choice to be Woodenton's "defender of the [assimilated] faith." But Tzuref, the yeshivah's principal, turns out to have arguments of his own: "The law is the law … and then of course the law is not the law. When is the law that is the law not the law?" The result is not only a movement from sympathy to symbolic identification but also a desperate leap into mental breakdown that might, or might not, represent clear moral vision. As Eli exchanges his Ivy League suiting for the Hasid's traditional black garb, he becomes the "fanatic" of Roth's title—a ripe candidate for the tranquilizers the assimilated, in fact, administer and for the Hasidic sainthood he may, or may not, merit.

The stories collected in Goodbye, Columbus pit the Jews of stereotype against the more human ones. Some, like "Epstein," the story of a sad, middle-aged Jewish adulterer, score their satiric points at the expense of rounded characterization and suggest that, at the age of 26, its author could be a very young, young man. Others, like "You Can't Tell a Man by the Song He Sings," belabor a small point about Joseph McCarthyism as it trickles down to a high school level. But in his best stories ("Goodbye, Columbus," "The Conversion of the Jews," "Eli, the Fanatic," and "On the Air," a wildly inventive romp that prefigures the zany postmodernist experimentation he would more fully exploit in his novels about Nathan Zuckerman's rise and fall) Roth turns the environs of Newark into the stuff of literature, no small accomplishment.

—Sanford Pinsker

See the essays on "The Conversion of the Jews" and "Goodbye, Columbus."