Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth 9781623562946, 9781501304583, 9781628925043

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Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth

Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth Brett Ashley Kaplan

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Brett Ashley Kaplan, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kaplan, Brett Ashley. Jewish anxiety and the novels of Philip Roth / Brett Ashley Kaplan. pages cm Summary: “Uses Roth’s novels as springboards to illuminate larger problematics of victimization, gender, racism and anti-Semitism”– Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62356-294-6 (hardback) 1. Roth, Philip–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Judaism and literature. 3. Anxiety in literature. I. Title. PS3568.O855Z6956 2015 813’.54 – dc23 2014034648 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6294-6 PB: 978-1-5013-2473-4 ePub: 978-1-6289-2503-6 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2504-3 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd

For Melia, Anya, Sasha (and Argos)

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6

Jewish Anxiety: “Goodbye, Columbus,” “Eli, the Fanatic,” and Portnoy’s Complaint Specters of Roth: The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost, and Zuckerman Unbound Double-Consciousness and the Jewish Heart of Darkness: The Counterlife and Operation Shylock The American Berserk: Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral Playing It Any Way You Like: The Human Stain Counterfactual Terror: The Plot Against America

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13 35 51 73 103 145

Conclusion: What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

163

Notes Bibliography Index

167 178 200

Acknowledgments As has been the case for the past fourteen years, I owe a deep debt and much gratitude to my friend Matti Bunzl, who is both the Director of the vibrant Jewish Studies program at Illinois and the Artistic Director of the stupendous and ambitious Chicago Humanities Festival. When my Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory had just been published and I had several competing ideas for the next project, I discussed these with Matti and he helped me to coalesce them into this book. I am also incredibly grateful to the former and current Chairs of Comparative Literature, Jean-Philippe Mathy and Lilya Kaganovsky, who have always been immensely kind and supportive. I could not have written this book without the time afforded by the Conrad Humanities Fellowship, an application for which Jean-Philippe put forward on my behalf. Nor could I have written it without the freedom to teach courses on Roth, and to teach a graduate seminar on Race and Alternative History that was helpful in developing the ideas herein. I am grateful to the students in those courses for helping me think through this book. I am bowled over by the generosity and rigorousness with which two anonymous reviewers tackled my somewhat rough manuscript. I have adopted the vast majority of their suggestions and I am so thankful for all the myriad ways in which their insights have improved this book. Sasha Mobley performed detailed editing and questioned me on a multitude of aspects of this text, and I am colossally grateful to her for this and everything else to boot. I am very grateful to Anna Stenport and Hina Nazar for reading an early version of the introduction. I would like to thank all the Roth scholars who I know and don’t know for their work on this fascinating author. Debra Shostak, Jay Halio, and Aimee Pozorski all kindly invited me to contribute to collections on Roth. I am grateful to David Gooblar and Aimee for organizing the very stimulating conference on Roth in Newark on the occasion of his eightieth birthday and to ClaudiaFranziska Bruehwiler for putting together an excellent colloquium in beautiful St. Gallen, Switzerland. The audiences at these conferences and at the Jewish Studies Workshop at the University of Illinois, the American Comparative Literature Association, the Association for Jewish Studies, and at the Modern

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Language Association have asked probing questions that have helped me to work through my ideas. Jenni Adams and Aimee were kind enough to steer me toward Haaris Naqvi and Laura Murray at Bloomsbury (formerly Continuum), who have been enthusiastic supporters of this project. Several excellent works on Roth discuss narrative strategies, intergenerational Jewish strife, sexual blossoming and waning, Israel, the Holocaust, alter-egos, gender, how Roth has treated intra- as well as extraliterarily critiques from Jewish readers that accuse him of being an antiSemitic self-hating Jew, and a host of other topics. My project is in conversation with and deeply indebted to a cornucopia of wonderful texts including but in no way limited to: Ross Posnock’s Philip Roth’s Rude Truth (2006), Dean Franco’s Race, Rights & Recognition: Jewish American Literature Since 1969 (2012), Michael Kimmage’s In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy (2012), Debra Shostak’s Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives (2004), Aimee Pozorski’s Roth and Trauma (2011), David Gooblar’s The Major Phases of Philip Roth (2011), David Brauner’s Philip Roth (2007), Steven Sampson’s Corpus Rothi II, and Pia Masiero’s Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books (2011). I also owe an enormous debt to Vicki Mahaffey because I have off and on participated in her stupendous Finnegans Wake reading group; not only have I learned a huge amount about the Wake itself but Vicki’s brilliant ability to pull strands of meaning from seemingly indecipherable if compelling prose has also enriched my reading practices. I look forward to continuing to learn from her and to struggle with the Wake in future readings; I am also grateful to John Moore and the other members of the reading group for their insights into Joyce’s hardest text. I am very grateful to my parents, Ann and Ralph, and my stepfather Marty; my mother helped very concretely with this book by traveling with us to St. Gallen to look after the children while I learned a great deal at the Roth conference there. I thank her heartily for this and all of her other generous acts. I have been truly favored to have so many wonderful friends— and many of them for decades! The following, enormously generous people were present to me (either virtually or phenomenally) during a very trying time: A.B., Lara, Yaz, Lilya and Rob, Theresa and George, Hina and Gian, Catharine, Carol, Polly, Katherine and Bill, Cathy and John, Audrey, Mia, Jesse and Allyson, Julia, Deb, Kim and John, Liz and Robin, Griselda, Justine, Allie and Ramona, Ayelet, Janice, Adam, Stephanie, Chris, Melissa and Elena, and so many other wonderfuls! I thank you all so, so much! It was a great

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pleasure this summer to see so many in my extended English family and I send love and appreciation to Jen Jen, Jean, Becca, Helen, Paul, and the rest of the family. This book is dedicated to Anya and Melia. I am very grateful to Melia for photographing the corrected proofs and sending them to the copyeditor, and I thank Anya for proofreading the index! I owe them much gratitude for the utter amazingness of their beings. Things are not always pacific, I do not always make the best parenting choices, and they do not always make the best behavior choices, but my heart gets fat (this is the English translation of the Tagalog phrase tumataba ang puso ko otherwise known as kvell) with enormous pride at the incredible people they are becoming. I love Melia and Anya beyond all scale or measure. Much thanks to the editors of the following collections or journals for allowing me to include substantially revised versions of Chapters 3, 5, and 6: “Double-Consciousness and the Jewish Heart of Darkness: The Counterlife and Operation Shylock,” Roth and Celebrity: An Edited Collection. Aimee Pozorski, ed. (Lexington Books, 2012): 133–153. “Anatole Broyard’s Human Stain: Performing Postracial Consciousness,” Philip Roth Studies 1: 2 (Fall, 2005): 125–144. “Reading Race and the Conundrums of Reconciliation in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain,” Turning up the Flame: The Later Works of Philip Roth, Jay Halio and Ben Siegel, eds. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005): 172–193. “Just Folks Homesteading: Roth’s Doubled Plots Against America,” Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America, Debra Shostak, ed. (Continuum Press, 2011): 115–129. I am very grateful to Ross Bleckner for permitting my cover to be graced by his stunning painting “Dream and Do” (84ʺ by 72ʺoil/linen 1996 COPYRIGHT: ROSS BLECKNER. COURTESY: MARY BOONE GALLERY, NEW YORK). I have been a huge Bleckner fan ever since I had the pleasure of spending time with his paintings at the Guggenheim in 1995. I thank Ron Warren at Mary Boone Gallery for facilitating permission.

Introduction

Jewish Anxiety (n.) A disorder in which tension between the fear of victimization and fear of perpetration creates an immense amount of hysterical, neurotic, self-questioning. The etiology of the disease, the actual source of the anxiety, is rarely ever identified and thus remains perpetually untreated. Represented wonderfully in, among other (male) Jewish artists, Philip Roth and Woody Allen. I argue throughout this book that Philip Roth’s novels teach us that Jewish anxiety stems not only from fear of victimization but also from fear of perpetration. It is impossible to think about Jewish victimization without thinking about the Holocaust; and it is impossible to think about the taboo question of Jewish perpetration without thinking about Israel. I use the word “taboo” here contextually as, of course, it is not at all taboo in some cases— but it is in the context of a Jewish-American writer’s works. The history of Jewish victimization predates by a long stretch the Nazi genocide and this dual anxiety is perhaps not only a “Jewish” concern. That perpetration and victimization can sometimes be uncomfortably close is part of what Roth explores throughout his oeuvre. Roth’s texts probe Israel–Palestine and the Holocaust with varying degrees of intensity but all his novels scrutinize perpetration and victimization through examining racism and sexism in America. The novels set in America often feature racist ranting characters who express anti-black-American or anti-Japanese sentiment; progressive figures who explicitly challenge this racism often oppose these characters. The totemic presence of people of color who seem to be randomly plunked into Roth’s texts without developing as fully formed characters formally shadows these debates within the narratives about racism in America. I suggest that these characters are problematic, on the one hand, because they are not granted the full consciousness that many of the white characters achieve; but, on the other hand, Roth may be (intentionally or accidentally) replicating and critiquing the very structure of racial division by having these figures be so evanescently sketched. Because copious numbers of Roth’s Jewish men

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try (but fail) to identify with some of these characters, an endlessly deferred alliance appears as a spectral presence that conjures up a shared oppression that will always be dissolved by white privilege. By placing Jewish identification with usually black characters in proximity to (often Jewish) racist ranting, Roth subtly demonstrates the danger of Jews becoming the very thing the aftershock of the Holocaust would make them despise most: racist. Roth’s main characters—almost all men—express much anxiety about the various masculinities they inhabit. They are sometimes put either literally or figuratively on trial for sexual aggression in ways that align them with perpetrators of racially based hate crime. While race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other identitarian markers all intersect and overlap, Roth makes a parallel move in the case of gender to how he treats race. Just like overt arguments about racism figure in much of his writing, so do disputes over feminism. While there is only one major black character (The Human Stain’s Coleman Silk), there are abundant major female characters, almost all white, mostly not Jewish, and quite varied and complex in their portrayals. The women fluctuate widely from sexually repressed hysterical feminists, to gender-bending queer characters, to one-dimensional sexual fantasies, to multivalent, inventive figures, to stereotypical caricatures of overbearing Jewish mothers, to subtly painted and immensely strong and admirable Jewish parents. This variety of female characters coupled with anxieties over masculinity makes it impossible to generalize about what exactly goes on with gender in Roth’s oeuvre. However, gender plays a central role in unpacking the exploration of perpetration and victimization that I argue is crucial to understanding Roth because he consistently challenges the victim–perpetrator expectations in situations wherein there is a power and/ or generational difference between men and women. Men, in these situations, are not always the perpetrators, and women not always the victims.1 I use the Rothian corpus as a springboard to illuminate the intersecting problematics of victimization and perpetration; masculinity and femininity; and racism and anti-Semitism. For if, as I argue here, Jewish anxiety is not only about the fear of being oppressed, we can begin to see how anxiety functions in terms of fears of perpetration, then perhaps we can better understand how to navigate through the mined terrain of Israel–Palestine. Jewish anxiety is replete throughout Roth’s texts in ways that help us understand what it really means to be caught in a permeable dialectic between victimization and perpetration. David Biale finds that “the

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Lebanon War suggested to some that the former victims of persecution and genocide had become perpetrators: Israel’s enemies reviled the Jewish state as the reincarnation of Nazi Germany” (Power, 3). Roth’s explorations of victimization and perpetration open up our thinking about how these formations are mutually constitutive, implicated, and dialogic. Roth has consistently written, both implicitly and explicitly, about victimization and perpetration. In The Facts (1988) he notes that “The collective memory of Polish and Russian pogroms had fostered in most of our families the idea that our worth as human beings, even perhaps our distinction as a people, was embodied in the incapacity to perpetrate the sort of bloodletting visited upon our ancestors” (28). In other words, Roth here remembers that an inability to become a perpetrator was a defining characteristic of his Jewish milieu; and yet he almost systematically delves into the possibilities for various modes of Jewish perpetration throughout. Claudia Roth Pierpont reports that one of the ideas Roth had for his first novel was about an “American Jewish businessman who travels to Germany after the war, determined to kill a German, any German at all” (32). According to Pierpont, then, the idea of Jewish perpetration was indeed firmly entrenched (if never realized in this form) from the beginning of Roth’s writing career. Pierpont also discusses an early never-produced play of Roth’s explores the dilemma of a “Jew who bartered with the Nazis, offering up hundreds of Jewish lives in the vain hope of saving many more” (33). These ethically complex plot arcs offer further evidence that this thinking through of the dichotomies at the heart of the transformations between subject positions between the oppressor and the oppressed were always already there in the background of Roth’s thought. *** Certainly, the word “anxiety” has a long history and contains much flux. Justine Murison defines it thus: Etymologically and medically, ‘anxiety’ reaches back to the classical period and forward to current colloquial expressions derived from Freudian psychoanalysis. Coming from the Latin for a feeling of choking or distress, ‘anxiety’ connotes the hysterical symptom of a ball rising in the throat, which partially explains the theory of the womb’s wandering during the classical period. (6–7)

While there are multiple times in Freud’s work that anxiety arises as a topic, it is very telling that in The Problem of Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und

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Angst, 1926) Freud rejects the idea that an anxiety prevails since birth and derived from birth and instead argues that anxiety arises from the loss of the mother (or the danger of the potential loss of the mother) and that this loss resonates with castration anxiety, something Roth expresses multiply but perhaps most persistently through a seemingly endless iteration of impotence anxiety; Freud defines impotent men as “those inhibited by the threat of castration” (78). Freud further argues, “Anxiety thus seems to be a reaction to the perception of the absence of the object, and there at once spring to mind the analogies that castration anxiety has also separation from a highly valued object as its content and that the most basic anxiety of all, the ‘primal anxiety’ of birth, arises in connection with separation from the mother” (76). By linking anxiety around the loss of the mother with anxiety around the loss of the phallus, Roth’s mode of investigating this and plenty of other Freudian problems comes into focus. Going further, if we can extrapolate anxiety at this, psychoanalytic level, to anxiety at group-identity and/or national levels, we can see that a group anxiety around the loss of the various (if always unstable) homelands during the Nazi genocide may have arisen in Jewish-American culture in conjunction with an anxiety around the loss of power (symbolized in the phallus) that this genocide occasioned.2 Derrida defines the relationship between anxiety and play thusly: “And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were at stake in the game from the outset” (Writing, 279). Roth, then, uses Jewish anxiety—as a doubled anxiety around past and future victimization as well as a phobia about becoming the very thing one has been historically conditioned to loathe most, that is, a perpetrator—in order to analyze the spectral presence of the repressed other within the always unstable confines of any given identification. By moving mostly chronologically (with some exceptions, especially in Chapter 2), one can see how Roth’s interest in race and complicity, in victimization and perpetration, has been consistent from beginning to end. For readers not intimately familiar with all of Roth’s works, he began his career with a big splash in 1959 with Goodbye, Columbus. He published what remains his most famous novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, in 1969, which was met with a storm of opprobrium and praise due to its no-holds-barred approach to both sexuality and Jewish stereotyping. In 1974’s My Life as a Man he constructed an important “alter-ego” by creating Nathan Zuckerman and placing him in

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a novel that has a very intricate structure; but scholars do not always agree as to whether this Zuckerman is the same as the other ones. Pia Masiero notes, “My Life as a Man inaugurates the masking practice that will become central to Roth’s oeuvre” (9). I treat a good number of the Zuckerman books here: The Ghost Writer (1979), Exit Ghost (2007), Zuckerman Unbound (1981, all in Chapter 2); and The Counterlife (1986, Chapter 3), American Pastoral (1997, Chapter 4), and The Human Stain (2000, Chapter 5). Roth has two other main “alter-egos”: David Kepesh and Philip Roth. Kepesh, who appears in The Breast (1972), The Professor of Desire (1977), and The Dying Animal (2001), is a professor who regularly shtupps his undergraduates and who seems to be a bit like the id to Nathan’s ego. The Roth books include two important works of alternative reality that I focus on in this project: Operation Shylock (1993) and The Plot Against America (2004, Chapters 3 and 6); the first features an hysterical Roth who confronts a maniac double, while the second features a child Roth who faces the transformation of America into a fascist, antiSemitic state. The other Roth books are The Facts (1988), Deception (1990), and Patrimony (1991), but I do not include detailed analyses of them here. David Brauner describes his extended time with Roth’s writing, “Like any long-term relationship, mine with Roth has had its ups and downs” (Philip Roth, 1). I heartily concur. Ever since I read Portnoy’s Complaint in Murray Baumgarten’s Jewish-American literature course at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the late 1980s, I have been immensely frustrated at times with Roth’s problematic representations of women, with his attacks on feminists, his queasy-making depictions of queer women, and the frequent appearance of underdeveloped characters of color to turn the plot. If I were to review his oeuvre I would say his prose is full of brilliant sentences, turns of phrase, and released neuroses, but he should have redacted and condensed more, and written less. As Roth himself told us at the Roth@80 conference in Newark in honor of his eightieth birthday, “I’m far from liking all the pages I’ve written.” Roth’s announcement in Les inrocks, that “Némésis sera mon dernier livre,” after thirty-one books means that he has been very much in the news of late. Because of this retirement we can now step back and assess all of Roth’s works both in terms of Jewish-American literature and in terms of his formidable contribution to American literature, period. “I’ve gotten such payoffs from being repulsive” (224), says Nathan Zuckerman, while pretending to be a pornographer named Milton Appel (who in the rest of The Anatomy Lesson (1983) is a thinly disguised Irving Howe)

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to Ricky, a cross-dressed limousine driver. Indeed, one could say the same for Roth. Payoffs and recriminations—both in large measure. Roth certainly constructs repulsive characters who declaim against “fucking fascist feminists” (Anatomy Lesson, 222) and who generally try to piss at least some people off. Aimee Pozorski notes in her introduction to a new collection on Roth: “inarguably one of the greatest living American writers, Philip Roth nonetheless provokes in some readers a kind of fury or revulsion” (Critical, 3). There is no one Roth. Roth’s writing has evolved and changed over the course of his voluminous novels—and not in any kind of straight-as-an–arrow arc toward or away from any one thing; his works’ complexity, ambivalence, explosiveness, intensity, repetitions, repugnance, delight, comedy, and wonder are enabled by consistently fantastic sentences often embedded with Sphinxlike riddles that mean Roth cannot be dismissed even if not everyone “likes” his work. There is also no simple position or argument about women, Israel, racism, American Jewry, the Holocaust, war, guilt, or any of the other major, often intersecting themes of this writer, whose curiosity extends in diverse and unquenchable directions. Whereas my younger self used to be able confidently to toss off adjectives about Roth’s work such as “misogynist” and “annoying,” in the course of writing this book I have come to agree with those sager scholars and readers who find much more nuance in his gender politics, in his varied representations of race, and in his frequent repetition of the same characters and themes. I think I am not alone in having gone through this transformation from repulsion with little payoff to payoff with little repulsion. Debra Shostak argues that “Roth’s work can appear as much a prescient critique of misogynist attitudes as a purveyor of them” (“Roth and Gender,” 112). To take an example from popular media, Katie Roiphe, in In Praise of Messy Lives, describes a friend of hers reading Roth’s The Humbling on a subway platform and launching the book into the trash in disgust. Mystified by this performative tossing out, by what she takes to be a “punitive” quality to much of the critique of Roth, and glossing over any possible sexism on the writer’s part, Roiphe describes his work thusly: Roth’s explicit passages walk a fine, difficult line between darkness, humor, and lust, and somehow the male hero emerges from all the comic clauses breathless, glorified. There is in these scenes rage, revenge, and some garden-variety sexism, but they are in their force, in their gale winds, in their intelligence— charismatic, a celebration of the virility of their bookish, yet oddly irresistible, protagonists. (65)

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Roiphe then surveys a smattering of the next generations of writers—David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, and so on, and finds them so awash in a certain inherited feminism that while their sexism is “shrewder and harder to smoke out” (71) their male characters are so terrified of seeming virile that the sex of the Roth–Updike generation has been replaced by cuddling and hand-holding. Roiphe misses the old sex: “it has a mystery and a power, at least. It makes things happen” (73). Another instance from popular media can be found in an interview Marc Maron conducted with Girls writer and producer Lena Dunham. After Dunham (whose mother is Jewish) notes, “I have a lot of anxiety and a lot of neuroses but I try not to inflict those on the people around me,” and then goes on to discuss Woody Allen, Dunham turns to Roth: Dunham: … he’s a goddam animal but I feel more comfortable because Philip Roth has been playing whatever his sick games are with adult women who are prepared for what he’s bringing, and he’s been warning everyone … basically if you’ve ever read a Philip Roth novel and thought “he’d be fun to date” that’s your fucking problem. [Dunham then describes reading all media relating to Roth.] Maron: Oh so you are obsessed with Philip Roth. Dunham: Kind of … I don’t want to be, it’s not an obsession that I want to own up to in my life just because being a feminist who is obsessed with Philip Roth is not like the most clean cut position but I just, his life’s work, his legacy the whole thing are super compelling to me and I was obsessed with Goodbye, Columbus from the minute I read it in seventh grade. Maron: But when you say as a feminist and having that sort of love hate relationship … I mean you understand the dynamics in his books and also in his real life. Dunham: There’s also incredible women like Mia Farrow who are also friends with Philip Roth because he’s smart and he’s amazing company and has the sensibility of a great literary mind while also having the darkness of an enraged dick Jew. Maron: Have you ever dated an enraged dick Jew? Dunham: Oh, like 15 of them.3

Dunham describes the discomfort of a feminist who still finds Roth gripping and complex—combining anger and humor in fresh ways. She can in almost the same breath dismiss him (“enraged dick Jew”) and praise him (“super compelling”). That Dunham and Roiphe both want in different ways to

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recuperate Roth while maintaining something of a feminist stance indicates a shift away from earlier often vituperative critiques that dismissed him outright. Some of the questions that circle around here are as follows: (1) by having Roth’s characters voice such vociferous, over the top claims such as the “feminists [are] so fucking stupid” (Anatomy Lesson, 218), or by writing such gems of caricature as The Monkey in Portnoy’s Complaint, or Sabbath’s Theater’s title character, or the Human Stain’s pinched, secretly racist French feminist Delphine Roux, is he allowing the flux and flow of voice to counter the hegemony of prudish, puritanical repression or does he—and do the texts themselves— ultimately reinforce sexist subject positions? (2) by having a plethora of his characters perform racist diatribes, or be so violently anti-Japanese that the correct pronunciation of Japanese surnames becomes impossible—by crafting these repulsive moments of explosive racism—does Roth open up a space to delve into its causes and thus, talking cure style, use the location of the symptom to cure the problem? Or does he—and do the texts—ultimately reinforce racist stereotypes? (3) How does the aggregation of references to the Holocaust perform throughout the entire corpus? (4) What do the multiple references to and scenes set in Israel mean when considered over the whole span? Taken together, these four central questions are intersectionally related to each other through what I call a continuum between victimization and perpetration. Roth is often careful to lambaste the lambasters of feminism, to have characters decry against the racists, to pose questions about alternative realities embedded in the aftereffects of the Holocaust, and to parade the whole spectrum of impulses regarding Israel. In other words, there is a dialogic openness about Roth’s work; and in this very openness (ironically given how harshly raked over the coals Roth has been for not always portraying Jews in a positive light), some scholars have identified a Jewish/Talmudic sensibility, the rabbis arguing with each other over the centuries as a model for how ultimately unanswerable the questions he raises resolutely remain.4 Zuckerman sums this up in a letter to Roth that closes the latter’s “novelist’s autobiography,” The Facts (1988): “By now what you are is a walking text” (162). *** In a fascinating inversion of the multiple examples discussed in this book of the what-if my-American-ancestors-had-not-emigrated-before-the-war-andI-had-become-a-victim fear, Roth creates a Czech character in a Zuckerman

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novel, The Prague Orgy (1985), who imagines what his father could have become in America. In the novel it is 1976 and a Czech writer in exile, Zdenek Sisovsky, entreats Zuckerman to bring back to the Occident the unpublished manuscripts of his father. When initially told to Zuckerman, his father’s story resonates with that of the celebrated writer Bruno Schulz, but then later in the novel this connection itself is revealed as a fiction within the fiction.5 Sisovsky tells Zuckerman: But in America my father would have been a celebrated writer. Had he emigrated before I was born, had he come to New York City in his thirties, he would have been discovered by some helpful person and published in the best magazines. He would be something more now than just another murdered Jew. For years I never thought of my father, now every minute I wonder what he would make of the America I am seeing. I wonder what America would have made of him. He would be seventy-two. I am obsessed now with this great Jewish writer that might have been. (22)

The opposite imagination of what could have been but isn’t often involves thinking through victimization, but here Roth has Sisovsky imagine salvation in an America that remains enigmatic to him. Unsurprisingly, Roth again resists, surprises, and offers the counter to the counter. Roth frequently explores counterfactual histories; indeed, as we saw in Sisovsky’s ponderings from The Prague Orgy, counterfactuality is a vast theme in Roth’s work and goes hand in hand with a critique of authority that often takes the form of critiquing the authority of history itself. Roth’s oeuvre is also replete with spectral figures that comprise yet another form of counterfactuality. For what intentionally conjures a ghost but the desire to reverse the clock to say more to someone dead? Not only do two of Roth’s novels contain the word “ghost” in the title (Ghost Writer (1979) and Exit Ghost (2007), Chapter 2) but ghosts play major roles in other novels as well. Sabbath’s Theater (1995, Chapter 4) contains extended scenes wherein Sabbath speaks to his dead mother; Sabbath’s lost wife (she disappeared, we never know why/how) Nikki refuses to relinquish the dead body of her mother until she is basically forced to do so. Like resisting the authority of Jewish religiosity, like the diatribes against monogamy imposed by marriage in which Sabbath indulges (and David Kepesh and Alexander Portnoy too), like the distaste for conforming to the norm that so marks Portnoy, the appearance of ghosts is also a rebellion against the norm, in this case a refusal

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to recognize death as an endpoint beyond which communication cannot flow. Roth’s voice, consistently that of an outlier, challenges all boundaries, including that between death and life.6 In The Dying Animal (2001) David Kepesh’s affair with a former undergraduate (he is 62 and she is 24 when the affair begins) comes to a melancholy conclusion when, after a long hiatus during which Kepesh obsesses over his lost lover, she appears on New Year’s Eve, 1999, to tell him that she has breast cancer (and it won’t be lost on anyone who has read The Breast that Kepesh himself was once metamorphosed into a very sensitive breast). Kepesh narrates: We watched the New Year coming in around the world, the mass hysteria of no significance that was the millennial New Year’s Eve celebration. Brilliance flaring across the time zones, and none ignited by bin Laden. Light whirling over nighttime London more spectacular than anything since the splendors of colored smoke billowed up from the Blitz. And the Eiffel Tower shooting fire, a facsimile flame-throwing weapon such as Wernher von Braun might have designed for Hitler’s annihilating arsenal—the historical missile of missiles, the rocket of rockets, the bomb of bombs, with ancient Paris the launching pad and the whole of humanity the target. All evening long, on networks everywhere, the mockery of the Armageddon that we’d been awaiting in our backyard shelters since August 6, 1945. How could it not happen? Even on that very night, especially on that night, people anticipating the worst as though the evening were one long air-raid-drill. The wait for the chain of horrendous Hiroshimas to link in a synchronized destruction the abiding civilizations of the world. It’s now or never. And it never came. (144–145)

Roth here connects Hitlerian destruction with 9/11 and with Hiroshima in a passage that encapsulates the continuum of victim and perpetrator that this book argues is central to his work. Roth would have been keenly aware that Wernher von Braun was among the Nazi scientists recruited by NASA and other American agencies right after the war. These particular perpetrators, rather than being “denazified,” were crucial in developing American arsenals and intelligence, thus forcing us to recognize our complicity in the aftereffects of Nazism. The joyous celebrations in this remarkable passage are shadowed simultaneously by the news of Conseula’s cancer and the transformation of the celebratory into the violent in Roth’s imagination. This shadowing typifies much of Roth’s approach to America: he consistently presents a doubled view of America, the “American dream” image always shielding or masking its very antipode; the skeletons tumbling out of his all-American closets would fill the

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vast Woodlawn Cemetery in Los Angeles. That doubled vision of America very often contains a what-if clause; for example, still in Dying Animal, Kepesh tells his embittered son, “Living in a country like ours, whose key documents are all about emancipation … . It would be another matter if you were living in Nazi occupied Europe” (81). The specter of Nazi occupation, the threat of the Holocaust, haunts numerous characters and heightens the sense of the doubled America. I have chosen the works that have become the case studies for the chapters of this book because they most forcefully support my central argument that some Jewish literature, and these works of Roth especially, manifest a dual anxiety about the scant historical happenstance that prevented one from being a Holocaust victim and also the acute and opposing anxiety that one has the potential to become a perpetrator. It is this dual anxiety that fuels many of the most engaging fictions and counterfactual novels in the period from the late twentieth through the tweens of the twenty-first century. My guess is that no one will be surprised that recent Jewish literature is replete with anxiety about Holocaust victimization; but what will perhaps be surprising is the second part of my central argument—that this anxiety is shadowed by the fear of becoming a perpetrator. As I see it, the stakes of this weigh heavily on contemporary politics because this literature expresses not only the kind of fear of victimization that fuels some hawkish discourses but simultaneously the fear of becoming perpetrators encourages us to rethink. In other words, the evidence in this literature suggests that the etiology of this particular Jewish anxiety can open up a space for seeing the connections among all sides. This is my reading rather than any explicit intention on Roth’s—or other JewishAmerican writer’s part. And this reading materialized after a sustained analysis of Roth’s novels; it is not on the surface of his texts but rather emerges like a photograph being developed slowly before one’s eyes.

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Jewish Anxiety: “Goodbye, Columbus,” “Eli, the Fanatic,” and Portnoy’s Complaint

[T]he Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness. He is not wholly what he is … . He is a white man … . Granted, the Jews are harassed—what am I thinking of? They are hunted down, exterminated, cremated. —Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952 Remember the scenes in Annie Hall (1977) where Alvy Singer (played by Woody Allen) imagines that Grammy Hall sees him as a Hasidic Jew with payes and a beard? Or when Alvy recounts to his friend Max, “I distinctly heard it, he muttered under his breath: Jew?” Or the scene where Alvy tears up his driver’s license when confronted with the goyische masculinity of a tall LAPD cop after smashing into several cars in the parking lot of a sprout restaurant under the blazing sun? Instances of this sort of comic display of Jewish anxiety abound in Roth’s work as much as in Allen’s. As does Roth, Allen also sometimes turns the comedy of such scenes into misery. Consider the following, from Bananas (1971): “My parents … starting beating me on the 23rd of December in 1942, and stopped beating me in the late Spring of 1944 … I was a nervous child.”1 In this book I locate a specific nervousness, a specific “Jewish anxiety” (and I will use the term throughout in at least imaginary scare quotes) around imagining, on the one hand, being a victim of the Nazi genocide and fearing, on the other hand, becoming a perpetrator of antiblack sentiment and/or anti-Arab violence, or other kinds of racism and/or sexism. This anxiety permeates the discomfited continuum between victim and perpetrator, guilt and innocence. In other words while multiple manifestations of Jewish anxiety saturate the comedic landscape, the particular iteration I tease out of Roth’s works revolves around this dual tension. I do not insist on limiting this double-sided fear to Jewishness—but it does seem to be a particularly loaded balance between victimization and

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perpetration when “Israel” (as if this place were a monolith) is so readily and falsely put into conversation with the former victimizers of European Jewry.

“Goodbye, Columbus” The racial dynamics in virtually all of Roth’s subsequent works are evident in his early novella, “Goodbye, Columbus” (1959).2 I am taking it as a given that the unmarked and unremarked whiteness of the overwhelming majority of Roth’s (and most white writers’ characters) is also about race even though it may not be explicitly so framed.3 Therefore, race figures in Roth’s oeuvre even in all the places where there is no overt discourse about race (and there are plenty of places where race figures as the subject). As Dean Franco puts it, “racialized identities, social race, and the gravity of public assumptions about race are central to Roth’s tales of maturation, acculturation, and postmodern escape (and return)” (“Introduction,” 83). But before moving into the analysis of “Goodbye, Columbus,” let’s take a step back and consider how race creates meaning in this context. As Karen Brodkin and others have argued, an historical shift moved the discourse around Jewishness from race to ethnicity and perhaps even more so from ethnicity to religiosity or spirituality. Yet, of course, it is crucial to remember in this context that Jewishness was thoroughly racialized and that this very racialization was a key component to Nazi arguments in favor of genocide. In other words, the sorts of near—but always uncomfortable and never complete (or realizable)—identifications epitomized in “Goodbye, Columbus” that Roth’s Jewish characters often feel toward his black characters (and we are almost never privy to the subjectivities or streams of consciousness of these characters of color) have a history that helps to make sense of why there should be this fragile commonality between black and Jew. Because it is relatively recently that, in Karen Brodkin’s phrase, Jews became white folks, these uneasy identifications would have been less uneasy when both groups were considered racialized. Roth, in a non-fictional voice, attempting to defend himself against attacks from Jewish community members and leaders who accused him of being “dangerous, dishonest, and irresponsible” as well as “anti-Semitic and ‘selfhating’ ” (Reading, 149), invoked an analogy among himself and Ellison and Baldwin that helps to unpack the modes of attempted identity between Jews

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and blacks that we find in “Goodbye, Columbus.” In “Writing About Jews” (1963), Roth responds (quite hostilely) to a critique launched by a rabbi in the following terms: What he fails to see is that the stereotype as often arises from ignorance as from malice; deliberately keeping Jews out of the imagination of Gentiles, for fear of the bigots and their stereotyping minds, is really to invite the invention of stereotypical ideas. A book like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, for instance, seems to me to have helped many whites who are not anti-Negro, but who do hold Negro stereotypes, to surrender their simpleminded notions about Negro life. I doubt, however, that Ellison, describing as he does not just the squalor Negroes must put up with but certain bestial aspects of his Negro characters as well, had converted one Alabama redneck or one United States senator over to the cause of desegregation; nor could the novels of James Baldwin cause Governor Wallace to conclude anything more than that Negroes are just as hopeless as he’s always known them to be. (Reading, 166)

Of course, written in 1963, Roth’s point is well taken; a rose-colored representation of any given group does us no good. But it fascinates me that Roth chose to parallel himself with Ellison and Baldwin and to cast JewishAmerican writing in with the problematics of “African-American” writers who have to contend with those hyphenated labels even though they might each prefer to be termed an “American writer.” Franco argues that Roth and the other Jewish-American writers he focuses on “expose the cynicism, limitations, blind spots, and conceptual aporias that nonetheless advance into mainstream political claims for group-based rights and recognition” (Race, 4). This is perhaps most obviously true in the case of Roth’s The Human Stain, which, as I argue in Chapter 5, offers an extended argument against the very possibility of groupthink, but this question of group-based rights can be seen in prototype form in the thwarted attempts “Goodbye”’s Neil makes to identify with the sketchily drawn black characters in this signature novella. “Goodbye, Columbus” traces the beginning and end of a love affair between Neil Klugman, a librarian at the public library in Newark from humble immigrant roots, and Brenda Patimkin, the Radcliffe-attending daughter of a well-heeled sink magnate who relocated his family from Newark to the swankier Short Hills, New Jersey. From the beginning, race matters. When Neil phones Brenda after meeting her on a rare trip to the Country Club (Neil did not move in those circles), Brenda asks him what he looks like: Neil: “I’m … dark.”

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Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth

Brenda: “Are you a Negro?” Neil: “No.” (7, ellipses in original). Thus from the novella’s inception Neil identifies as dark … but white, and Brenda again thinks in explicitly racial terms when she asks him to describe his countryclub member cousin, Doris. Neil: “She’s dark—”. Brenda: “Is she—” (12). In this second iteration Roth removes the ellipses and thus the hesitancy around the descriptor “dark” but has Neil cut Brenda off before she can ask, for a second time, if someone is a “Negro.” Now, given that this is 1959 in New Jersey, we, of course, have to historicize the racial understanding of the white characters. I conjecture that Brenda would not have agreed to date him had Neil been black (and, of course, most likely Neil would not have been admitted to the country club as a guest rather than a worker had he so been). Interestingly, this appears as the first moment in the text wherein Roth has Neil identify partially with blackness. Two other scenes of identification mark this novella as centrally concerned with race even though, at the level of plotting, only peripherally present. As we will also see in Portnoy, a black maid becomes a minor character in “Goodbye.” Here’s Carlota’s introduction: “a Navaho-faced Negro who had little holes in her ears but no earrings” (21). Neil describes Brenda’s mother in the same paragraph: “purple eyes, her dark, and large, persuasive frame, she gave me the feeling of some captive beauty, some wild princess, who has been tamed and made the servant to the king’s daughter—who was Brenda” (21). Interestingly, Mrs. Patimkin figures here as “wild” and a “servant,” like Carlota, to Brenda. Roth favors these sorts of racialized descriptions. In The Dying Animal (2001), Roth consistently describes Kepesh’s Cuban lover Consuela as “pale” (3) or having “skin of a very white color” (18) and in Sabbath’s Theater he depicts one of the many incidental and underdeveloped black characters as “part Indian … Admixture of races” (740–741; more on this in Chapter 4). As was the case with the alignment of Mrs. Patimkin and Carlota, these moments all feature an attention to the hybridity of race. “Goodbye, Columbus” includes a ridiculous moment during which Roth has Neil perceive Carlota’s labor as sheer fruit-filled fun: First, “Carlota appeared on the back steps, eating a peach and holding a pail of garbage in her free hand” (29) and then: I was always amazed at how Carlota’s work never seemed to get in the way of her life. She made household chores seem like illustrative gestures of whatever it was she was singing, even, if as now, it was “I get a kick out of you.” She moved from the oven to the automatic dishwasher—she pushed buttons,

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turned dials … and from time to time picked a big black grape out of a bunch that lay on the sink. She chewed and chewed, humming all the time … I felt a kinship with one who, like me, had been partially wooed and won on Patimkim fruit. (77)

All of these moments betray Neil’s self-declared association with this woman who labors all day for a white family; as he tells us, “I felt like Carlota; no, not even as comfortable as that” (40). As if the class and financial distance between he and the Patimkims could be mapped onto racial divides—particularly in late 1950s America. Presumably, Roth satirizes Neil as naive, glib, and fruit-filled in his understanding of labor. The fact that Neil “feels a kinship” for Carlota because they both enjoy the literally overflowing fruits of the Patimkim home goes entirely unreciprocated by Carlota; similarly, in telling us that he does not even feel as comfortable as the maid, Roth betrays Neil’s immense lack of understanding of racial and class divides; Neil may not be quite as fancy as the Patimkins but he is still perceived as white and this would obviously have made all the difference in this context.4 Roth introduces an incidental character, a “small colored boy” (31) who stands in front of one of the lions of the library and growls at the statue. It would not take much to unpack the rich symbolism here: lions, native to Africa but encased in bronze/marble to symbolize both Occidental learning and imperial mastery over savagery being imitated by a small boy who likely descended from slaves imitating the very growl imperiled by ecoimperialism. When Neil first meets the “lion tamer” (33), the child asks him, “where’s the heart section?” (33), by which he means the art section but Neil can’t understand him because he had the “thickest sort of southern Negro dialect” (34). After directing him to the art section, Neil then has to confront a racist coworker, John, who wonders what the child could be doing in the art section for so long and requests that someone check on him because “You know the way they treat the housing projects we give them” (35). Neil challenges him on this and then when John repeats and sexualizes his skepticism Neil replies, “Don’t worry, Johnny, they’re the ones who’ll get warts on their dirty little hands” (35). As those familiar with Portnoy’s Complaint and Sabbath’s Theater especially but also The Dying Animal, The Plot Against America, and many other Roth works will know, the main characters are very often prone to copious masturbation. By having Neil evoke the fear of warts emerging on the hands of masturbators as signs of sin, Roth plays with the ridiculousness of this type of fear-mongering discourse. When Neil ascends

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Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth

to the third floor to locate the boy, he describes him like this: “He was very black and shiny, and the flesh of his lips did not so much appear to be a different color as it looked to be unfinished and awaiting another coat” (36). Like a painting, then, the boy gazes in wonder at the paintings of Gauguin. This moment when Neil mocks his coworker and tries to stanch his racism forms part of Roth’s elaboration of this identification with the art-loving child. Finding the boy immersed in a large Gauguin book, when asked, Neil explains to him about the French painter and his Tahitian subjects. The kid wants to know: “Is he a white man or a colored man?” (37), and when Neil tells him he replies that he knew it all along. And then Roth has Neil see everything through Gauguin-tinted glasses: “I started up to Short Hills, which I could see now, in my mind’s eye, at dusk, rose-colored, like a Gauguin stream” (38). Neil’s life becomes limited to “Brenda and the little colored kid who liked Gauguin” (47); the kid would appear each day at the library and head “up the long marble stairs that led to Tahiti” (47). Neil breaks all sorts of rules to keep the book available to the child who does not want to take it home because “At home somebody dee-stroy it” (60). Of course, this brief sentence conjures up a chaotic abode that respects neither art nor books; in other words it confirms a negative stereotype in much the same way as Roth was considering stereotypes about Jews in “Writing About Jews.” Neil as protector, worried about the kid’s book being taken from him, is in a patronizing position toward him, but also seems to care in a way that demonstrates some of the good liberal sentiment that we will see Portnoy also exhibits. Neil has a telling dream about the child: With me on the ship was the little colored kid from the library—I was the captain and he my mate, and we were the only crew members. For a while it was a pleasant dream; we were anchored in the harbor of an island in the Pacific and it was very sunny. Up on the beach there were beautiful bareskinned Negresses, and none of them moved; but suddenly we were moving, our ship, out of the harbor, and the Negresses moved slowly down to the shore and began to throw leis at us and say “Goodbye, Columbus … goodbye, Columbus … goodbye … ” and though we did not want to go, the little boy and I, the boat was moving and there was nothing we could do about it, and he shouted at me that it was all my fault and I shouted it was his for not having a library card, but we were wasting our breath, for we were further and further from the island, and soon the natives were nothing at all. (74–75)

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This dream betrays an attempted but eventually thwarted identification between Neil and the kid from the library that nonetheless maintains the power differential between them; Neil remains in charge as “the captain” (recalling Conrad’s doubled captain from The Secret Sharer which Roth alludes to in “Eli”). The association between them intensifies when Neil too, like the boy, repeatedly gazing at the reproductions of Gauguin’s paintings, gazes at the still “beautiful bare-skinned Negresses.” Because it is a dream Columbus never explored, the Pacific and these “Negresses” would, of course, have been the Polynesians romanticized by Gauguin.5 In the dream, as they reluctantly move away, Brenda’s brother’s LP from his college football days that titles the novella appears, thus switching Neil’s identification effectively from black to white. Within the dream, both Neil and the kid from the library must leave their fantastical worlds: that is, Neil’s fantasy of sustaining a relationship outside of his class and the boy’s fantasy of a Gauguinian rose-tinted world far from the poverty that marks the Newark he inhabits. Neil never sees the boy again, after this dream. He does wonder, though, if he will encounter him among the “squalid” (90) houses he views when he visits Mr. Patimkin at his sink factory—where black workers who live in the formerly Jewish area of Newark perform the physical labor while the white (Jewish) bosses yell at them and make phone calls. The narrator describes the transformation in Newark: “instead of Yiddish, one heard the shouts of Negro children playing at Willie Mays” (90). Neil finally dismisses the boy from his dream when he notes that the Gauguin book was eventually checked out to a gentleman who had multiply requested it and he wonders what the child’s reaction might have been to the loss of his favorite tome and its attendant fantasies. But then Neil tosses out a comment that sounds just as racist as that of the coworker with whom he had formerly argued: “What had probably happened was that he had given up on the library and gone back to playing Willie Mays in the streets. He was better off, I thought. No sense carrying dreams of Tahiti in your head, if you can’t afford the fare” (120). In other words, whereas Eli, as I discuss below, demonstrates the continuum between perpetrator and victim by formally being moved from one to the other throughout the course of the text, Neil takes the opposite path: he transfers from the position of identification with the victims of oppression as represented by his attempted alignments with the child in the library and Carlota, but he ends up becoming a perpetrator of the very racism he had formerly decried. Within the structuration of the story as Roth lays it

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Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth

out for us, the world of Gauguin aligns with the paradise of Brenda and her upper-crust milieu, whereas the boy in the library stands in for the workingclass family firmly rooted in Newark and symbolized by Neil’s Aunt Gladys with her stereotypical recent-immigrant dialect and her fears that Neil tries to reach beyond his class-designated station by consorting with Brenda.6 That Brenda’s mother had been described as a “wild princess” underscores this structural alignment between her world and that in Gauguin’s paintings. When Neil eschews the boy by mentally tossing him into the ghetto where he can play at being Willie Mays (while never achieving this either) and cease dreaming of Tahiti, he breaks the attempted identification and moves through the continuum of victim to perpetrator. Roth’s little-discussed novel Letting Go (1962), which he published after Goodbye Columbus, echoes in interesting ways the underground conversation about race epitomized in both “Goodbye” and Portnoy. Letting Go tells the story of Gabe Wallach and his letting go of all sorts of things, including a long-term but never quite realized crush on Libby, the wife of his colleague Paul. Gabe has a relationship with Martha Reganhart, a divorcée who has two small children, and at the soirée during which they meet, Pat Spigliano, the wife of one of Gabe’s colleagues, explains that she had to tell her daughter that “ ‘she couldn’t kiss little colored children for the same reason that she couldn’t marry her brother. And I believe she understood. There is a Negro problem in the neighborhood’ ” (65). Martha echoes this with “There’s a Negro little-boy problem” (66) which Roth then not only repeats but flags as the “first words I [i.e. Gabe] ever heard her speak” and they were followed by “What a dumb, silly impossible bitch.” In keeping with the trope of characters arguing over race that we will see flares up powerfully in Portnoy, Martha rails against the silly racism (by using a misogynistic slur) of Pat during this inaugural conversation between Martha and Gabe. The discourse on race here—avowed racism and its disavowal—never emerges as a major theme; but Roth highlights it to the extent that their shared antiracism in effect brings Gabe and Martha together. A conversation about race appears again in Letting Go around Martha’s housemate, Sissy, who had been married to an impotent man (who we might assume is white since Roth does not mention his race explicitly) and who “in her continuing search for the exotic” (197) (note that Roth, through Gabe here, labels blackness “exotic”) “was involved with Blair Stott, who was a Negro about one and a half neuroses away from heroin” (197–198). Blair is a minor character in the novel and not

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much depth is granted to him apart from his supposed sharp contrast to Sissy’s impotent ex-husband. A few other black characters float in and out of the novel; “behind the lunch counter the Negro girl who ladled out the food was preparing an elaborate turkey sandwich for herself ” (220–221); then, when a sick Gabe was supposed to be leaving Martha’s house before the children awoke, the “battered face of an old Negro woman” (254) inadvertently discovers him in her room. In another scene that echoes this, when Paul and Libby, forever hard up, shop at the Catholic Salvage for the furnishings that Libby ends up hating and resenting, Paul tests several mattresses until a “Negro man who walked by carrying an old console-model radio” rouses him (329). Then, when an unexpected visitor from the adoption agency through which Libby and Paul (some years after an abortion) try to adopt a child calls on Libby and notices the defunct bulb in the hallway, Libby illogically associates this with the presence of black families in the building: “ ‘You see,’ Libby said, ‘there are two Negro families in the building and—’ And what! I don’t have anything against Negroes! But the agency does— the agency—Why do I keep bringing up Negroes all the time!” (334). Roth never explains Libby’s strange blurting out about the presence of black residents—and there is perhaps a resonance with Roth’s own frequent turns to characters of color here—and we are left to wonder what motivates this association of hers and what Rosen, the adoption agency visitor, makes of it. Keeping in mind that their shared antiracism brings Martha and Gabe together, within the structure of the novel it is also interesting that Libby, who never hooks up with Gabe, associates decay with blackness. Like the woman behind the lunch counter, whose race is mentioned for no discernible reason, when Paul connects in New York with his eccentric uncle Asher, “they could both see into the change booth, where a Negro was reading a book” (445–446); again, there is no reason for this, within the context of the novel. Yet again, black people appear as backdrop; while Sid and Gabe sit on the front porch, “several Negro women with shopping bags in their arms were chatting on the porch” (468); then, when another minor character, Theresa, relinquishes her baby to Gabe so that Libby and Paul can adopt her, “A taxi immediately swung up the crescent drive; I saw first the face of the driver, a Negro, and then Sid in the back seat” (477). Sid appears behind the driver, almost like a white shadow. Letting Go, then, is principally not a novel about race and yet, as the above examples have underscored, these incidental black characters often initiate important moments in the plot and/or reveal crucial aspects of the more fleshed-out white characters. Sandwiched between “Goodbye, Columbus” and

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Portnoy, this early, not particularly innovative or brilliant, novel nonetheless highlights the ever-presence of the question of race and its effects in the Rothian universe.

“Eli, the Fanatic” “Eli, the Fanatic” (1957, Commentary, republished in Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959)) features a secular Jewish character, Eli, who at first resists and then plays at becoming his supposed nemesis, an Hasidic Jew who has moved into the neighborhood against the wishes of the assimilated Jewish population of Woodenton. “Eli” contains the kernel of what would become most of Roth’s enduring themes: anxiety, psychoanalysis, fanaticism, counterfactual reality, ghosts, madness, passing, and doubling. And, as happened repeatedly in Letting Go, “Eli” contains a totemic black character, plunked into the narrative and marked racially without ever being fully realized. “Eli” also showcases Roth flexing his anti-establishment muscles and proceeding to upend all sorts of taboo subjects, especially, in this case, the vast gap between assimilated and Hasidic Jews. Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (2007) also treated this disjuncture between secular and Orthodox Jews (and/or assimilated Jews and Haredim). That novel, a counterfactual history, narrates the travails of the Jews relocated to Sitka in the Alaska Territory, a new Jewish homeland in the tundra that provided an uncomfortable sanctuary from the genocide of World War II but was then rife with tension between secular Jews and Haredim. Chabon’s protagonist, the hard-boiled detective Meyer Landsman, while investigating the murder of Mendel Shpilman (believed by many to be the potential messiah), is caught in the crosshairs of the division between the secular Jews of Alaska and the “black hats”: “The truth is, blackhat Jews make Landsman angry, and they always have. He finds that it is a pleasurable anger, rich with layers of envy, condescension, resentment, and pity” (102). Chabon often mines Roth for inspiration (he cites “Goodbye, Columbus,” for example, as one of the models for The Mysteries of Pittsburgh) and here he may be nodding to “Eli” in so far as he explores the friction between these conflicting Jewish groups.7 The divergent landscapes between assimilated Jews and Haredim are vastly complicated; and “assimilated” Jews often disagree about everything as much as the various Haredi groups disagree

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about everything from Israel to life choices. But as he does in “Eli,” Roth would go on to brave the eye of several storms while tossing out pieties of all stripes. Set in the aftermath of World War II, “Eli, the Fanatic” takes the form of a tightly wrought short story rich in metaphoric detail recounting the predicament of Eli Peck, a lawyer with a history of nervous breakdowns, who must reluctantly try to convince a newly arrived Yeshiva to go elsewhere. Eli feels the requests of the town pressing in on him, symbolized in the weight of his briefcase which, on other occasions, is “like a feather” but now “felt so heavy packed with the grievances, vengeances, and schemes of his clients” (252) to effect the removal of the Hasidic community. From the outset to the conclusion Roth emphasizes the similarities between the Hasidim and blackness in telling ways—not only because of their traditional black garb. The palette of the short story turns on black and white in stark contrast. The opening line is this: “Leo Tzuref stepped out from back of a white column to welcome Eli Peck” (249). Eli then moves into a “dark” and “dim” (249) room only to be eventually led out through the “dark tomb of a corridor” (252). When the head of the Yeshiva, Leo Tzuref, turns his back to Eli he misperceives “the black circle on the back of his head” and concludes, “the crown of his head was missing!” only to quickly realize that it was Tzuref ’s skullcap (250). On the one hand, Roth uses Eli’s misunderstanding to betray the depth of his secularism; yet, coupled with Eli’s second misperception, when he views another Hasid sleeping under a tree, he at first can only see “a deep hollow of blackness” (253) thus both enriching and prefiguring the importance of this figure of blackness to the story, and in both cases aligning blackness with absence. With all these figures of darkness here, Eli hears the refugee children playing and finds that “The dusk made the children’s game look like a tribal dance” (253) and also that their speech sounds like a “mysterious babble” (250). Tzuref, it turns out, is, along with his eighteen charges, a DP (displaced person) from Germany; in other words, his whole community survived the Holocaust. These victims of Nazism are now subject to discrimination from the secular Jewish community of Woodenten. As Eric Sundquist notes, “Beginning with ‘Defender of the Faith’ and ‘Eli, the Fanatic’ in the 1950s and continuing through Nemesis in 2010, there is hardly any aspect of the American reaction to the Holocaust that Roth has not woven into his fiction” (231, “Philip Roth”). The fanaticism of the title appears first when Ted, one of the townsfolk, vociferously opposed to the presence of the Hasidic group, exclaims, “Goddam

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fanatics” (258). Eli’s pregnant wife, Miriam, an analyst, labels Eli “neurotic” (258) (which he repeats when describing himself to himself “His goddam luck he had to be neurotic!” (261)). And Roth underscores neurosis by stressing the Jewish anxiety suffered by the assimilated Jews in a letter Eli writes to Tzuref: Woodenton is a progressive suburban community whose members, both Jewish and Gentile, are anxious that their families live in comfort and beauty and serenity … . Woodenton, as you may not know, has long been the home of well-to-do Protestants. It is only since the war that Jews have been able to buy property here, and for Jews and Gentiles to live beside each other in amity. For this adjustment to be made, both Jews and Gentiles alike have had to give up some of their more extreme practices in order not to threaten or offend the other. Certainly such amity is to be desired. Perhaps if such conditions had existed in prewar Europe, the persecution of the Jewish people, of which you and those 18 children have been victims, could not have been carried out with such success—in fact, might not have been carried out at all. (261–262)

I cite this remarkable passage at length because it demonstrates that Roth had been concerned with questions of victimization and perpetration almost since the beginning of his writing. That Roth has Eli “blame the victim” by shockingly suggesting that had the Jews of Europe assimilated (as, indeed so many had) then the Nazi genocide might not have happened accentuates this early concern with the continuum between victim and perpetrator. Those American Jews who Eli represents fear as their alternative reality victimization in Europe, yet, even while recognizing the DP’s experiences as victims, Eli insists on making them agents in their own destruction because they refused to “make amity” with the Gentiles through assimilation. As Hana Wirth-Nesher notes of “Eli,” “in the wake of the Holocaust, his American-Jewish community has no compunctions about putting the blame for anti-Semitism on the victims themselves” (“Resisting Allegory,” 104).8 Roth further underlines Eli’s “aggressiveness” (a word Miriam had also used to describe him) by creating a scene in which he frightens the Yeshiva children: “He reached out with his briefcase as if to stop them, but they were gone so fast all he saw moving was a flock of skullcaps” (263). The briefcase had already been introduced as a loaded object metaphorizing the weight of the complaints against these victims so its appearance here highlights its symbolism while it also seems such an inappropriate way to stop scared and traumatized children from running away. Eli tells Tzuref, “I didn’t mean to frighten them” and Tzuref replies, “They’re scared, so they run” (263). Roth associates Eli with criminality

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when, after a comedic scene during an exchange of legal correspondence, Eli thinks to himself in an ironic mode: “It was a crime to keep carbons!” (264). Tzuref ’s insistence that the gentleman in the black suit be allowed to keep his garb includes both the fact that he has “Gornisht” (264, Yiddish for “absolutely nothing”) and that “a medical experiment they performed on him yet!” (264). Thus, Tzuref explicitly underlines the man in the black suit’s status as a survivor in order to get Eli and the assimilated Jews of Woodenten to relent in their campaign against these new religious survivor arrivals. And, if we were in any doubt, in Eli’s next letter to Tzuref, he spells it out, “I’m not a Nazi who would drive eighteen children, who are probably frightened at the sight of a firefly, into homelessness” (274). As Eli continues to both reflect on his own connection to these other Jews and to wrestle with the likes of Ted who keep repeating the dismissive word “fanatic” to describe the Hasidim, he thinks peace was what “his parents had asked for in the Bronx, and his grandparents in Poland, and theirs in Russia or Austria, or wherever else they’d fled to or from” (279–280). By using the word “Nazi” here Roth invites us to reflect upon Jewish innocence and guilt, victimization and perpetration. For just as Eli tries to rid the town of those visibly Jewish at the behest of assimilated Jews, he recognizes that his ancestors would have similarly been compelled to flee from anti-Semitic violence and contend with prejudicial treatment. The denouement of the story arrives when Eli dons the black suit surrendered by the unnamed gentleman after he “assimilates” by wearing Eli’s green J. Press suit. Eli puts on Hasidic garb left on his doorstep and proceeds to prance maniacally around for all to see. When Eli first witnesses the man in his suit he views him as an “apparition” (282), thus prefiguring the many ghosts and specters haunting Roth’s texts. While Eli’s sanity seems to unravel from the garment exchange, the Rothian motif of the minor black character suddenly appears, “A Negro woman spreading some strange gospel … knocked at the front, rapped the windows, and finally scraped a half-dozen pamphlets under the back door” (284). This “strange gospel” resonates with the “hocuspocus abracadabra stuff ” (277). The “Negro woman” echoes the blackness that Eli associates so strongly and iteratively with Hasidim. Roth revels in the stark contrast between the “white, white, terribly white skin” (284–285) of Eli’s body and the “eclipse” (285) that metaphorizes the blackness of the man’s suit: But black soon sorted from black, and shortly there was the glassy black of lining, the course black of trousers, the dead black of fraying threads, and in the center of the mountain of black: the hat. He picked the box from the

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Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth doorstep and carried it inside. For the first time in his life he smelled the color of blackness: a little stale, a little sour, a little old … . (285)

Certainly this blackness is not exactly racialized, and yet does it only trope religious fanaticism? Sure enough, enticed by all this blackness, when Eli puts on the Hasidic garb, he “stood draped in black, with a little white underneath, before the full-length mirror” (286). Eventually, the mirror reflects, in Eli’s fevered imagination, the Hasidic man and himself, as they stand confusedly confronting each other in each other’s clothes: “And now, looking at himself in the mirror, he was momentarily uncertain as to who was tempting who into what” (286). The scene strongly resembles a similar one in Conrad’s Secret Sharer (1909) when the captain faces his double. Given that Roth mentions Conrad a myriad of times in many novels he likely straightforwardly conjures Conrad here. “And then Eli had the strange notion that he was two people. Or that he was one person wearing two suits … . They stared long at one another” (289). Conrad renders this moment: “The shadowy, dark head, like mine, seemed to nod imperceptibly above the ghostly gray of my sleeping suit. It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a somber and immense mirror” (27). Roth mines Conrad for the dark, ghostly imagery and for the sense of the double-as-mirror. As I discuss in Chapter 3, the crucial figure of the double highlights the sense of the continuum between victim and perpetrator because the doubles are often bad-boy inverted images of the originals. Returning now to “Eli,” because the Hasidic gentleman is in the middle of painting when Eli catches up with him, the black-and-white symbolism expands even further when “white paint spattered both of them” (290) and then Eli realizes that “those black clothes [felt] as if they were the skin of his skin” (293), thus focusing Eli’s transformation from white to black and prefiguring the many thwarted identifications that Roth’s Jewish characters will find with his minimally rendered black characters. All the onlookers to Eli’s transformation instantly assume that he is having a “nervous breakdown”: “Everybody in Coach House Road was aware that Eli Peck, the nervous young attorney with the pretty wife, was having a breakdown. Everybody except Eli Peck. He knew what he did was not insane, though he felt every inch of its strangeness” (293). Roth concludes this rich and fascinating short story by having Eli, visiting his newborn son, being taken for crazy because of his Hasidic outfit, then being knocked out by an injection by those quintessential

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men in white coats. The story ends thusly: “The drug calmed his soul, but did not touch it down where the blackness had reached” (298). The coloration of the story from white to black is very exact throughout the text; remember that the beginning included the image of Tzuref (in black) surprising Eli by stepping out from a white column and the text ends with the blackness associated with Tzuref and the other survivors now taking over Eli. Whereas he had initially terrified the children with his briefcase stuffed full of complaints against them, when he returns to the Yeshiva dressed in the black suit, “the children played on; tipping the black hat, he mumbled, ‘Shhh … shhhh,’ and they hardly seemed to notice” (289, ellipses in original). “Eli, the Fanatic” perfectly illustrates the counterintuitive approach to the uncomfortable continuum of victim and perpetrator that forms the focus this book because Eli moves from a perpetrator of anti-Hasidic sentiment to a victim of the very assimilated Jews he formerly represented. An intuitive, and unsurprising, observation about much Jewish-American fiction would be that this literature often manifests an anxiety about what could have been had the “-American” hyphenated term never modified the “Jewish” antecedent— what could have happened had one’s ancestors not emigrated to America before World War II. Would one have been murdered? Ample anxieties about victimization exist in this body of literature. But perhaps one might also ask, would I have collaborated? I make a perhaps surprising, counterintuitive argument here: that another anxiety saturates much Jewish-American literature and finds in Roth an exquisite nucleus. This second anxiety takes the form of worry over becoming either a perpetrator of anti-Arab violence or of American racism, another alternative reality or counterfactual history wherein the inheritors of victimization during the Nazi genocide imagine becoming perpetrators of hatred. This dual anxiety is limited neither to Jewish-American literature nor to Roth’s fiction; but I have chosen to focus on Roth because, as encapsulated in “Eli,” his capacious oeuvre supplies ample evidence for this dual anxiety and because his work is ripe for a new reading that takes these concerns into account.

Portnoy’s Complaint Any book about Jewish anxiety cannot help but include the urtext on the topic, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969).9 The novel takes the conceit of a monologue

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delivered in the second person to Dr. Spielvogel by Alexander Portnoy, and you may recognize my faux dictionary definition from the beginning of the introduction as a mock-up of the opening gambit Roth offers at the outset of the satire wherein he constructs a faux DSM definition named after his titular character. Dr. Spielvogel is based loosely on Roth’s analyst, Dr. Hans Kleinschmidt, whom Claudia Roth Pierpont describes as “a German-born Jew who had fled the Nazis in 1933, completed medical school in Italy, gone to Jerusalem in 1939, and, finally, immigrated to the United States in 1946” (49).10 In other words, the analyst to whom the whole novel is addressed and who gets the closing lines is himself a refugee who chose the United States over Israel as his exilic homeland. In Proustian fashion the novel zigzags through the indelible imprints left on Portnoy by his childhood in Weequahic, New Jersey, where he was raised by the caricatures Jack and Sophie Portnoy, to his life as a 33-year-old “Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity for the City of New York” (110), where, bucking the trend among the staid Jewish milieu of his boyhood to marry and produce Jewish offspring, he conducts a series of affairs with shiksas and thus endlessly vexes his worried parents. The plot isn’t so much a plot as a series of reminiscences layering childhood memories onto tales of these liaisons with women whom he neither loves nor respects. This pseudo-confessional novel is definitely the funniest thing Roth has ever written; indeed, as Roth discusses in the film Philip Roth: Unmasked and as Bernard Avishai notes in his breezy book about Portnoy, it “grew out of a kind of stand-up routine” (43). Roth’s satirical humor leaves no character unscathed, least of all Portnoy himself who comes off as a schmuck who has no appreciation for all that his parents offered him, and especially seems grim at the end when he attempts to rape an Israeli woman who reminds him of his mother! Portnoy falls asleep each night, after having jerked off to Freud’s complete works, and it takes no unpacking to ferret out the oedipal overtones or the fear of castration. Portnoy’s Complaint is replete with evidence that bears out my central argument that Jewish anxiety as manifest in these texts is a dual anxiety of what could have been had the Jewish-American character, Alexander Portnoy, not had ancestors who emigrated to America, and simultaneously and in direct tension with this, what kind of perpetrator (racist? anti-Arab?) one can become. As David Biale notes regarding the hostile reception that met Portnoy’s Complaint, “There were critics who saw in Roth nothing short of a Jewish self-hater who had resurrected the Nazi charge of Rassenschande, that

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the Jews lust after and defile pure Aryan girls” (2). As we saw in “Eli,” Roth has Eli compare himself to a Nazi who could be so heartless as to chuck out a group of survivors. The flip side of the fear of oppression—the anxiety around becoming a perpetrator—is ever present here. Early on in the novel, Portnoy tells us that “Disaster, you see, is never far from my mind” (20) and this is perhaps explained by the question his sister Hannah poses to him: “Do you know, she asks me, where you would be now if you had been born in Europe instead of America?” (77). The fundamental anxiety that underlies a panoply of Jewish anxieties and neuroses as found in much Jewish-American fiction appears again—disaster imminent, the Holocaust evident. As Steven Milowitz argues, Roth’s works “point to a central obsessional issue, the issue of the Holocaust and its impact on twentieth-century American life” (ix). Bearing this argument out, Hannah continues, “Dead. Gassed, or shot, or incinerated, or butchered, or buried alive. Do you know that? And you could have screamed all you wanted that you were not a Jew …” (77). Portnoy responds to this, with italics indicating his typically enraged state: “I suppose the Nazis are an excuse for everything that happens in this house!” (77). The childhood scenes in Portnoy’s Complaint are set just before and then during the war so it makes perfect sense that Roth highlights the family’s deep anxiety about the Holocaust. At the time of writing, around 1967, the culture industry had not yet caught up with American Jewish consciousness of the Nazi genocide. In another example of a counterfactual reality, Portnoy looks to Naomi, the Sabra he encounters in Israel (where he is forever “unhinged and hysterical” (259)), “for signs of the American girl she would have been had her parents never left Philadelphia” (259); the alternative reality that Hannah poses is that of being murdered in the Holocaust had his grandparents remained in Europe whereas the counterfactual reality Portnoy imagines Naomi having is that of a (neurotic and anxious?) American Jewish woman. The vicissitudes of emigration and the confusions of Diaspora remain unsettled.11 But strikingly, the obverse counterfactual is posed because here we have the two sides of the anxiety. Portnoy lies to his mother, Sophie, telling her that the reason he spends so much time in the bathroom with the door locked is because of a stomach ailment rather than the need for privacy for his endless masturbation. Trying to divine the source of this ailment, Sophie quizzes him about all the horrible things he might have ingested: “Hamburgers,” she says bitterly, just as she might say “Hitler” (33). The evocation of “Hitler” here is at once a comedic hyperbole meant to underscore the level of Sophie

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Portnoy’s paranoia about what her son takes into his body and a revelation of the proximity of the Holocaust to the consciousness of these characters. In The Facts, Roth remembers: What I can still recall from my Hebrew School education is that is that whatever else it may have been for my generation to grow up Jewish in America, it was usually entertaining. I don’t think that an English Jewish child would necessarily have felt that way and, of course, for millions of Jewish children east of England, to grow up Jewish was tragic. And that we seemed to understand without even needing to be told. (122)

Sophie Portnoy could be an emblematic study in Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, not least in the important scene wherein she runs copious amounts of scalding water on the dishes from which Dorothy, their black housekeeper (13), had just eaten. Ania Loomba, in describing the attempts by Dalit groups in India to be included in the United Nations Conference Against Racism (Durban, 2001), as people who have suffered caste rather than strictly racial bias, chillingly reports that Dalits “were regarded as so polluted that even their shadows were understood as contaminating those they fell upon” (511). Sophie Portnoy doesn’t quite go this far but her purifying rituals resonate with the sense of pollution described by Loomba. Portnoy, speaking through the (imagined, hyperbolized) consciousness of his mother, traces her desire to separate the “danger” of goyische eating habits from the “purity” of kashrut: Let them (if you know who I mean) gorge themselves upon anything and everything that moves, no matter how odious and abject the animal, no matter how grotesque or shmutzig or dumb the creature in question happens to be. Let them eat eels and frogs and pigs and crabs and lobsters; let them eat vulture, let them eat ape-meat and skunk if they like—a diet of abominable creatures well befits a breed of mankind so hopelessly shallow and empty-headed as to drink, to divorce, and to fight with their fists. (81)

In keeping with the intense moralizing around food that Portnoy’s mother favors, Sophie’s hamburger symbolizes a great evil (Hitler) yet also reminds us of the quotidian and vivid presence of the war and the Holocaust to Roth’s American Jewish milieu. Indeed, Sophie literally stands over Alex with a knife and demands that he finish his supper. She does not know, as Portnoy tells us, “So. Now you know the worst thing I have ever done. I fucked my own family’s dinner” (134)). Thus making Portnoy an unkosherer of food even worse than

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what they (you know who I mean) deign to eat. Portnoy’s exploits with liver aside; this anxiety over victimization and perpetration in a Holocaust context goes hand in hand with a complicated discourse on race, some of it centered around Portnoy’s father Jack, an insurance salesman who collects money from the mostly black impoverished population of Newark.12 Although Jack’s task of collection is like gathering “blood from a stone” (7), he does this so well that he effectively undermines getting promoted because “Who else would work such barren territory with such incredible results?” (7). As Franco puts it succinctly in the title of an article about Portnoy (which became the opening chapter of his Race, Rights, & Recognition), “it’s about race, not sex (even the sex is about race).” Initially reporting on without arguing against his parents’ racism (10, 13), Portnoy eventually makes it his professional duty to combat racism and erupts with “I tell you if he ever uses the word nigger in my presence again, I will drive a real dagger into his fucking bigoted heart!” (75). The knife with which his mother threatens him (16) then becomes the knife that will stanch the racism of the father so that the elder Portnoy represents the victim of anti-Semitism who then becomes racist. This racism resonates with his father’s anxiety, which somatically manifests as endless constipation: “ownership of his intestinal tract is in the hands of the firm of Worry, Fear & Frustration” (26)—in other words Jewish anxiety dominates Jack’s body. The intense anxiety experienced by Jack Portnoy stems in part from the inherent anti-Semitism of his company wherein there had never been “a Jewish manager” (8); he is stuck in a mid-level position from which he can never rise, blocked, literally and figuratively, by frustration, while his son, in stark contrast, comes all over the place, literally and verbally. And if we were in any doubt (which we couldn’t possibly have been) that Jack Portnoy is anxious, Alex Portnoy spells it out for us: “my father is a man who has a certain amount of worrying to do each day, and sometimes he just has to forgo listening to the conversations going on around him in order to fulfill his anxiety requirement” (92). Portnoy confirms that it was the anti-Semitism of Jersey City that fueled their move to the almost entirely Jewish Weequahic: “one night a swastika was found carved into the desk of one of the Jewish children in Hannah’s class” (52); this coupled with his sister being chased by a gang on an “anti-Semitic rampage” (52) caused them to relocate. Thus as the family is victimized and unhinged due to anti-Semitism, the father becomes a perpetrator of hate speech and racist sentiment.

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One of Portnoy’s more memorable lovers, a woman nicknamed the “Monkey,” because of an exploit with a banana, echoes Portnoy’s father’s bigotry when she rails at him: “you care more about the niggers in Harlem that you don’t even know, than you do about me, who’s been sucking you off for a solid year!” (106). Portnoy stresses, in one of his rants to his mother, that he fights the good fight and that this still is not—cannot be—“perfect”: “Mother, I am conducting an investigation of unlawful discriminatory practices in the building trades in New York—racial discrimination!” (110). Portnoy thus attempts to situate his father and the Monkey as racists and to position himself as antiracist. When describing Uncle Hymie, the father of Portnoy’s cousin Heshie, who made the grave mistake of falling in love with a shiksa whereupon Hymie told her “that his son had an incurable blood disease” (59) thereby ending forever their engagement, Portnoy notes that his uncle was the only one to have been “born on the other side and to talk with an accent” (51), thus sharply delineating American from European-born-Yiddish-speaking Jews. “The other side” resonates also with the rhetoric often employed in Holocaust testimonies where the phrase “the Aryan side” demarcates the world outside of the ghetto. Ronald Nimkim, a childhood neighbor of Portnoy’s, committed suicide at 15 despite being a brilliant budding pianist and a perfect specimen of Jewish budding manhood. One of the neighbors, clucking over this tragedy, notes, “You couldn’t look for a boy more in love with his mother than Ronald!,” to which Portnoy glosses, “I swear to you, this is not bullshit or a screen memory, there are the very words these women use” (97). Portnoy continues, “No, you don’t have to go digging where these people are concerned—they wear the old unconscious on their sleeves!” (97). That Alex tells us, “A Polack’s day, my father suggested to me, isn’t complete until he has dragged his big dumb feet across the bones of a Jew” (127) offers yet another example how this root of postwar Jewish anxiety informs how Jack views the world. Toward the very end of the novel, when Portnoy travels to Israel to escape the “Monkey,” the following conversation with the Sabra Naomi ensues: “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, “self-deprecation is, after all, a classic form of Jewish humor.” “Not Jewish humor! No! Ghetto humor.” Not much love in that remark, I’ll tell you. By dawn I had been made to understand that I was the epitome of what was most shameful in “the

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culture of the Diaspora.” Those centuries and centuries of homelessness had produced just such disagreeable men as myself—frightened, defensive, self-deprecating, unmanned and corrupted by life in the gentile world. It was Diaspora Jews just like myself who had gone by the millions to the gas chambers without ever raising a hand against their persecutors, who did not know enough to defend their lives with their blood. The Diaspora! The very word made her furious. (265)

Naomi argues that the diaspora itself denuded Jewish manhood and made American Jews into the anxious types, as personified by Woody Allen, the stereotype of American Jewish masculinity. Naomi assumes that were there to be a Holocaust somehow within the Jewish Homeland, the new masculine Israeli Jews would indeed “raise a hand against their persecutors.” But what in fact happens to Portnoy is that, whereas he had not been “unmanned” in America he is in Israel where he finds that he cannot get it up. In a sense Portnoy’s sudden impotence reverses one of Daniel Boyarin’s compelling arguments. Boyarin finds that the emergence of the State of Israel reinvigorated a new era in the cultural construction of Jewish masculinity, wherein what had previously been the dominant image of the pale, skinny yeshiva bokher transformed into the macho image of the Israeli man tilling the land, fighting the current residents, and generally being tough (see Unheroic Conduct). Portnoy, in contrast, can’t keep it down in America and wilts in the face of the Sabra woman, Naomi, who resembles his mother and whom he unsuccessfully attempts to rape. She is too strong, too much like his mother, and the wilting member functions as a metaphor for the incompleteness of the very project of the Jewish Homeland— whereas Portnoy imagines he will find there the “happy Jews” frolicking in the Dead Sea, he rather finds menacing Jewish teenagers and women who challenge him, even accusing him of being “nothing but a self-hating Jew” (265). Portnoy metaphorically links himself with the “soiled” housekeeper when he exclaims: “Whining, hysteria, compromise, confusion, disease! Yes, Naomi, I am soiled” (266). Portnoy hopes that Naomi will come to have “the proper awe for us fallen psychoneurotic Jewish men!” (268). Finally, he exclaims: “And in Israel! Where other Jews find refuge, sanctuary and peace, Portnoy now perishes! Where other Jews flourish, I now expire!” (271). Portnoy’s voyage from Newark, where he combats his parents’ racism while perpetrating misogyny, to Israel, where he loses his masculinity in the face of the extravagant powers of the state, in effect, traverses along victim–

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perpetrator continuums. I close this chapter with one of the most-cited passages from Portnoy’s Complaint: Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I’m living it in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in the Jewish joke—only it ain’t no joke! Please, who crippled us like this? Who made us so morbid and hysterical and weak? Why, why are they screaming still, “Watch out! Don’t do it! Alex—no!” and why, alone on my bed in New York, why am I still hopelessly beating my meat? Doctor, what do you call this sickness I have? Is this the Jewish suffering I used to hear so much about? Is this what has come down to me from the pogroms and the persecution? from the mockery and abuse bestowed by the goyim over these two thousand lovely years? Oh my secrets, my shame, my palpitations, my flushes, my sweats! The way I respond to the simple vicissitudes of human life! Doctor, I can’t stand any more being frightened like this over nothing! Bless me with manhood! Make me brave! Make me strong! Make me whole! Enough being a nice Jewish boy, publicly pleasing my parents while privately pulling my putz! Enough! (36–37)

This is the most familiar passage from this much pored over book—especially the fragment about the Jewish joke. But the suggestion that the “sickness” results from the “pogroms and the persecution” compels and reminds us that the shadow of the Holocaust causes Portnoy’s hysterical anxiety. That this very fear coexists with Portnoy’s rants against his father’s racism expresses the duality of the anxiety: on the one hand, the fear comes from the “lovely” 2,000 years of persecution; on the other hand, an outcropping of that anxiety manifests in Sophie Portnoy’s ridiculous sterilizing of the plates of the black housekeeper and the bigotry of Jack Portnoy. Portnoy’s seemingly unquenchable desire drives the narrative and runs aground in Israel, where, as he tells Spielvogel, “Doctor: I couldn’t get it up in the State of Israel! How’s that for symbolism, bubi?” (257). Recalling Freud’s definition of anxiety, cited in the introduction, and the link between personal and national anxieties, we can see here that the impotence that besets Portnoy happens at precisely the moment when his potentiality as a perpetrator is most acute: not only does this happen in the Jewish state where his alignment with hypothetically problematic forms of Jewish military power reaches its potential but he also here demonstrates this potential by attempting to rape the Israeli native who rejects the diasporic masculinity he parades. Portnoy thus moves along the continuum of victim of his family’s oedipal dramas as well as aligning himself with those victims of racism his father has as clients in Newark to a perpetrator of a possible violent crime occasioned by his situation in Israel.

2

Specters of Roth: The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost, and Zuckerman Unbound

Freud did everything possible to not neglect the experience of haunting, spectrality, phantoms, ghosts. —Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (1995) Dana Doron and Uriel Sinai’s haunting film Numbered (2012) traces the stories of the numbers tattooed on the arms of several Holocaust survivors now living in Israel. Throughout, the sound of the clicking of the camera and the appearance of many stylized images of cameras themselves foreground the cinematic rupture of the fourth wall. We look at the device as it records what we see. A black screen punctured by the apparition in white of his or her concentration camp number introduces each new survivor; below the number first names appear and only at the end of the film do we learn the full names of the participants. Eerily this resonates with the erasure of the name that was part of the goal of the process of numbering from the Nazi perspective; but this very erasure is undone when many of the children or grandchildren of survivors undergo tattoos replicating those of their relatives. What are we to make of this process of memorialization on the flesh? Are these homages to the pain undergone by survivors? Is this what Gary Weissman calls a “fantasy of witnessing” taken to the nth degree? Is this form of appropriation akin to the taking on the badge of shame emblematized by the crossing of the yellow star with the pink triangle that was so popular for some Jewish activists during the reign of ACT UP? Do these tattoos break with the prohibition against tattooing, which is variously interpreted by biblical scholars?1 And what kind of signifiers are these writings on the body of where we are now in the process of remembering and memorializing survivors than we were when, in 1979, Roth had Zuckerman construct an alternative reality wherein a seductive young and alive Anne Frank literally removes with a scalding iron all traces of her concentration camp tattoo?

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Returning to the film for a moment, perhaps the most compelling story in Numbered is that of Hanna Rabinovitz, a daughter of a survivor who erroneously transcribes her father’s camp number on her ankle—or at least, she thinks she does and then becomes dismayed to learn that the number she inscribed on her flesh belonged to a victim. She cannot understand how she mis-tattooed the number because it had become so emblazoned in the family that it was the combination to the safe, the key to open her father’s luggage, and so on. When she realizes that the tattoo she had covered over with black dots before redoing it with her father’s correct one belonged to Maurice Finsi, who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942, she then feels that she has erased this hitherto unknown person again and that perhaps she should have retained his number on her ankle as an enfleshed memorial. At another point in the film a very young man tattoos his grandfather’s concentration camp number on his arm. Sinai, a photographer, lingers over a shot of the smooth young arm emblazoned with the same number as that of the aged, wrinkled, faded arm of the grandfather and the still offers a visually striking juxtaposition that recalls the span of Roth’s ghost novels, The Ghost Writer (1979) and Exit Ghost (2007), wherein fact versus fiction, old versus young, vigor versus impotence, and history versus counterfactual reality play with a host of Jewish anxieties that beset much of Roth and other Jewish-American writers’ works. Indeed, as I argue throughout this book, some of this literature manifests an anxiety about not only the victimization that could have happened but also a harder to locate anxiety around becoming the victimizer.

The Ghost Writer The Ghost Writer (1979) features a young Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s frequent narrator who had been introduced in My Life as a Man (1974) and who appears here as a devotee of the fictional Jewish writer E.I. Lonoff. After the aspiring writer wrote the revered elder a letter, Lonoff invites Zuckerman to his house, whereupon he has front-row center seats from which to observe the dramas that unfold in Lonoff ’s world. Set in a snowy New England landscape and featuring Lonoff ’s wife, Hope, of an old established American family, the sort with roots stretching back to Plymouth Rock, the landscape of the novel

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offers the sort of goyische living that most of Roth’s Jewish characters dream of but can never attain. (I am reminded here of the curtains behind which Portnoy, while chasing shiksas around the skating rink, imagines the grammatically correct lives these girls must surely lead (146–152); or the Swede in American Pastoral (see Chapter 4) who manages to attain the Old Stone House only to find its foundations utterly false (his wife cheating, his daughter blowing people up, things falling apart)). It is, therefore, entirely and perfectly disjunctive that it is within this bastion of gentile old money that Zuckerman finds Amy Bellette, Lonoff ’s young lover about whom Nathan writes a fiction within the fiction of her as Anne Frank, alive and sexy, an “impassioned little sister of Kafka’s” (170). This Anne Frank story is a counterhistory that reveals a double anxiety: on the one hand, if history had been different, Anne could not only have survived but would have been the perfect icon to save Nathan from the slings and arrows of Jewish self-hatred that are launched at him by a sensitive Jewish readership who, much as many of Roth’s readers in the 1960s and 1970s resented him, resent Nathan’s less-than-stellar representations of Jewish life. From the opening descriptions that Nathan offers of Lonoff, the tension between the fate that could have met him in Europe and the genteel life he actually lives is foregrounded: “some … 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” (10). The alternative reality that Lonoff had escaped by becoming American sets up the fear of victimization that one finds so often in Jewish-American literature. Nathan feels an immense “kinship” (13) with Lonoff because the older writer captures the sense of the “burden of exclusion and confinement that still weighed upon the lives … [of the] shtetl life ten minutes’ walk from the pillared banks and gargoyle insurance cathedrals of downtown Newark” (12–13) in which he had been raised. Nathan continues to note that Lonoff ’s stories elicited “feelings of kinship for our pious, unknown ancestors, whose Galician tribulations had been only a little less foreign to me, while growing up securely in New Jersey” (13). Nathan thus marks the difference between the reality he experienced as an American, far from these “foreign” problems (pogroms, genocide) and the other reality that he could have experienced had his forbearers not emigrated before the war (Nathan tells us his family arrived from “Eastern Europe in 1900” (96)).

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Further, Lonoff ’s heroes, “some ten years after Hitler … say something new and wrenching … about the ambiguities of prudence and the anxieties of disorder” (13); in other words, Lonoff is a post-Holocaust writer whose works capture the quintessence of the feeling of anxiety and alienation that characterizes much Jewish experience. Later on, Nathan underscores this when he tells Lonoff: “I think of you as the Jew who got away … . You got away from Russia and the pogroms. You got away from the purges … You got away from Palestine and the homeland” (50). Here Nathan figures Lonoff as having escaped both victimization in Eastern Europe and perpetration in Palestine. America figures here as the place through which the line between victimization and perpetration flows. In stark contrast to Lonoff ’s texts, Nathan’s own stories have caused a rift with his father and his community. This is much like the critique of many of Roth’s works, in response to which some rabbis condemned him as producing “such conceptions of Jews as ultimately led to the murder of six million in our time.”2 As Wapter will do, this critic associated Roth with Nazism, thus again moving along a continuum of identitary structures from victimization to perpetration. In The Ghost Writer, one of Nathan’s stories “borrowed from our family history instances of what my exemplary father took to be the most shameful and disreputable transgressions of family decency and trust” (81). Roth’s father, in contrast, apparently handed out signed copies of Portnoy’s Complaint and remained proud of his son.3 Arguing that Nathan’s short story will contribute to already extant anti-Semitism in America, Nathan’s father drives home his point: “I wonder if you fully understand just how very little love there is in this world for Jewish people. I don’t mean in Germany, either, under the Nazis. I mean in run-of-the-mill Americans, Mr. and Mrs. Nice Guy” (92). Because of his strong disapproval of his son’s story, Nathan’s father enlists the well-respected judge Wapter to convince Nathan of the problematically anti-Semitic nature of his stories. In a lengthy letter, Wapter recommends that Nathan see the Broadway play of The Diary of Anne Frank and then closes with ten questions for the young upstart writer, the first of which is: “1. If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the thirties, would you have written such a story?” (102). Thus the alternative reality comes full circle; Nathan views Lonoff as having escaped genocide and Judge Wapter perceives Nathan as contributing to the condition of possibility of genocide by allegedly writing anti-Semitic tales. The final question posed by the Judge: “10. Can you

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honestly say that there is anything in your short story that would not warm the heart of a Julius Streicher or a Joseph Goebbels?” (103–104). In hashing out the judge’s response to Nathan’s story with his mother, Nathan asserts, “In Europe—not in Newark! We are not the wretched of Belsen! We were not the victims of that crime!” (106). So within a short span of the novel, Wapter aligns Nathan and the perpetrators Streicher and Goebbels, and Nathan rejects the analog his mother implies between the Jews of Newark and those of Europe. This flexibility of possible identitary positions between victim and perpetrator is exactly what Roth’s larger project brings out. Within the structure of Ghost Writer, the second chapter, entitled “Nathan Dedalus,” underscores the connection between Roth/Zuckerman and Joyce/Dedalus as resistors, outliers, and outsiders to convention. This is followed by another chapter, titled in my edition simply “Femme Fatale” without a chapter number (but in other editions with a chapter number), wherein the supposed story of Amy as Anne is told. Readers new to the book only find out in chapter four, “Married to Tolstoy,” that Nathan (and not Roth) had written the previous chapter and that it was a fiction within the fiction: “I could not really think of her as Amy and longer. Instead I was continually drawn back into the fiction I had evolved about her” (157). When Nathan constructs a fantasy wherein Anne Frank has survived the war and, as the beguiling Amy Bellette, schmoozes in the New England countryside with Lonoff, he includes a scene in which “Anne” burns her arm with an iron: “When the bandage was removed, there was a patch of purple scar tissue about half the size of an egg instead of her camp number” (131). Whereas in 2012, as documented in Numbered, some descendants of survivors tattoo concentration camp numbers on themselves, this fictional account set in 1956 yet written in 1979, right on the cusp of the great burst of Holocaust attention, wherein “Anne” replaces her camp number with a self-inflicted wound, marks a sharp historical shift between then and now. As Eric Sundquist aptly remarks, “The Ghost Writer epitomized Roth’s zest for tarnishing Jewish idols and desacralizing Holocaust sentimentality” (Strangers, 517). In 1979 Nathan’s story about a living Anne Frank would have been much more remarkable than it would be now, in the wake of a host of inventive counterhistories and farfetched imaginaries about what could have happened. Cliff Spargo, in his excellent reading of Ghost Writer, notes thus: “In so far as Roth’s Holocaust novel is implicitly shaped by these … anxieties about the

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fictional imagination, he ingeniously endeavors to make The Ghost Writer most directly recollective of the American cultural memory of the Holocaust precisely at the point at which it seems most patently fictive” (93). In a similar vein Michael Rothberg argues, “it is less the Holocaust and its impact on American life that obsesses Roth than the unbridgeable distance between the Holocaust and American life” (“Roth,” 53).4 In The Ghost Writer, Roth plays with Nathan’s fiction within the fiction of an alive Anne Frank in order to fantastically bridge the distance “between the Holocaust and American life” but to serve that American life with a salvation against the onslaught of critique Nathan receives for his refusal to paint with only rose-colored lenses the American Jewish milieu. As I discussed in Chapter 1, when Roth responds to these critiques extrafictionally (and there are plenty of places where he responds within his fiction, see especially the section below on Zuckerman Unbound), he often analogizes the Jewish-American writer who cannot free himself from the hyphen and the black-American writer who similarly can never just be read as an American writer. By choosing the hallowed ground of Anne Frank as a sexualized savior for the embattled Nathan, Roth, again, desacralizes and avowedly refuses to be cowed or engaged by the pious critics against whom he rails within and outside of his novels. By bringing up the specter, in Ghost Writer, of this fantasy of an Anne Frank who survived, Roth resituates the continuum between victim and perpetrator. Nathan, perceived by Judge Wapter as a perpetrator of anti-Semitism, fights back by de-victimizing Anne Frank and sacrilegiously turning her into a beacon of salvation for him. When Nathan imagines introducing his wife, Anne Frank/Amy Bellette, he pictures his father exclaiming in wonder and forgiveness “Well, this is she … Anne, says my father—the Anne? Oh, how I have misunderstood my son. How mistaken I have been!” (italics and ellipsis in original, 159). Through this counterfactual fantasy Roth explores differing ideas of innocence. Because Anne Frank is constructed as the symbol par excellence of the suffering of the innocent—and that very innocence has been threatened by the sexuality inherent in the diary and famously excised by her father Otto—and because Roth exacerbates this corruption of innocence by simultaneously sexualizing her further and by emplotting her as a figure to release Nathan from abuse by other Jews who can only see him as a threat, the continuum between innocence and guilt becomes clearer. Nathan implores, “Oh, marry me, Anne Frank, exonerate me before my outraged elders of this idiotic indictment!” (170).

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Exit Ghost History, then, is indeed a ghost story, haunted by insubstantial fathers and bodies of mothers importuning us … —Vicki Mahaffey, “Minxing marrage” (1993) The Ghost Writer ends in the snow, in 1956, with some uncertainty as to the fate of Hope and Amy (we know that Lonoff died in 1961 (14)); we do not find out until the sort of sequel, Exit Ghost (2007), that Amy and Lonoff go off to Europe together to have an affair, which only serves to make the writer “gloomy” (151). The late novel Lonoff was working on concerned an undisclosed dark subject that Amy likens to the struggle that survivors undergo between writing as catharsis and writing as further traumatization. Amy tells Nathan, “When Primo Levi killed himself everyone said it was because of his having been an inmate at Auschwitz. I thought it was because of his writing about Auschwitz, the labor of that last book, contemplating that horror with all that clarity. Getting up every morning to write that book would have killed anyone” (151). In this fiction, Levi’s struggle with the reality of the camps kills him—not long after Roth actually interviewed him about the process of writing. Exit Ghost begins when Nathan, who had secluded himself in the countryside for some eleven years in response to anti-Semitic death threats (53), decides to return to New York City in search of a medical cure for his lost manhood. Happening upon a notice for an exchange of an apartment for a country residence, Nathan finds himself immersed in the world of a young couple, Jamie and Billy; Nathan develops a crush (of course!) on the sultry and significantly younger Jamie (whose name evokes Amy) and plays out the fantasy of his crush through a series of (rather bad) plays wherein he can be alone with her. Throughout the novel, Richard Kliman, a former boyfriend of Jamie, hounds Nathan, attempting to milk him for information about Lonoff for a biography of the great writer that Kliman intends to write. But its gossipy quality mars the biography, most saliently Kliman’s insistence on bringing to light Lonoff ’s supposed secret incest with his half-sister when a teenager. Henry James’s biography of Hawthorne quite possibly lies behind the whole fracas between Kliman and Nathan as they argue over how to handle Lonoff ’s corrosive secret incest. Roth gives us a few hints here: Nathan describes Lonoff in Ghost Writer as “the region’s most original storyteller

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since Melville and Hawthorne” (4); and then mentions James as part of a discussion of the “madness of art” (77) and reads Lonoff ’s copy of “The Middle Years” (113–117). At the outset of James’s biography he carefully situates Hawthorne in the very landscape in which Lonoff resides: “Out of the soil of New England he sprang—in a crevice of that immitigable granite he sprouted and bloomed” (3). James continues to underscore the point by noting that “Hawthorne was by race of the clearest Puritan strain” (6), and in discussing Lathrop’s biography of Hawthorne, James finds that he “has much to say about the ancient picturesqueness of the place, and about the mystic influences it would project upon such a mind and character as Hawthorne’s” (11–12). Roth’s huge interest in and indebtedness to James has been well documented and it makes absolute sense that Roth would have been fascinated by James’s obsessive uncovering of the structures of difference between America and Europe.5 In James’s imagination, America continually reappears as the corruptible innocent to Europe’s always already corrupted soul. One need only remember Isabel Archer being drawn into Ormond’s world in Portrait of a Lady to glean a thumbnail sketch of this recurrent theme. The corollary in the Rothian universe is the imagined innocence and strifeless spirit of the goyische Americans whom his Jewish characters (almost all of whom are one or two generations away from Europe) fantasize over. In Exit Ghost, Nathan wants none of this story about Lonoff ’s supposed incest and rebuffs the aggressive Kliman. In the course of the novel Nathan also reconnects with Amy Bellette, the beautiful young woman Zuckerman had imagined to be an Anne Frank who survived. As Steven Sampson puts it, “En revenant à New York, il découvre une ville peuplée de survivants” (58, “returning to New York, he finds a city populated by survivors”). Whereas when Amy appears in the earlier novel, Nathan pictures her as the “dark beauty” from a “portrait by Velàzquez” (17), in Exit Ghost, she strikes him as “disfigured, evicted from the dwelling of her own body” (111); she has brain cancer, is scarred, disheveled, and forgetful—neither she nor Nathan are aging well; his incontinence has reduced him to diapers and when they plan to meet for dinner each goes to a restaurant—but not the same one—and waits for an hour—no one knows who got it wrong; each is so old and confused. Roth paints a dystopian portrait of aging and Nathan remains “stunned by the brutality of her transformation” (150). Kliman baits Zuckerman to open up about Lonoff by telling him that the great writer was left behind by his parents in America in disgrace for his supposed incestuous relationship. Zuckerman had understood,

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using a Jamesian formulation, that Lonoff ’s parents found “American society repellently materialistic, and when Lonoff was seventeen, they moved to preMandate Palestine. It was true that Lonoff had remained behind, but not because he was abandoned as a deviant wrongdoer of a son; he was a fully grown American boy and preferred to become an American-speaking American man rather than a Hebrew-speaking Palestinian Jew” (119). In other words, Kliman wants to have it that the disgrace caused the separation, whereas Zuckerman, in keeping with the complicated adoration of America and the certainty of the American homeland for Jews that many of Roth’s characters manifest, stresses the anti-Zionism of Lonoff ’s decision. Roth threads Conrad’s The Shadow Line (1917) through Exit Ghost, making it clear that the discourse of deceit, illness, death, and haunting that characterizes Conrad’s novella bears weight here as well. Nathan tells us, “Lately I’ve been rereading Joseph Conrad for the first time in fifty years, most recently The Shadow-Line” (3–4). In one of the (terrible) plays wherein Nathan imagines the dialogue between him and Jamie (rendered as “He” and “She”), he asks her if she had read The Shadow-Line (137) (and the novella comes up again in another play when Jamie, having procured a copy, tells Nathan his memory of the text is excellent (226)). The great secret of The Shadow Line is that the former captain, now dead, had sold the ship’s store of indispensable quinine and replaced it with some sort of salty and horrible substance with no chance of curing “tropical fever,” thus causing the entire crew (save the new captain and a cook called Ransome) to be near-death when a fever sweeps through the ship. The aptly named first mate, Burns, as he burns with fever, seems to believe that the old dead captain’s ghost bedevils the ship. Roth thus takes this sense of haunting from Conrad and changes it into a series of less vindictive ghosts such as Lonoff and Nathan’s mother. Conrad explains his title at the outset by finding that “time, too, goes on—till one perceives ahead a shadow-line warning one that the region of early youth, too, must be left behind” (6); indeed the new captain loses his youth throughout the course of the novella, connecting him with the contrast between the young Nathan of Ghost Writer and the old Nathan of Exit Ghost as well as the young and beautiful Amy whose aging has been so marked. Nathan highlights this connection when he notes, “Proving that the drama that is associated usually with the young as they fully begin to enter life—with adolescents, with young men like the steadfast new captain in The Shadow-Line—can also startle and lay siege to the aged (including the aged resolutely armed against all drama), even as circumstance readies them for

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departure” (122–123). Nathan, dreaming of asking his mother if they can have incest, had “fallen asleep on the bed, clothed and with my underlined copy of The Shadow-Line beside me” (241), thus further indicating the inseparability of Nathan’s story with Conrad’s “confession” and reminding us of Portnoy falling asleep each night to Freud’s complete works. In going over with Jamie the going over that he gave Kliman, Nathan says to her, “There’s the not-so that reveals the so—that’s fiction; and then there’s the not-so that just isn’t so—that’s Kliman” (120) and continues, “the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most” (147). In other words, Exit Ghost highlights how alternative realities can seem more real than the real. In another brush with alternative reality: “But isn’t one’s pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most” (147). A marked shift occurred between the late 1970s and early 1980s when Roth published The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman Unbound and Exit Ghost, set in post–9/11 New York during the 2004 Kerry–Bush election. As Aimee Pozorski aptly argues, “it is difficult to determine whether the 2004 election that organizes the text is a figure for terror or the terror itself ” (Trauma, 132). Whereas in the earlier ghost novel the young Zuckerman looks up to the aging writer Lonoff, in the later novel the youth are in awe of Zuckerman as the elder literary star; Lonoff has become a ghost, the grandpa of a Jewish lineage of letters, a memory. Exit Ghost is generally considered one of the weakest of Roth’s books; but, bracketing the justified critique of the novel (see Hitchens’s scathing review, among others), tracing the changes between Roth’s two ghost stories speaks volumes about the transformations in discussions of the Holocaust.

Zuckerman Unbound (1981) Published just two years after The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound (1981) chronicles the effect of celebrity on Nathan, just after Carnovsky (a not very disguised Portnoy’s Complaint) has been published during the final throes of the madness of the close of the 1960s. Zuckerman has just broken up

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with his Christian “do-gooder” wife Laura when he encounters Alvin Pepler, a former talk show quiz wonder and now wandering bastion of rage who obsesses over and follows Zuckerman. Pepler is a sort of proto-pipik from Operation Shylock (which I discuss in the next chapter)—in this iteration he does not actively copy Zuckerman but rather imagines that Nathan has stolen everything from him, even the creative and obsessive onanism at the heart of Portnoy. By the end of Zuckerman Unbound Nathan’s father, who for much of the novel had been a quiet poststroke chiropodist in a nursing home in Florida, is killed by the exposure of the Jewish family in Carnovsky and utters as his final word “bastard.” The novel contains many cross-references to other of Roth’s works including a dedication written by E.I. Lonoff, the already mentioned proto-double from the later Operation Shylock, and the kernel of the suggestion that Henry and Nathan switch places, something that happens in The Counterlife (see Chapter 3). Like the Ghost Writer’s Nathan, Zuckerman Unbound’s Nathan is perceived as “The Enemy of the Jews” (58) and this Nathan recites several letters that echo Judge Wapter’s harsh critiques: “Dear Mr. Zuckerman: Il faut laver son linge sale en famille! Dear Mr. Zuckerman: This letter is written in memory of those who suffered the horror of the Concentration Camps … Dear Mr. Zuckerman: It is hardly possible to write of Jews with more bile and contempt and hatred … ” (ellipses in original, 59). As was the case in Ghost Writer, a quick association blossoms between the perceived anti-Semitism of Zuckerman’s airing dirty laundry and the Holocaust. And just as Anne Frank loomed large in Ghost Writer, so she appears here in the form of a role played by Caesara: “He was thinking of Caesara starring at nineteen as the enchanting Anne Frank, and of the photographs of film stars like the enchanting Casesara which Anne Frank pinned up beside that attic bed. That Anne Frank should come to him in this guise. That he should meet her at his agent’s house, in a dress of veils and beads and cockatoo feathers” (90). Thus Caesara’s image appears to Nathan doubled with her appearance to Anne Frank, thus structurally aligning Nathan with one of the world’s most famous victims. Race figures in Zuckerman Unbound in ways that echo the tension between identification and anxiety that I discussed in Chapter 1. For example, when, feeling the effects of his recently increased celebrity, Nathan wonders how best to disguise himself so as not to be accosted by the likes of the Peplers of the world, he muses that if he looked “less like Albert Einstein, more like Jimi

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Hendrix” he would not “stick out so much” (6). If he switched his identity, in other words, from Jewish to black, he would be less visible. Similarly, after the “large jovial black man” (10) who reads Nathan’s electric meter asks him if he has done all the outrageous sexual stuff in the book, the narrator reflects that “Zuckerman was tall, but not as tall as Wilt Chamberlain” (10). And again, as was the case in “Goodbye, Columbus,” a partial identification is simultaneously revealed and thwarted. Race also figures into one of the first utterances of the zany Alvin Pepler, who, when meeting Nathan at a deli, first tells him, “you’re our Marcel Proust” (13) and then, in a list of “great Newark writers,” places LeRoi Jones fourth. “I say this without racial prejudice … but what he writes is not literature. In my estimation it is black propaganda” (13). Given the anxiety Nathan manifests that he may well be another Alvin, this offers yet more evidence of the anxiety around becoming a perpetrator, a racist (I am taking it as a given that if someone says, “I say this without racial prejudice,” he or she actually harbors much racial prejudice). During one of Pepler’s rants he uses, among other choice words, an unforgiveable racial epithet to define the entire city of Newark: “Newark is a nigger with a knife! Newark is a whore with the syph! Newark is junkies shitting in your hallway and everything burned to the ground! Newark is dago vigilantes hunting jigs with tire irons! … Newark is ashes! Newark is rubble and filth!” (156). Pepler goes on to explain to Zuckerman that once he has grasped these essential elements of his home town, “Then you can write ten books about Newark! … They cut off both balls for a Bulova watch! And your dick for the fun of it, if it’s white!” (156). Castration, impotence. Whereas in Portnoy the title character could not get it up in Israel, here there is no point getting it up in Newark because you’ll be castrated by a black man with a knife; in Portnoy, as I discussed in the previous chapter, Sophie Portnoy wields the castrating knife while her son Alex threatens the racist father with a knife, whereas here the zany Pepler reduces all of Newark to the knife-wielding black man of racist fantasy, to the woman whose looseness causes disease. As Ben Schreier notes, the transformations in the racial mix of Newark thread throughout Zuckerman Unbound and are even accorded the closing lines of the novel. As Michael Kimmage argues in his book about the importance of Newark as a trove for material for Roth, “The riddle of Newark, in the Newark trilogy, is that it defines everything, fixing the pattern, furnishing the real names, and shedding light on the darkness of mutable selves, while being itself a place of metamorphosis” (29). After Carnovsky

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kills Nathan’s father, he flies back to Newark, whereupon the armored chauffeur he requested meets him; Nathan asks the driver to take him on a tour of his hometown, during which he locates many of his childhood haunts, as we Roth scholars also did during our tour of Roth’s Newark at the Roth@80 conference, only to note their decay. The site of his Hebrew lessons had become an “African Methodist Episcopal Church” (225) and this is where Roth ends the novel but only after claiming that he had become no one and that he did not “come from anywhere anymore, either” (225). One of Vicki Mahaffey’s brilliant, influential arguments about James Joyce could also apply to Roth; Mahaffey contends that Joyce resisted authority “of church, state, and marriage” and that he “systematically splintered the power of an established authority, using language and style to produce an interplay of different ‘author’-ities for the reader to reevaluate and arrange” (Reauthorizing, xiii). If we replaced “church” with “temple” we could basically use Mahaffey’s argument for Roth; and, also, quite literally Roth creates different authors within his texts who often rewrite, rearrange, and retell. For example, in My Life as a Man, Zuckerman writes Peter Tarnopol’s story so we have the novel within the novel; in The Counterlife one brother rewrites the story of the other; David Kepesh, in The Dying Animal notes of his lover Consuela that “It was the true beginning of her mastery—the mastery into which my mastery had initiated her. I am the author of her mastery of me” (32). As we see in Ghost Writer, Zuckerman supposedly writes the key chapter about Anne Frank. Roth makes the connection between himself and Joyce explicit in The Ghost Writer by titling Chapter 2 “Nathan Dedalus” (75); this is part of Roth’s argument for putting into relation the problematics that Stephen Dedalus suffers in relation to Catholicism and that Nathan deals with in relation to Jewishness.6 As is the case with “Nathan Dedalus,” many, many, references to Joyce appear in Roth’s oeuvre—both explicitly and implicitly, the meaning of this deep connection has to do with the very project of guilt and innocence, perpetration and victimization, often being imbricated. Nathan also adds a “flaming Dedalian formula to ignite my soul’s smithy” (49) and asks rhetorically whether Joyce (and Flaubert and Thomas Wolfe) hadn’t “all been condemned for disloyalty or treachery or immorality” (110). For some instances of Roth’s explicit and implicit turns to Joyce, consider this: In Zuckerman Unbound, Zuckerman, when first meeting the movie star Caesara, with whom he has a very brief affair, is drawn to her in part because they had both read “Ellmann’s biography of Joyce … . He couldn’t

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have come off better had it been Joyce himself ” (79), and then later in the novel: “Priceless. The vrai. You can’t beat it. Even richer in pointless detail than the great James Joyce” (139). In Sabbath’s Theater, Sabbath scoots off into a Wakean monologue that begins: “a blur whizzing blur why now most unpleasant invention nobody think ticker tape” (549), which he then signals as such with: “So Sabbath passeth the time, pretending to think without punctuation, the way J. Joyce pretended people thought” (551). In a line that could easily have been the inspiration for Portnoy’s Complaint, Finnegans Wake includes “though my corked father was bott a pseudowaiter, whose o’cloak you ware” (155). One could probably pick other moments from the Wake and demonstrate rigorously how Roth simply plucked lines like this from Joyce’s masterpiece and created novels out of them. Another important, if comical, connection between Roth and Joyce feeds directly back into Portnoy’s Complaint: at one point in the film Philip Roth: Unmasked, Roth notes that just as Joyce left Dublin but wrote about it forever, so he left Newark never to return and yet mined it in almost all of his work. Roth describes a moment in Ulysses where a hole cut into one of the characters’ pockets allows him to observe a woman bathing and simultaneously masturbate; the film cuts to an image of Joyce standing with one hand in his pocket and Roth praising that wonderful scene. Of Roth’s The Great American Novel (1973) one could say the entire book is an homage to Finnegans Wake through its style if not its content. What matters most about the crucial nature of Roth’s mining of Joyce is that, according to Mahaffey, Finnegans Wake is, among other things, an exploration of the imbrication of victim and perpetrator. Mahaffey terms this the “reversibility of male and female, oppressor and victim” (“Minxing,” 233). Drawing on Guattari’s arguments about fascism’s saturation into many historical and psychoanalytical concepts, Mahaffey finds that “fascism has been molecularized” (219) and that “Finnegans Wake implies that each of us is every name in history” (226). The compelling argument Mahaffey makes about the process through which fascism can be located in many unexpected places, fused with the understanding that one of the Wake’s contentions is that we can all take on counterintuitive historical emplotments, means that Roth could well be mining Joyce for, among other things, the potential reversibility of the positions of oppressor and victim. Roth has always been invested in death; this interest has increased markedly in the later novels and there is a thematics of death and funerals and funerality that could easily be traced to a very long novel about

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a wake. That Roth’s writings are in the wake of the Wake is certain. At least from the unforgivable dead child in Letting Go (1962), through to his closing quartet of novels that center thematically on death—( Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), The Humbling (2009), Nemesis (2010))—to The Counterlife’s staging of the death of one brother in place of another, to Operation Shylock’s imagined necrophiliac sex, to Sabbath’s obsession with death and the grave, right through, death circulates throughout Roth’s works and it is to be expected that some of the dead will appear as vibrant ghosts. Everyman opens with “Around the grave in the rundown cemetery … ” (1); as I discuss in Chapter 4, much of Sabbath’s Theater takes place either at Drenka’s grave, or at the cemetery wherein Sabbath will be interred with his family, or at the bedside of his former (disappeared) wife Nikki’s dead mother, or in reflecting on Linc, an old friend who killed himself and to whose funeral Sabbath intends to go. It is telling that at Roth’s eightieth birthday party he decided to read to the audience a long selection from Sabbath’s Theater about graves and possible headstones and Sabbath’s defiance of death even while the character contemplates suicide. In a paper delivered at the Roth@80 conference entitled “ ‘Every third thought shall be my grave’: Memento mori and Story,” Debra Shostak examined some of the tropes of graves and gravestones in Roth and I look forward to reading her insightful analyses of them. I mention these graves here to underscore one of the many directions that Roth’s attachment to Joyce and the Wake takes. With this obsession with death comes, perhaps naturally, an interest in ghosts. Sabbath talks to his dead mother; Amy Bellette, in Exit Ghost, talks to the dead Lonoff; the ghost of Anne Frank haunts the young Nathan in The Ghost Writer; and there are many other ghosts throughout. For Roth the ghost is a metaphor ripe with possibilities especially in the face of his characters’ many obsessions with death. In “ ‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka” (1972, in Reading), Roth imagines that an alternative death for Kafka (who died in 1924) would have been a crematoria: “Skulls chiseled like this one were shoveled by the thousands from the ovens; had he lived, his would have been among them, along with the skulls of his three younger sisters. Of course it is no more horrifying to think of Franz Kafka in Auschwitz than to think of anyone in Auschwitz—it is just horrifying in its own way. But he died too soon for the holocaust” (248). Just as Roth imagines an alternative reality wherein Anne Frank lives, he conjures one in which Kafka dies in this

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ignominious way rather than in the Kierling Sanatorium. But in the same text Roth also imagines a Kafka who, as a “refugee teacher, sticklike in a fraying three-piece suit” (259), becomes his teacher in 1942, in Newark. Two alternative realities are packed into the same story. In the second iteration, the narrator, remembering being nine years old, would have “cut [his] tongue out” (258) had he known that the nasty moniker he picked for his frail mentor Kafka would stick. “Doctor Kishka!” (258), the kids call him. This disrespect is in striking contrast to the loving portrait Roth had drawn in the first part of the story, where it is Kafka’s death through Auschwitz rather than his survival that he fabricates. “My guilt,” the narrator tells us, “awakens redemptive fantasies of heroism, I have them often about the ‘Jews of Europe.’ I must save him” (259). Thus within a short space the narrator moves from constructing a cruel nickname that gets taken up by the other Hebrew school boys to tease this impoverished “refugee from the Nazis” (269) to feeling enormous guilt and indulging in fantasies of saving the Jews of Europe.7 “Looking at Kafka” may have been Roth’s first counterfactual story and it is fascinating that it should simultaneously take the form of an imagination of Kafka as a Holocaust victim and as a survivor who is teased by the first-person narrator. Roth will go on, as I discuss in the next chapter, to explore counterfactual fantasies in several other instances that all turn on a certain transformation between innocence and guilt.

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Double-Consciousness and the Jewish Heart of Darkness: The Counterlife and Operation Shylock

One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. —W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) Sabbath was [a] sadistic doppelgänger. —Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater (1995) What if you were forcibly wrenched back in time and had to undergo the slavery of your ancestors? What if Japan and Germany had won World War II, divided up America, and run the country as a totalitarian state wherein Jews were calmly exterminated and free speech was a quaint object of nostalgia? What if instead of a Jewish “homeland” in Israel, during the war Tlingit territory in Alaska was given to Europe’s Jews and a Yiddish-speaking population flourished on the frozen tundra? What if instead of Roosevelt’s third term the renowned anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh had become the president of the United States, pogroms ran rampant, and East Coast Jews were forcibly relocated? What if your brother suffered a fatal illness and died and you discovered that he had already, before his death, written you into the narrative as the dead? What if you, a famous author, arrived in Israel only to discover that someone posing as you had made great inroads into the Israeli cultural scene to advocate the return of Israeli Jews to those places in Europe from which they had been systematically eradicated? You may recognize these counterfactual scenarios from Octavia Butler’s Kindred; Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle; Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union; and Roth’s The Plot Against America, The Counterlife,

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and Operation Shylock. Alternative or counterfactual histories often use the trope of the double, the what-could-have happened-who-could-I-havebeen-had-time-space-been-configured-differently. This voyaging between OTL (Our Time Line) and ATL (Alternate Time Line) or history and counterhistory often allows the texts to make impossible comparisons that, nonetheless, enrich and inform our understanding of trauma. What can be unnerving about some of these alternative realities is exactly just how close they can be to history as we know it. While, for example, it may be a stretch to imagine a Holocaust in America now, one does not have to invent in order to describe violent histories here—from the genocide of American Indians to the Atlantic slave trade to lynching on an unimaginable scale. As part of his elaboration of double-consciousness, W.E.B. Du Bois recounts witnessing the most shocking forms of human mutilation and violence in the South. Du Bois was keenly aware of the terror that shadowed the experiences of many people of color and he also stressed how what Paul Gilroy terms a “buried social memory of that original terror” (129) seeped into the experiences of others even if from a different source.1 Many Holocaust survivors describe feeling doubled so that the survivor’s past self—the one who was starving, afraid, and incarcerated—shadows the survivor’s present self—the one who strives to be present to a quotidian world full of ordinary, whole, objects that bear no relationship to the traumatized past. Charlotte Delbo, one of the most compelling testimonial writers, who was a member of the French resistance and then deported from Drancy to Auschwitz/Birkenau, describes this doubled self beautifully: “I live within a twofold being. The Auschwitz double doesn’t bother me, doesn’t interfere with my life. As though it weren’t I at all. Without this split I would not have been able to revive” (Days, 3). Delbo’s doubled self is a survival mechanism so that the presence of the double allows the traumatic past to exist in a parallel realm that does not mar her present self. She refuses to collapse the double into the “I” because this would bring with it the importation of all the pain the double keeps back. Du Bois, on the other hand, stresses the agony of double-consciousness and the always thwarted desire to merge into one whole; and yet he maintains the importance of keeping the other selves distinct: Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question … . It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity … . The history of the

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American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. (7–9)

In his examination of a voyage Du Bois took to ruined Warsaw in 1949 Michael Rothberg notes, “The lesson of Du Bois in Warsaw is in the end equally crucial for Holocaust studies, postcolonial studies, and ethnic studies in general: the varieties of racial terror that have marked and marred the twentieth century … leave their tracks on all forms of knowledge” (Multidirectional, 115). Rothberg’s description of Du Bois’s impression of Warsaw stems from his elaboration of multidirectional memory or the ways in which different traumatic situations illuminate and inform each other. Multidirectional memory is a useful rubric under which to view the resonances between narratives imagining slavery and narratives imagining Holocaust victimization. Du Bois’s double-consciousness illuminates and enlarges the following discussion of how the double functions in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock. Du Bois’s theory of double-consciousness helps to explain the sensation in some Jewish-American literature of being haunted by a floating signifier of terror.2 In some narratives doubling reveals American Jewish curiosity/phantasizing about what victimization during the Holocaust might have felt like and these imaginings are rather akin to some alternative fictions of what it might have been like to be a chattel slave. Imagining brutality during the Nazi genocide and that of being subject to the Atlantic slave trade surfaces in some of this literature and resonates with the process of figuring alternate realities, counterfactual histories, and double anxieties. The literary trope of the double allows them to perform as screens onto which the “originals” can cast their worst nightmares; this kind of double appears in Roth as spaces onto which the main characters, Nathan Zuckerman (The Counterlife) and “Philip Roth” (Operation Shylock), can play out being the sexually impotent and in both cases ultimately dead Jew. The specter of the impotent, decaying, or dead Jew is informed by the fear of falling into alternate realities (encapsulated by the double) wherein the nightmare, seemingly impossible other scenario, becomes real. These works deploy the trope of the double shadowed by the anxiety of a counterfactual history in which the Holocaust and the devastation wrought by World War II ensnares American Jews. But there is a further twist and one that both The Counterlife and Operation Shylock brings out: the terror that Du Bois located behind and informing all of his experiences is itself doubled in Roth’s fiction. On the one hand, there

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is the terror expressed in some of the counterhistories, described above, of the victim that the American Jew could have been had his or her family not emigrated before the Nazi genocide; on the other hand, there is also the terror of becoming the other who perpetrates anti-Arab violence that one could have become had one made aliyah (emigrated to Israel). What is also behind this double terror is the analogous fear that the Jewish victims of anti-Semitism have become, across the passage to America, white racists. The subjects of race in Roth, and indeed the huge questions, over which much ink has been spilled, of “blacks and Jews,” are large ones, but, as I discussed in Chapter 1, race figures importantly in a series of displacements that mimic the process of doubling. What I propose here is, first, that there are several iterations of the double: (a) the double as s/he figures in counterhistories or alternative novels as the screen onto which to project anxieties about what could have been; (b) the double as in Du Bois’s double-consciousness wherein people externally hailed as “other” struggle to make sense of the two different sides of hyphenated American identities; (c) the double as often experienced by Holocaust survivors who use the trope to explain the “twoness” of being the self suffering acute trauma and now, in the relative “normal” of the postwar era being that same person, transfigured by trauma and yet quintessentially different from the “Auschwitz self ”; (d) the double as part of a long literary tradition that includes but is in no way limited to Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), wherein the trope often serves to express sexual and/ or socially unacceptable “vices” that would be too scary for the originary character to claim as his (almost always his) own. Second, I propose that Roth employs all of these types of doubling, and that, further, these doubles when taken together express, especially in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock, the doubled anxiety of the Jewish character who fears both becoming victim and becoming perpetrator of anti-Arab violence and/or American racism. Both The Counterlife and Operation Shylock engage Roth’s favorite theme of the double; as we saw in Chapters 1 and 2, Roth loves to invoke Conrad, and his doppelgänger story, The Secret Sharer, seems to have had a lasting effect on Roth’s novels. The Counterlife threads counterfactual realities through a novel within the novel (also perhaps a nod to Conrad whose Heart of Darnkess enframes several narratives within the novella) in which Henry and Nathan Zuckerman change places, exchanging life for death. Operation Shylock revolves around a doubling of a fictional Philip Roth with another man, who happens to look exactly like Philip Roth and who has used the

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writer’s celebrity to bolster his wonderfully zany cause of diasporism. What time and again underlies Roth’s continual return to the double is the fear and anxiety that troubles many American Jews that they could have been their doppelgängers who never left Europe. Many survivor accounts similarly describe feeling split, feeling that they are two in one, feeling that reality has become the worst, and that the everyday is unreal, dreamlike, a perverse inversion wherein many survivors felt during their incarceration that the worst was so unbelievable as to be unreal. Within Holocaust literature and testimony, the thematic of the double works to help some survivors understand the bifurcation between the pain of the past and the ordinariness of the present—and for some survivors the double means that the real one is the one in the camps and the dream-self is the one who is here, in the present. The Counterlife and Operation Shylock both put into play a series of anxiously doubled Jewish identities shadowed by death. In the earlier novel death can almost be viewed as suicide for sex but is expressed by the postmodern displacement of the death of the brother/double. As Robert Alter elegantly puts it, Nathan writes “his own destiny over the surface of Henry’s life” (54). In the later novel, the double takes on both a more comedic and more terrorizing form in the shape of a madman whose similarity to Roth is so extreme as to be seemingly unstoppable except by his death.3 The Counterlife and Operation Shylock both revolve around the question of Israel, the former having one section taking place there, the latter being almost entirely set in the Jewish state. Roth references The Counterlife within the narrative of Operation Shylock (9). Henry driving “over from Jersey to confess to the mocking author the ridiculous absurdity of his dilemma” (29–30) prefigures in Counterlife the centrality of confession to Shylock. This author, the famous Nathan Zuckerman, credits celebrity with the end of his first marriage: “Nathan had left her at about the time that Carnovsky was published and celebrity seemed to promise more tantalizing rewards” (214). Both novels also feature the death of one of the doubles and link that death with erectile function. Steven Sampson notes, “le dédoublement étant un theme cher à Roth” (58, “doubling was a theme dear to Roth”). As Debra Shostak aptly and succinctly phrases it, “Both erotic and thanatic desire are at play” (“Obsessive,” 200). Both novels make explicit the counterfactuality of their constructs: The Counterlife contains counterselves and counterbooks (205) and circulates very much around the question of authenticity versus fiction, reality versus fantasy, history versus counterhistory; Operation Shylock also includes a “counterplot” (225)

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and countersuggestiveness (345) (and Dying Animal adds counterobsession (33), counterthreats (85), and counterargument (112); American Pastoral adds counterinclination and counterimpulse (147), Sabbath’s Theater counterthought and counterurge (518)). All of these “counters” correspond with parallel lives, counterhistories, or alternative histories, other time lines. The double intersects with these counterselves by being the representative of that other possibility, the one inaccessible to the present but possible in other times/spaces.4 The double has a long and venerable literary and philosophical tradition.5 By stressing this trope Roth here echoes Gershom Scholem’s reading of the dibbuk wherein “The entry of a dibbuk into a person was a sign of his having committed a secret sin which opened a door for the dibbuk” (349). The double and the dibbuk are not the same because the latter is often understood as an “evil spirit” of a restless dead soul who takes over the body of a living person, but there is a resonance between them. Gordon Slethaug claims that “Jewish lore incorporates a … tradition of the prophetic powers that come to one who encounters his double” (9). Paul Coates delineates writing on the double as generating “not love but the uncanny” (1) and goes on to connect some literary doubles both with writers who are “suspended between languages” (i.e. Conrad, Nabokov, etc.) and with the rise of fascism wherein the nation functions as a “hall of mirrors, endlessly prolonging collective narcissism” (2). The playful, inventive visual artist Sophie Calle in a sense writes and images back to her double when, because Paul Auster had based a character in his novel Leviathan on her, “intrigued by this double, I decided to turn Paul Auster’s novel into a game and to make my own particular mixture of reality and fiction” (np). Calle then goes on to imagine playfully what her double might do on any given day and assigns herself, in Double Game, a series of roles based on her literary figure. Roth also imagines his characters breaking out of books and becoming real and as part of his very self-consciously taking his place in the literary canon of doubling that includes Conrad, Melville, and Dostoyevsky, all of whom are mentioned explicitly and/or implicitly in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock.6 In Shylock Roth makes of the very idea of the double a “famously real and prestigious archetype” (102) and outright rejects the moniker “double” for the other Roth while simultaneously and consistently using it to describe him. Doubles, he speechifies, “figure mainly in books, as fully materialized duplicates incarnating the hidden depravity of the respectable original, as personalities or inclinations that refuse to be buried alive and that infiltrate civilized society

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to reveal a nineteenth-century gentleman’s iniquitous secret” (102). Whereas he, “Roth,” suffers a double who cannot figure metaphorically (so he claims) because he materially rather than merely psychologically shadows him, nonetheless, there are simply too many figures of the double in Roth’s fiction to not be able to read them metaphorically as legions of literary scholars have done with Conrad, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, Pynchon, Stevenson, Morrison, and more.7 Melville’s Moby Dick comes into play several times explicitly as does “Billy Budd,” in which “innocence and guilt … changed places” (354). This resonates with some of Operation Shylock’s characters’ criticisms of Israeli military violence wherein the innocent Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide are perceived as transforming into the guilty perpetrators of anti-Arab violence. In conversation with Primo Levi, referring to the latter’s novel The Monkey’s Wrench, Roth suggests that whereas Levi’s main character claims to have “two souls in [his] body,” Roth feels that “there’s one soul, enviably capacious and seamless; … not only are the survivor and the scientist inseparable but so are the writer and the scientist” (Survival in Auschwitz, 181). So for Roth, the creator of many literary doubles, the survivor un-doubles, “enviably capacious and seamless.” This indicates how, curiously, the American Jew in the Rothian universe doubles, shadowed by the European Jew as either victim or survivor and the survivor who has no need of a double because he or she has already moved through the worst.

The Counterlife (1986) Roth structures the The Counterlife in keeping with the late 1980s postmodern turn by offering competing counternarratives that then undo themselves in a somewhat maddening series of chapters designed to keep the reader guessing as to what “actually” happens in the text.8 The novel opens with the dilemma of cardiac patient Henry Zuckerman, who undergoes a risky surgical procedure to cure his impotence. Henry is motivated by his desire to resume sexual relations with a younger mistress (Wendy); in a cruel twist of Rothian fate, he dies on the operating table. The next section opens with what we initially imagine as a counterhistory wherein Henry, having survived the operation, decides to renounce his family, his secularism, and even New Jersey in order to make aliyah and immerse himself in the study of Hebrew in a religious outpost in Israel. Then we return to Henry’s brother, Roth’s familiar alter ego Nathan

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Zuckerman, who begins an affair with a married woman and suffers the very same fate as Henry. The novel’s postmodern conceit consists of chapters whose unacknowledged author is in fact the character Nathan Zuckerman, not Roth. It was always Nathan and never Henry who had a heart condition, and Nathan, the celebrated and prolific writer of Carnovsky and other literary achievements, had fictionalized his brother’s death in place of his own. This uncannily prefigures the anxiety manifest in Plot Against America and Operation Shylock about the death of the other through genocide or through choosing to risk one’s life for sexual adventure. Nathan’s fictional Henry indulges in “demonic fantasies” (4–5) ascribed to a woman classically constructed by male desire whose only wish is for renewed sexual potency; Roth also constructs an adoring young woman in Operation Shylock who shares the same singular desire. The obsession in both novels with male sexual potency, on the one hand, is utterly unsurprising in the Rothian imagination but, on the other hand, also expresses a more general anxiety about American Jewish masculinity that the construction of the State of Israel did much at once to assuage and complicate. Stereotypical Jewish masculinity resides within the figure of the pale, thin Yeshiva student; as Israel began to project its desired image of masculinity as virile, militant, and macho, this stereotype changed.9 How these dialectics of Jewish masculinity manifest in America remains one of Roth’s enduring concerns. Thus by having both novels revolve around impotence and Israel, Roth reflects on these changing masculine imaginaries.10 As we saw in Chapter 1, Portnoy cannot get it up in Israel. The double functions as the other onto whom Roth’s characters project both their death and, what amounts to the same thing for these men, their impotence. These alternate worlds out of which the doubles erupt allow the characters to foist their anxieties about death and sexual death onto someone who resembles but is not them. The double almost always magnifies its uncanny power by being at once extremely different from the original yet in the end by discovering how this seeming difference masks an uncomfortable similarity. Roth references the literary lineage of authors who create doubles as tropes used as metaphors for a host of anxieties; Conrad, for example, with his arguments against the violence inherent in the colonizing projects, is very present in The Counterlife. When Nathan returns from visiting his brother in Israel, Maria describes it as a journey to the “Jewish heart of darkness” (263), thus equating the State of Israel with the colonizers and reawakening the discussion earlier in the novel

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about the comparison between Israelis and Nazis. Nathan’s Israeli friend Shuki, interviewed on BBC radio, had been confronted by the British interviewer with this: “You Jews learned a lot from Auschwitz … How to be Nazis to the Arabs” (66). As we will see in Operation Shylock, almost all of the Israeli characters are, unsurprisingly, utterly transformed by their experiences at concentration camps or other traumatic spaces during the war, “learning” not how to terrorize but how to be traumatized. When Shuki’s BBC interviewer thus flips the equation he obviously taps into a whole slew of misguided comparisons between Israelis and Nazis; one can be highly critical of the Israeli occupation without taking the false step of comparing Israelis with Nazis. In comments such as these from the radio interview and other rants, Roth allows the fanatics to undo themselves. Wartime Europe transforms Herbert Grossman, a minor character in Counterlife who rants about the fears that beset him in then contemporary (late 1970s) America. The Zuckerman brothers’ father tries to restart Grossman’s sapped will only to be defeated at every attempt: Hitler had done it—there was no other explanation. Dr. Zuckerman could not otherwise understand someone who was simply not there … . “Everyone worries about Israel,” Grossman was saying to him, “but you know what I worry about? Right here. America. Something terrible is happening right here. I feel it like Poland in 1935. No, not anti-Semitism. That will come anyway … . I feel it on the streets … You can’t even walk to the store. You go out to the supermarket in broad daylight and blacks come up and rob you blind.” (40)

Grossman’s experience as a refugee leads him to replicate in displaced form the anti-Semitism he experienced and to transform it into racism. Another minor character, Goff, had described the racism of his customers in a shoe shop in Albany who refused to try on shoes after black customers had preceded them. And Henry, rather revoltingly, in an attempt to refire his lost potency, has Wendy, his mistress from his dental practice, pretend to be “a black twelve year old girl named Melissa” (10), who crawls around scantily clad, willingly allowing him to strike her. As Dean Franco notes, “even the sex” in Roth “is about race” (Portnoy, 86). Grossman’s racism flows from his familiarity with anti-Semitism, Goff merely reports the racism of his “Christian” customers, and Henry constructs a sexual fantasy wherein Roth imagines the white, pale, blonde Wendy in a sexual performance as a 12-year-old girl (ugh!). This Jewish antiblack racism is not confined to America. While visiting Henry in Israel Nathan is privy to one of the extended paranoid rants of the guru of the settlement in which Henry

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attempts to connect with his “authentic” (74, 138, 147, 154–155) Jewishness.11 Mordecai Lippman declares, [T]he Jew in America will be crushed—if he is not slaughtered first by the blacks, the blacks in the ghettos who are already sharpening their knives … . There is nothing the American goy would like better than a Judenrein United States. First … they permit the resentful blacks to take all their hatred out on the Jews and afterward they take care of the blacks. And without the nosy Jews around to complain that they are violating black civil rights. Thus will come the Great American Pogrom out of which American white purity will be restored. (124)

Lippman’s knife here recalls both the knife that Sophie Portnoy used to encourage her son to eat up and the knife with which the son imagines stabbing the father if he reiterates his bigotry (see Chapter 1). Thus again the symbolism of the knife wielder shifts from its association with the Jewish main character, Portnoy, to here the frightened imaginary of Lippman, who, from his settlement in Israel, fears the “blacks in the ghettos who are already sharpening their knives.” In Plot Against America (2004), written almost twenty years after The Counterlife, Roth will construct a counterfactual past in which this Great American Pogrom materializes. Both the doubling and the racism of these earlier texts thus prefigure the counterfactual history imagined in Plot. A parallel, if, of course, radically socially and historically different, series of imaginings revolve around counterhistories and/or science fictional (due to time travel) texts wherein being a slave becomes part of the fiction. In her brilliant novel Kindred (1979), for example, Octavia Butler explores what it would have been like for someone who was unwillingly torn from the present of America in the 1970s to the slave past. As her main character Dana shifts between the time zones she begins to feel that the reality of the present fades: “I felt as though I were losing my place here in my own time. Rufus’s time was a sharper, stronger reality” (191). Another character, Alice, Dana’s great-great grandmother whom she unwillingly helps to accommodate into a relationship with the slave master, Rufus, her great-great grandfather and the person who has “called” her back into the slave riddled past multiple times in order for her, like some sort of angel, to save his life countless times, also demonstrates how slaves are made: “She went to him. She adjusted, became a quieter more subdued person. She didn’t kill, but she seemed to die a little” (168). Dying a little comes up often in Holocaust survivor accounts wherein a tension often surfaces between living in oblivion versus remembering, writing, and

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thus dying again, dying a little, or being far too proximate to death. And for Dana, conversely, it is Nazi degradation of Jewish and other victims that forms a touchstone for her to compare with the mortifications of slavery. During one of her trips back to the present she reads a book of “excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred” (116–117). At another moment in the nineteenth century, she is forced to burn a book—a history of slavery in the United States—and this, for her, recalls Nazi book burnings (141) and in retelling the story of the disapproval with which both she and her white husband Kevin met when attempting to introduce their families to the idea that they planned to marry, Dana notes that her soon to be brother-in-law “would have made a good Nazi” (110) because he was a dedicated racist. The analogy between Nazism and slavery becomes piquant for Dana while travelling between the OTL and the ATL. Uncannily, like Jorge Semprun, a Spaniard who had been incarcerated in Buchenwald for fighting, and like Delbo, in the French resistance, Dana finds uncomfortably that the slave plantation has become a perverse “home” for her. The real, the home, is in the space of pain, while the dream, the present, is unreal and unheimlich, unhomelike, uncanny. As Semprun beautifully phrases it, Two worlds, two lives. And at the time I could not have said which was the real one, which the dream. (234) It had all been a dream since ever since I’d left Buchenwald, the beech wood on the Ettersberg, the ultimate reality. (154) As though—and I understand that this statement might seem unacceptable, or at least outrageous, but it’s true—as though the night on the Ettersberg, the unquiet sleep of my companions in the crowded bunks, the feeble, raspy breathing of the dying, the flames of the crematory, were a sort of homeland. (153–154)

For this survivor the uncomfortable “unacceptable” is that the traumatic past has become a sort of bizarre “homeland.” Orlando Patterson, in discussing the relationships between master and slave, finds that “we are dealing not with a static entity but with a complex interactional process, one laden with tension and contradiction in the dynamics of each of its constituent elements” (13). This definition surprisingly aptly describes Roth’s endless doubles—far from being static they are always

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shifting, in tension, elastic, and morphing into and away from each other. In The Counterlife, when Nathan arrives in Israel to try to connect with Henry, who has survived his operation in this version and become a fanatic, he imagines his friend Shuki as the “Israeli counterpart to my own father” (51). But Nathan emphatically rejects the concept of Israel as a “homeland” in terms that Roth repeats in Plot Against America (2005) wherein the child narrator Philip Roth tells us that America is his homeland.12 Henry had expressed a deep nostalgia for Newark in the 1940s (6, 9), and when the narration in Counterlife shifts to Nathan’s consciousness he explains that the landscape of Israel feels “remote” to him and that My landscape wasn’t the Negev wilderness, or the Galilean hills, or the coastal plain of ancient Philistia; it was industrial, immigrant America—Newark … . My sacred text wasn’t the Bible but novels translated from Russian, German, and French … not the semantic range of classical Hebrew but the jumpy beat of American English was what excited me. I was not a Jewish survivor of a Nazi death camp in search of a safe and welcoming refuge … . In the long run I might even be far more secure as a Jew in my homeland. (53–54)

Here Nathan uncovers the Israeli landscape as an impostor offering a supposed homeland that actually bears no relation to his experience as a Jewish-American deeply invested in Newark as the industrial landscape of his experiential past. Whereas both Butler’s novel and Semprun’s testimony had located an unnerving sense of home within the very traumas experienced by their characters, Roth’s Nathan locates his homeland firmly in New Jersey and views those who choose Israel often in terms of fanaticism. Ranters and maniacs of varying stripes populate the Israeli landscape; they are also on the flight from Israel back to London. A childhood friend from Jersey, Jimmy, who, attracted by Nathan’s celebrity, had hailed him on the street while exclaiming, “I’m your biggest admirer in the world!” (91), then proceeds to pretend to blow up the plane in the name of his cause, “FORGET REMEMBERING!” (165). Jimmy explains in his screed, “ISRAEL NEEDS NO HITLERS FOR THE RIGHT TO BE ISRAEL! JEWS NEED NO NAZIS TO BE THE REMARKABLE JEWISH PEOPLE! ZIONISM WITHOUT AUSCHWITZ!” (165). Jimmy here raises the question, albeit in his zany, CAPITALIZED, fanatical way, of the legitimate issue of Jewishness being conflated with the Holocaust so that the latter overshadows the former and Jewishness becomes associated with mourning rather than celebration. It turns out, of course, that Jimmy’s screed is only intended to be a “joke” for Nathan’s benefit: “Come on, you think I’d be crazy enough to fuck

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around with the Holocaust?” (169). Roth here thus touches upon the vital topic of whether or not there is an overabundance of Holocaust memory and whether and to what degree this traumatic event shapes Israeli practice and U.S. policy toward the Jewish state; this will form one of the central questions of Operation Shylock. A comparable screed to Jimmy’s capitalized one from The Counterlife appears in Operation Shylock courtesy of Roth’s friend George Ziad, who asks (and then answers his own rhetorical question), “What justifies seizing every opportunity to extend Israel’s boundaries? Auschwitz” (119). Deepening his rant, and after describing a massacre of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, Ziad continues: The end of the Holocaust is written on that wall in Palestinian blood. Philip! Old friend! All your life you have devoted to saving the Jews from themselves, exposing to them their self-delusions … You have been attacked for this, you have been reviled for this, the conspiracy against you in the Jewish press began at the beginning and has barely let up to this day, a smear campaign the likes of which has befallen no Jewish writer since Spinoza. Do I exaggerate? All I know is that if a goy publicly insulted a Jew the way they have publicly insulted you, the B’nai B’rith would be screaming from every pulpit and every talk show, “Anti-Semitism!.” (122)

Many references in both Counterlife and Shylock surface to this kind of mistreatment by Jews who attack Roth (or “Roth” or Zuckerman) for “betraying” Jews as a whole by not always representing them in the peachiest light; as Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi notes, Roth “seemed intent on writing the naughtiest page of the Jewish Story” (149). Obviously the actual Roth has indeed been thusly critiqued and one unsurprisingly finds these attacks discussed herein; but interestingly Ziad’s multipage “lecture” on the problematics of “Shoah business” (119) juxtaposes itself (due to the excesses of Israeli military violence) with the public lashing out against Roth for his portrayals of Jews.13 Like Ziad, Pipik rants against “Holocaustomania” (231), which he dubs a “new religion” (231), and like the racist characters in Counterlife, Pipik’s screed includes invective about the much documented tensions between blacks and Jews: “The Jews don’t have any friends at all. Even niggers hate Jews … By the way, the Germans do have the capacity to exterminate people … I would say the Germans do have a cruel streak, but so do we. We exterminated the Indians … No one wanted Jews in their country. Why? The Jew has a tendency— as I say, even niggers hate Jews” (232–233). In Ziad’s words, it is shoah business, in Jimmy’s words it is, “forget remembering.” Peter Novick’s much discussed

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Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth

The Holocaust in American Life polemically asserted that the abundance of Holocaust discourse in America served, especially in the 1970s, to fuel U.S. military and financial support for Israel, but that, in later years, “there seems little reason to believe that memories of the Holocaust have had any real influence on American policy toward the Middle East” (167). But memories of the Holocaust have had, according to Novick, a huge influence on Jews in the United States so that “as American Jews poured more and more effort into commemorating it … the Holocaust was displacing Israel at the center of American Jewish consciousness” (168). Ziad and Jimmy rant against this very displacement; and the doubles Roth creates in effect serve to dramatize the seesaw between mourning and celebration that Israel in competition with (while being bolstered by the existence of) the Holocaust effects.

Operation Shylock (1993) Operation Shylock is a mad, comic, manic novel filled with the ranting of fanatics and the rich imaginings of paranoid characters. The plot revolves around a journey to Israel undertaken by the narrator “Philip Roth” in order to interview the Israeli writer and Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld.14 While in Israel Roth the narrator discovers that an American private investigator uncannily resembling him named “Philip Roth” poses as the real Roth and manipulates the latter’s celebrity to foster “diasporism.”15 This double, dubbed “Pipik,” exploits Roth to bolster his replacement of global Jewry back to those places in Europe from which many survivors of the Holocaust fled.16 The fake Roth’s scheme only works because of the real Roth’s real response from some critics who accuse him of being “bad for the Jews” because his characterizations often reinforce rather than challenge stereotypes and because his (Jewish) men are forever chasing shiksa tail. To wit, Pipik is accompanied by “Jinx,” his paramour, who is in the process of recovering from acute anti-Semitism and who briefly allows the narrator Roth to cuckold Pipik. And there are more doubles in the novel. The aging Holocaust survivor Smilesburger initially appears to be a major financial supporter of “diasporism” but turns out to be in fact a Mossad agent pulling the strings of Roth (narrator) as puppet; Roth is supposed to have gone off to Athens on a top secret Mossad mission that is never detailed in the text. And

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a large part of the novel is taken up with the (actual) trial of John Demjanjuk, a perpetrator who posed as an innocent double of himself. Roth (author) flips the double over and over again throughout the novel: “This man, your monster, is, in fact, your salvation—the impostor is your innocence” (323); “I’m seeing double, I thought, doubles” (277), and then Pipik tells Jinx, as they trawl around Newark trying to uncover the fakeness of the real Roth, “he’s the fucking double” (336). When, at the end of the novel, Roth meets Smilesburger at Barney Greengrass in New York, the Mossad agent echoes this with “You’ll yearn for the indignities of a double like Pipik” (365). That the monstrous double will end up offering some kind of salvation resonates with the long line of literary doubles into which Roth inserts Operation Shylock. In a New York Times Book Review essay Roth mischievously claims that the Philip Roth imposter in Operation Shylock was in fact a real person. Throughout the novel and the commentary surrounding it, there remains in place a mystery as to whether this doubling actually happened to Roth. In “A Bit of Jewish Mischief,” Roth argued that his experience of this double in Israel made him understand the condemnations of “superdignified Jews” who charged him with a “malice … alleged to outstrip its playfulness far too energetically” (1). He opens this article by noting as if it were real, that he had been “caught up in a Middle East crisis all my own” and that this double offered a “satirizing of me so bizarre and unrealistic as to exceed by far the boundaries of amusing mischief I may myself have playfully perpetrated on my own existence in fiction” (1). Mark Shechner cites Roth challenging the skeptics to talk to people involved in the double-deception in order to corroborate his story and then concluding with “I actually don’t care whether they believe me or not” (133); Shechner goes on to note that it both does and does not matter if Roth’s novel is, as he claims, 98 percent true (and which is the 2 percent that’s not true?).17 It does matter, Schechner suggests, because we want to know; it does not matter because it does not alter one’s reading of the novel, which after all, even though subtitled “A Confession,” remains fiction. Alan Cooper notes, “When review copies were being sent out in January and February 1993, Simon & Schuster kept changing the designated review categories from fiction to nonfiction and back again to fiction, and reports from within the walls of the publisher had a frenzied Roth haunting the precints with changes and expressions of anxiety” (Philip Roth, 254). Elaine Safer argues, “In Operation Shylock, Roth, with superb comic irony, uses the concept of the double to reassert postmodern skepticism

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about identity of the self, about metafictional aspects of calling attention to the story-telling itself, and about the many-faceted views of factual evidence” (163). For what it’s worth, I am going to go ahead and assume, knowing Roth’s texts, that he did not in fact work for Mossad and that there was no double; given how often he and other writers turn to the figure of the double, it seems significantly more likely that he introduced him fictionally in order to tease out the parameters of self satirization, and in order to have a means through which to express at once the anxiety about becoming the fanatic, the impotent, dead Jew, as befalls Pipik, and the violent perpetrator of hate crimes, as the dark side of the Jewish state. Using the Yiddish phrase “Moishe Pipik,” Roth dubs the double “Pipik” to describe someone who is too big for his britches.18 Roth underscores the literal meaning of Pipik as “bellybutton” when he remarks that his double had managed to dress identically to him and that thus “everything inexplicable became even more inexplicable as though what we were missing were our navels” (66). And, of course, one can’t avoid thinking of “navel-gazing” when thinking of Roth in general and Operation Shylock in particular, with its fantasy of someone else admiring you so much that they replicate even the worn patches on their elbows to be more like you. “Pipik” argues that diasporism will bring about a “new Jewish reality” (37), thus confounding the counterfactual reality that Roth has created by imagining a double whose most ardent wish is to return the world’s Jews to Europe whereupon we will be greeted with cries of joy: “Our Jews are back! Our Jews are back!” (36). Roth’s celebrity offers a readymade platform for Pipik to exploit in order to try to gain momentum for his relocation of the Jews back to Europe. “You hide your sweet side from the public” (62), he coos to the narrator Roth, and continues to admonish him for not exploiting his celebrity, “Your prestige has been a little wasted on you” (67), and then later explains, “I am only spending the renown you hoard” (76). In reflecting on all the madness of the preceding plot, Roth (narrator) notes of himself that because he is a “cultural celebrity” he “imagines there is some correlation between his own feverish, ignorant apocalyptic fantasies and the way that struggles between contending political forces are won and lost in actuality” (263). Roth (narrator) describes Pipik as his “Jerusalem counterself ” (20) (similar to the “Israeli counterpart” in The Counterlife (51)) and at one point Roth (narrator) imagines that this “Jerusalem counterself ” is Zuckerman or Kepesh or Portnoy “free of print and mockingly reconstituted as a single satirical facsimile of me” (25). Roth (author) plays with the idea that, despite his character’s vast suffering at the hands of

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this irascible Pipik posing as his double, the double is always already there, threatening to erupt into the form of that which one wishes one wasn’t. There is a moment wherein the narrator, reflecting on the wild adventures he has just laid out for us, notes that when he “sat down to reread the entire manuscript, I discovered myself strangely uncertain about the book’s verisimilitude” (329). Similarly, in Auschwitz et Après Delbo finds that “Aujourd’hui, je ne suis pas sûre que ce que j’ai écrit soit vrai. Je suis sûre que c’est véridique” (epigraph, “Today, I am not sure that what I wrote is true. I am certain that it is truthful”).19 Of course, this striking similarity between the phrasing of this doubt about truthfulness is perhaps less surprising when we consider that Roth’s trip to Israel is occasioned, within Operation Shylock, by an interview with the Holocaust survivor and Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld and that Roth, who has also published interviews with Primo Levi, wrote a novel about Anne Frank (The Ghost Writer), cites Bruno Schulz and other victims, is obviously well versed in Holocaust Literature and testimony. In the context of Operation Shylock the doubt about veracity is a prevalent theme. The text’s first paragraph includes this sentence: “The book is as accurate an account as I am able to give of actual occurrences …” (7), whereas the final utterance of the novel is “This confession is false” (367). The polarity between the claim to accuracy and the claim to falsehood marks the unreliability of our narrator and means that the factual and the imaginative are closely intertwined here (i.e. Demjanjuk was on trial, Roth did interview Appelfeld, but as I noted above I assume that Roth was not a Mossad agent nor that a double posed as him in order to locate support for “diasporism”). Unsurprisingly in an Israeli context, the Holocaust marks many of the characters in Operation Shylock. The narrator has an Israeli cousin, Apter, who suffers lifelong post-traumatic stress disorder in the form of an enduring childlikeness after having been saved by being sold into a brothel at the age of 9: “There is imprinted on Apter’s face absolutely nothing of the mayhem of Jewish life in the twentieth century, even though in 1943 his entire family had been consumed by the German mania for murdering Jews” (9). There is no shadow of the Holocaust on Apter, in other words, because he has never moved beyond the past. But the “imprint” remains through its very absence and in a country where the tussle with traumatic pasts stains many citizens. And precisely because of this traumatic past Roth has a hard time believing both Apter and Appelfeld, who tell him about the zany double who besets him. Precisely because they are survivors and have both come to expect the unwanted and extraordinary, Roth

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doubts that they have actually found his double. Roth observes that for both survivors, before their “original being[s] had had time to anneal into a solid, shatterproof identity. The much-praised transfigurations concocted by Franz Kafka pale beside the unthinkable metamorphoses perpetrated by the Third Reich on the childhoods of my cousin and my friend, to enumerate only two” (20–21). Roth here evokes the golem through the figure of clay and imagines the depth of the traumatic stamping that characterizes both men. Later in the novel Roth compares Appelfeld to Kafka, to which the former replies: Kafka emerges from an inner world and tries to get some grip on reality, and I came from a world of detailed, empirical reality, the camps and forests. My real world was far beyond the power of imagination, and my task as an artist was not to develop my imagination but to retrain it, and even then it seemed impossible to me, because everything was so unbelievable that one seemed oneself to be fictional. (47)

In Operation Shylock the narrator Roth’s “self ” has already become fictional in the guise of the double/impostor who poses as him and he imagines both here and in The Counterlife those fictional selves taking on material form. Kafka’s work irradiates throughout Holocaust literature and testimony; even though he never witnessed the Nazi genocide (he died in 1924 of tuberculosis), his ability to record unnervingly the sense of the upside down realities to which victims such as Appelfeld were subject resonates powerfully with many accounts of surviving the worst.20 As I discuss in Chapter 5, Roth turned to Kafka multiple times throughout his works perhaps essentially because of Kafka’s ability to capture these unpredictable, illogical, but often essentially true sensations of utter alienation (think of Roth’s transmogrification of the “Metamorphosis” into The Breast). In Operation Shylock, Appelfeld continues to describe to Roth how “the Jewish experience in the Second World War was not ‘historical.’ We came in contact with archaic mythic forces, a kind of dark subconscious the meaning of which we did not know” (73). This deepens the sense of the Jewish heart of darkness as Appelfeld channels Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which similarly meditates on both being within the “dark subconscious” and also on failing to grasp its meaning: We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness … . We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled … We could not understand because we were

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too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign—and no memories. (105)

The doubles in Roth’s oeuvre express the anxiety of the imposter, the exposure of undoing the veil and seeing the other. What Conrad so famously achieved in Heart of Darkness was a revelation of how we are implicated in forms of violence even while we may want, consciously anyway, to resist. When he describes how comprehension fails “because we were too far,” Conrad underscores the process through which we become entrapped in alternate realities that take on the appearance of an albeit strange reality and can erase or elide the other real. In a key passage Roth describes the doubling, the parallel lives that an American Jew such as himself and a European such as Appelfeld have—both commonality and stark differences emerge: Because, I thought, of Aharon’s and my distinctly radical twoness, a condition with which you [i.e. Pipik] appear to have no affinity at all; because we are anything but the duplicates that everyone is supposed to believe you and me to be; because Aharon and I each embody the reverse of the other’s experience; because each recognizes in the other the Jewish man he is not; because of the all but incompatible orientations that shape our very different lives and very different books and that result from antithetical twentieth-century Jewish biographies; because we are the heirs jointly of a drastically bifurcated legacy— because of the sum of all these Jewish antinomies, yes, we have much to talk about. (181)

In terms that not only conjure but actively quote Du Bois—both use “twoness”— Roth here spells out, in relation to Appelfeld, the implicit parallel lives imagined in many of his texts and what can be said to represent Jews whose families emigrated to America before the war, on the one side, and those who remained in Europe and thus either fell victim to or survived the Nazi genocide, on the other. The recognition of the other-one-is-not emphasizes that rather than doubles these two parallel lives are the alternate realities of the other. Shostak suggests, “Appelfeld is Roth’s most important counterself, since his undeniable presence points to the terminal illness lurking in Roth’s metaphysics of identity” (Countertexts, 149). In Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) an alternate reality akin to that depicted in Roth’s Plot Against America spins out wherein Germany and Japan have won the war and divided America; a novel within the novel depicts an alternate reality wherein America and the Allies win the war and the world is then “taken over” by Jews and communists.

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Dick’s counterhistory has the same sense as this moment in Shylock wherein Roth details the could-have-beenness of the other. In a sense, Roth’s description of he and Appelfeld’s twoness here makes explicit what has been a constant thread worrying throughout many of his texts of being the Jew who did not survive; whereas in Plot this anxiety is broadcast as counterhistory, in both Counterlife an Operation Shylock the anxiety comes in the narrative form of the death of the other (Henry/Pipik). The emotional as well as legalistic aftereffects of the Holocaust shadow the whole crazy scenario of Roth confronting his double, both because of the ample presence of survivors such as Appelfeld and because the novel takes place against the backdrop of the trial of John Demjanjuk in Jerusalem in 1988. Demjanjuk (1920–2012) had been an auto worker in Ohio when he was accused of falsifying his identity and thought to be “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka; he was then taken to Jerusalem where he was convicted and sentenced to death. This initial (1988) conviction was overturned by an Israeli high court in 1993 as it was determined that while he was not Ivan he was responsible for thousands of deaths at Sobibor. Long after Operation Shylock was published Demjanjuk was deported (in 2009) from Cleveland and tried in Germany. He was sentenced on May 12, 2011 to five years in prison and then spent time in a German nursing home, having been released in the hope of being granted appeal. He died on March 17, 2012, before the case could be settled definitively.21 This significant trial (which Roth the author did attend at least in part) as background works to heighten the sense of counterrealities, competing fictions, unstable identities that form some of the central concerns of the novel precisely because Demjanjuk himself posed as an “innocent” Ohio autoworker but may have been responsible for murdering some 28,000 people. As Murray Baumgarten notes, “This is another case of identity politics: the judges must decide if he is, in fact, Ivan the Terrible … or only an Ivan look-alike” (295–296). In the courtroom Roth (narrator) tells an interlocutor: “But I can assure you that I am no more myself than anyone else around here” (134). And this resonates with the Counterlife wherein, “Being Zuckerman is one long performance and the very opposite of what is thought of as being oneself” (319). Roth considers throughout the novel the sharp disjunction between the community-oriented family man that Demjanjuk became and the brutal assassin he had most likely been during the war. In imagining Demjanjuk as the violent “mass murderer” (53) at Sobibor who then went on to be a respected citizen, Roth reflects on how the double

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performs in the Nazi imaginary: “The Germans have proved definitively to all the world that to maintain two radically divergent personalities, one very nice and one not so nice, is not the prerogative of psychopaths only” (54).22 The presence of Demjanjuk in the text mirrors the always present question of the victim or survivor that Roth’s Jewish-American characters could have been because Demjanjuk’s “normal” life veils his perpetrator’s life. If Demjanjuk can switch between genocide and the American dream, who is to say that any of us “ordinary” people could not perpetrate hate crimes, whether racist, Islamophobic, or anti-Semitic?23 The figure of the double offers a literalization of one of Roth’s abiding themes: that of the troubled underside behind the mask of the American dream, here flipped so that the Nazi perpetrator of genocide is veiled by the image of the happy Midwestern family man who conceals from his happy community the worst of his past. Thus Roth explores both the anxiety inherent in the fear that the “twoness” between he and Appelfeld, the American who escaped by accidental dint of birth and the European whose entire life has been marked by trauma, could be flipped and could have been he (Roth or his Jewish-American main characters) who became the victim, but also, and here is where the Demjanjuk trial is crucial, the anxiety that any one of us could become perpetrators. This is the doubleconsciousness of the Jewish heart of darkness.

4

The American Berserk: Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral

This person had a certain fortunate, brilliant exceptional look … which would have made almost any observer envy him at a venture … . His companion … was a person of a quite different pattern, who, although he might have excited grave curiosity, would not, like the other, have provoked you to wish yourself, almost blindly, in his place. —Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881) By writing Sabbath’s Theater (1995) and American Pastoral (1997) back-to-back (although Roth had been brewing the second text since sometime after the Vietnam war), Roth casts perpetration and victimization as inherent actors of his theatrical explorations of human experience.1 If one had to contrast two protagonists (Sabbath and Swede) and two novels in order to represent sinner and saint, or perpetrator and victim, one would be hard-pressed to unearth two more germane texts than these. The profusion of sex and explosion of repression that marks Sabbath’s Theater is then inverted in American Pastoral. The second novel features a character who is so insanely good that he scatters not sperm all over graves (as Sabbath is fond of doing) but apple seeds all over the countryside (like Johnny Appleseeed). As Steven Sampson cleverly puts it in an “interview” with a phantom Roth, “Vous êtes le Jackson Pollock du sperme” (10). Sabbath’s Pollockian excesses create no offspring, whereas the Swede’s wholesome marriage to Miss New Jersey spawns a child who blows up the contours of the “perfect” family for reasons that the Swede can never grasp. Whereas Sabbath is the agent of many naughty scenes, the Swede seems almost an innocent bystander to the traumas that befall him. The very proximity of the chronology of these two strikingly different texts indicates how closely thematics of perpetration can be woven with thematics of victimization in Roth’s corpus.

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Sabbath’s Theater (1995) Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free. —Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919)

Sabbath’s Theater (1995) charts the decline and fall of Mickey Sabbath, a middle-aged former puppeteer living in the tiny town of Madamaska Falls (whose name, of course, underscores the fall of Sabbath and recalls Milton’s Paradise Lost). Sabbath’s name initially conjures the traditional Jewish time of rest but the third OED meaning is “a midnight meeting of demons, sorcerers and witches presided over by the Devil, supposed in medieval times to have been held annually as an orgy or festival” (2613). Thus the main character is marked at once as embodying a tension between a peaceful practice and rabble rousing with the Devil. His name, then, contains both sides of a dynamic between “good and evil” as construed through a religious lens. The novel is set from 1993 to 1994 and toggles back and forth between different time zones, so stay with me as we move through the roller-coaster ride of crazy stuff that Roth has Sabbath perform. Five years before the diegetic time of the novel, Sabbath had been disgraced by the broadcasting of recordings of sexually explicit conversations between he and one of his former students, Kathy Goolsbee (whose name resonates with the witches and demons embedded in Sabbath’s name because it sounds like “ghoul” to my ears). While getting over the sting of the disgrace, three ghosts haunt Sabbath: his first wife, Nikki, who disappeared without trace; his brother, Morty, killed during World War II; and his mother, destroyed and never to regain herself after the death of her eldest son. Sabbath remains in a hate-filled marriage with his second wife, Roseanna, a woman whom he once fervently desired and now blatantly ignores, while he carries on a thirteen-year long affair with Drenka, a Croatian immigrant who, with her husband Matija, runs a hotel in the area. Drenka recounts her exploits with myriad lovers to Sabbath while he enjoys the spectacle of her middle-aged sexual flowering. After Drenka dies quite suddenly of cancer, Sabbath begins to spin: going to New York for the funeral of a suicided friend he takes up residence with his old chum Norman and his wife Michelle only to abuse their adult daughter’s underwear and photo and to steal illicit images of Michelle along with huge wads of cash.

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Finally returning, draped in his brother Morty’s American flag and carrying the uncanny objects he left behind, to Madamaska Falls, Sabbath discovers Roseanna in bed with Christa (a young German woman with whom he and Drenka had carried on a threesome) and returns to Drenka’s grave to piss all over it. I am not sure that I can adequately analyze the pissing and coming all over graves that Roth has Sabbath engage in so heartily. Is it just that death and sex are close for Sabbath? (The ghost of his mother does appear while he has sex with Drenka, for instance, and, conversely, he feels he can no longer be attracted to Nikki precisely because she was too attached to her mother’s corpse.) Is this “shocking” habit of Sabbath’s Roth’s way of driving home his most colorful character’s “perversity?” I don’t have the answer but it is clear that the landscape of the cemetery is crucial to this text and that this very landscape offers Roth another opportunity to put victimization and perpetration into play. When Sabbath scouts a burial plot for himself he imagines it next to that of a grave marked “Holocaust Survivor.” In stark contrast he envisions his headstone as reading: “Beloved Whoremonger, Seducer/ Sodomist, Abuser of Women, /Destroyer of Morals, Ensnarer of Youth, / Uxoricide, /Suicide /1929–1994” (716). Roth thus juxtaposes (quite literally) a person structurally situated as a surviving victim of the Holocaust with Sabbath poised to reside in perpetuity under his own invented memorial stone that places him in the position of perpetrator. In a similar fantasizing about his own death, at one point Sabbath concocts an obituary that launches various accusations at him including, “Mr. Sabbath did nothing for Israel” (549). Having failed to support Israel takes its place along with uxoricide in a list of wrongdoings. When Sabbath pens his will he leaves “twenty dirty pictures of Dr. Michelle Cowan to the State of Israel” (779), thus at once resolving the crime of having done “nothing for Israel” and continuing the hostility Sabbath feels toward the imagined Jewish homeland. The final scene of the novel takes place at Drenka’s grave when her enraged son, Matthew the state trooper, discovers Sabbath there and hauls him into the squad car. Sabbath tells him, “Take me in so I can purge myself publicly of my crimes and accept the punishment that’s coming to me” (786), but Drenka’s son refuses, thereby denying Sabbath the exculpation from his crimes in the form of punishment. As is the case in these graveyard scenes, Roth sets Sabbath up structurally as a perpetrator throughout the text but simultaneously undoes this structural

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positioning by clouding the parameters of victimization and perpetration. Sabbath pretends to have murdered his first wife, Nikki, claiming to Kathy Goolsbee that he strangled Nikki during a rehearsal for Othello. Sabbath alleges that because it “perpetuates the stereotype of the violent black male” (592), Kathy would never have heard of Shakespeare’s play. “I played the stereotypical violent black male,” Sabbath tells her, “In the scene in which he murders her I did it” (592). By titling his novel as he does, Roth stresses the importance of the theatrical in both the general sensation of Sabbath as a character who plays all sorts of tricks and also in the more specific scenes such as this one where theater or puppetry appear. Roth has Sabbath playfully present himself as an embodiment of the very kind of stereotyping that PC-consciousness deplores (see next chapter on The Human Stain). Roth features Sabbath at once identifying with a Moorish character (Othello) and with perpetration in the form of murder. This offers another instance of what I discussed in Chapter 1 as an unstable identification of a Jewish character with a black one. Both Sabbath and The Human Stain’s Coleman Silk are disgraced teachers: Sabbath because of the exposure of taped sexually detailed conversations with a student, Coleman because of a supposed racial slur. In both cases Roth is careful to discharge the charge: Sabbath was just as much a “victim” of Kathy as she was of his; Coleman could not possibly have issued a racial slur because he did not know the race of the absent students whom he terms “spooks.” Another moment when Roth reverses perpetration and victimization falls during the scene where Sabbath recounts his arrest, in 1956, for fondling the breast of Helen Trumbull, an audience member to the puppet show he regularly performed as street art on 116th and Broadway. While Sabbath is on trial for “disorderly conduct and obscenity” (666), Helen Trumbull bravely arrives at the courtroom to testify in his defense: “Here’s the alleged victim testifying for the perpetrator” (663). As she attempts to defend him, the prosecutors and the judge demean her by making her out to be a “whore” (664, 666) and thus discredit her testimony. Sabbath is, nonetheless, let off with a fine instead of jail time; the perpetrator is saved by the “traumatized or hypnotized or tyrannized” (679) victim.2 Another example appears while Sabbath is at Norman and Michelle’s apartment. After he riffles through their daughter’s room, the narrator comments, “The savage license taken here astonished even the perpetrator” (535). Norman walks in on Sabbath being thrilled by a photograph of his adult daughter Deborah and Sabbath imagines him thinking: “Enter our terrorist” (512). And, while he somehow snuggles with Rosa, the

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housekeeper at Norman and Michelle’s place, he reminds us that “He had a harassment record a mile long already. They’d string him up by his feet outside NOW. Roseanna would see they did it to him the way they’d done it to Mussolini. And cut off his prick, for good measure” (540). In all of these instances Roth emplots Sabbath as a harasser, a terrorist, and, indeed, a “perpetrator.” But in all cases Roth unpacks this alignment with perpetration by either having the supposed victim come to his defense or by constructing another perpetrator who turns him into a victim, as is the case with the image of a castrated and strung up Sabbath, visualizing himself as Mussolini. In Chapter 2 I discussed some of the many inspirations Roth draws from Joyce, one of the most important of which is how in Finnegans Wake Joyce is concerned, according to Vicki Mahaffey, with the collapse of poles often held distinct, such as male and female. Roth makes a similar claim via Sabbath’s Joycean stream of prose: “So passeth Sabbath, seeing all the antipathies in collision, the villanous and the innocent, the genuine and the fraudulent, the loathsome and the laughable, a caricature of himself and entirely himself, embracing truth and blind to the truth, self-haunted while barely what you would call a self ” (551).3 Of all of the instances I have cited where Roth puts the anxiety around perpetration and victimization into play, this Joyceaninflected moment explains most clearly how Roth’s project works. Caricature and an unstable selfhood, ghosts, the inability to see the truth (and this will be particularly piquant for American Pastoral’s Swede Levov), and the fake and the real are all seen here as smashing into each other and becoming imbricated within each other. While the narrator explains how the whole scandal with Kathy Goolsbee came about in 1989, he makes it clear that whereas Sabbath might think he fishes for her, “she’d pierced him … he [was] being craftily landed and that someday very soon now he could discover himself eviscerated, stuffed, and hung as trophy on the wall above the desk of Dean Kimiko Kakizaki” (564). Sabbath also, after his disgrace, reverses the polarity of victimization and perpetration by sarcastically claiming that Kathy had paid “unwanted attention to my mind! … . Help! I’ve been mentally harassed! Help! I am the victim of mental harassment! … Call the dean! My dick has been disempowered” (594, original emphasis). As was the case when Sabbath imagined being castrated and hung up like Mussolini, he here plugs into the very familiar Roth trope of castration and impotence. Mussolini recalls the war and Sabbath is vehemently racist against the Japanese, something he justifies by placing the

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blame on Japan for the death of his brother, shot down over the Philippines in 1944. This anti-Japanese racism is fueled when the Japanese dean weighs in on the Goolsbee scandal. Roth makes the confusion between victim and perpetrator clear at the level of typography by inserting a series of split pages wherein a recording of the damning conversation between Sabbath and Kathy can be read below the narrative. The conversation was taped by both Kathy and Sabbath for their later delight, and then accidentally left by Kathy in the bathroom and broadcast on a phone line so that hundreds of people could hear it (and, in Sabbath’s fancy, enjoy it heartily as just another bit of porn). If this had happened now, the recording would have gone viral. After being made public on the call-in line, the tape was given to the dean. From the transcript (567–585) the affair appears consensual; from the perspective of the “mollycoddling professors” (572) Sabbath had abused his position of power as Kathy’s professor and become her “victimizer” (567) while she maintained her “innocence” (567). Sabbath had been keeping tapes of these explicit conversations in a locked file cabinet and knew full well the disgrace that would overcome him if any were to be made public: Sabbath knew the danger of what he had in those shoeboxes yet he could never bring himself either to erase the tapes or to bury them in garbage at the town dump. That would have been like burning the flag. No, more like defiling a Picasso. Because there was in these tapes a kind of art in the way that he was able to unshackle his girls from their habit of innocence. (566, original emphasis)

The image of the flag as uncanny object will reappear later in the text, when Sabbath drapes himself, shroud-like, in the flag that graced his brother’s coffin. And here, the reference to “defiling a Picasso” conjures up the Nazi take on “degenerate art” where modernists such as Picasso produced art unsavory to fascist taste. Another such moment where the war figures subtly in this text appears when Sabbath and Norman are laughing together and then Sabbath thinks unkindly of his friend: “Another sentimental Jew. You could fry the sentimental Jews in their own grease” (506). By here alluding to human grease as lubrication for frying Roth conjures up the (probably apocryphal) ghoulish accounts of Holocaust victims’ fat being used for this and other purposes. Returning to Roth’s recounting of the Kathy Goolsbee scandal, Sabbath’s anti-Japanese racism is focused on the dean, whom he terms the “midget Jap dean” (562) and whose name he consistently mangles (she appears as Kakizaki,

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Kakumoto, Kamizaki, Kuziduzi, Kamizoko, Kakizomi, Kazikomi (566–596)). Roth explains that Sabbath “hated her fucking midget guts, not for her leading the coven that cost him his job … . [but for] loosing those girls that killed him, a dozen of them a year, none over twenty-one, and always at least one …” (562–563). Roth uses “killed” in a triple sense here. First, this reverses Sabbath’s imagined killing of his first wife, Nikki. Second, the disgrace kills not him exactly but his employability as a teacher. Third, it recalls the proximity of sex and death, of which the coming on the graves never fails to remind us. In these moments Roth makes it virtually impossible to have any sympathy for Sabbath. His blatant racism and clear flattening of these students simply into “girls” with whom he can engage in play blocks identification with and sympathy for our main character. But Roth also makes into prudes and scolds the women who denounce Sabbath. In Roth’s parodic take on feminism, a group whose name acronyms SABBATH is formed: Women Against Sexual Abuse, Belittlement, Battering, and Telephone Harrassment (567). The third sense (that of meeting with the Devil) of his titular character’s name appears here as the reference to a “coven” makes clear. One of the group’s co-chairpersons announces in a “clinical” voice that she is about to play the tape of the explicit conversation between Sabbath and Kathy. She concludes by noting, “in his psychological assault on an inexperienced young woman, Professor Sabbath has been able to manipulate her into thinking that she is a willing participant. Of course, to get the woman to think that it is her fault, to get her to think that she is a ‘bad girl’ who has brought her humiliation on herself by her own cooperation and complicity … ” (568, ellipses in original). The transcription that appears below in the split page, meanwhile, makes it perfectly clear that Kathy is not only “complicit” but is in fact the instigator—it is she (and not Sabbath) who turns the conversation sexy. And, while Sabbath heatedly discusses his disgrace with Kathy while they sit in a car on Battle Mountain, Kathy, sobbing, repeats, “I want to suck you” (569), thus furthering the text’s contention that she is not the victim. In all cases, the novel argues, what may look from the outside like an older, more experienced man exploiting a younger, naïve woman; what may look like sexual abuse, is in fact sex and/or sexual play between consenting adults. A minor character, Gus Kroll, asks Sabbath if he can “take a joke that’s not too appreciative of women,” to which Sabbath replies: “The only kind I can take” (407). Indeed, Sabbath’s Theater makes fun of the feminists who are up in arms about Kathy Goolsbee’s debasement but it also makes fun of Sabbath. As David Greenham notes, “Sabbath is masculinity ironized” (165). In a chatty

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little book about Portnoy’s Complaint whose cover announces its sympathy for Roth’s 1969 novel by mimicking the original bright orange and red of the first edition, Bernard Avishai declares, “all men are created equal, but with a little porn clip running in the back of our minds, which can turn life, liberty, et cetera into a rough ride” (207). Claudia Roth Pierpont, at the conference in honor of Roth’s eightieth birthday, held up Drenka as a marvelous example of a strong female character in Roth’s world. But Sabbath reveals perhaps the most salient feature of her character near the outset of the novel: “Inside this woman was someone who thought like a man. And the man she thought like was Sabbath. She was, as she put it, his sidekicker” (379). In other words, at least in Sabbath’s view, they both have a porn clip (and, of course, there’s nothing little about it) running in their minds all the time. Unlike the women Roth’s characters problematically convey as prissy people who turn them off—think of Kepesh’s Claire Ovington, who can’t stand to swallow Kepesh’s come (The Breast, The Professor of Desire)—Drenka drinks it all in, literally and figuratively. Drenka revels in poring over sexual exploits, enjoys pretending to be a whore (and getting paid by a Sabbath who can ill afford it), and initially eschews monogamy. In being, in Sabbath’s construction, like a man she becomes certainly one of the strongest and most memorable of Roth’s female characters; but why does she need to be configured as male-ish for this to be so? Sabbath’s Theater ultimately expresses the confusion between perpetration and victimization through the anxiety around sexuality that Sabbath goes to such great lengths to identify and detonate. Kathy cannot be seen as a victim of Sabbath and nor can he be seen as a perpetrator; and yet it is within Sabbath’s dialogue with Kathy that he aligns himself with Nazis and thus with perpetration: “If they send me up for sodomy, the result could be death. And that might not be as much fun for you as you may have been led to believe. You may have forgotten, but not even at Nuremberg was everyone sentenced to die” (586). In other words, even some Nazis were let off. It’s a telling revelation for Sabbath, who had also compared himself to Mussolini, but who generally argues against the demonization of what he maintains is the “delightful Dionysian underlayer of life” (587)—and therefore against viewing him as akin to one of the perpetrators on trial at Nuremberg. By using this analogy Roth cracks open the divide between German and Jew, between victim and perpetrator. Sabbath simultaneously identifies across the ravine with victims. As I discussed above, Sabbath imagines himself being buried next to a Holocaust survivor, which contrasts sharply with his self-analogizing

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to Nazis. This again underscores Roth’s central concern with the relationship of victim and perpetrator arrayed as a continuum. As Roth digs in with all these graves, he reinforces the importance of death to Sabbath’s Theater. Roth dedicates the novel to two friends, Janet Hobhouse and Melvin Tumin, who died in 1991 and 1994; Tumin will be the inspiration for The Human Stain’s Coleman Silk (see next chapter). The epigraph to the novel, from The Tempest, is “Every third thought shall be my grave” (act v, scene I). As it turns out, the graves of Morty, Sabbath’s mother, Nikki’s mother, Drenka, and Linc take up more thought than his own grave. He does finally invest in a plot bought with some of the cash stolen from Michelle but left uninhabited by his body at the close of the novel, whose final paragraph includes “He could not fucking die” (787). Indeed, Roth would formalize this theme that had been present throughout his work, with his final cluster of novels that center on death as their explicit focus.4 Roth has Sabbath reflect that no evidence had ever been offered Sabbath to persuade him that the dead were anything other than dead. To talk to them, admittedly, was to indulge in the most defensible of irrational human activities, but to Sabbath it was alien just the same. Sabbath was a realist, ferociously a realist, so that by sixty-four he had all but given up on making contact with the living, let alone discussing problems with the dead. Yet precisely this he now did daily. His mother was there every day and he was talking to her and she was communing with him. Exactly how are you, Ma? (385)

Within the context of the novel we can read this passage as echoing the long scenes of Sabbath’s lost first wife Nikki sitting over her mother’s body in absolute communion with the dead to the exclusion of the living (469–488). When Roth ends the passage with Sabbath’s direct address to his mother, we can imagine Nikki asking her mother the same question. Adhering to no particular religious creed, Nikki feels no need to bury the parent to whom she remains unwilling to bid farewell. Sabbath notes, “I was a Jew accustomed to the dead’s being buried when possible within twenty-four hours, but Nikki was nothing” (475). While Sabbath’s mother may have been buried in a timely manner she never stops haunting him. During moments when Sabbath talks to her, he often questions his own converse with the dead: And just who did he think he was talking to? A self-induced hallucination, a betrayal of reason, something with which to magnify the inconsequentiality of a meaningless mess—that’s what his mother was, another of his puppets, his

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Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth last puppet, an invisible marionette flying around on strings, cast in the role not of guardian angel but of the departed spirit making ready to ferry him to his next abode … His mother had by now draped her spirit around him, she had enwrapped him within herself, her way of assuring him that she did indeed exist unmastered and independent of his imagination. (474–475)

Similarly, as discussed earlier in Chapter 2, a ritual of one-sided dialogue between Amy and the deceased Lonoff is a daily occurrence in Exit Ghost. All of these ghosts circulate throughout these novels and perform differently in each instance. The memory of Sabbath’s brother Morty, for example, haunts Sabbath in ways that illuminate the continuum between victim and perpetrator. Sabbath considered Morty’s death in the Philippine theater of World War II in terms of his national rather than cultural identity: “But he didn’t die because he was a Jew. Died because he was an American” (744). In contrast to the many European Jews who were killed for being Jewish, despite the assimilation (and indeed in part because of it), Morty’s death can be attributed to the very patriotism that Sabbath mocks when he “desecrates” the flag. In a decaying seaside house belonging to Sabbath’s almost 100-year-old cousin Fishman, Sabbath discovers Morty’s uncanny objects in a box containing an American flag and a Yarmulke. Freud’s derivation of the uncanny came on the heels of war, in 1919, and it is not accidental that these objects of Morty’s are relics from war. Freud tells us that “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (825) and this certainly happens with these objects from the dead. When Drenka’s son, Matthew, finds Sabbath at her grave he decries against him: “You desecrate my mother’s grave. You desecrate the American flag. You desecrate your own people. With your stupid fucking prick out, wearing the skullcap of your own religion!” (782). Sabbath’s “prick” is merely incidental and rendered useless here in light of the desecration launched by his use of these uncanny objects from the war. When Sabbath first reflects on this combination of flag and yarmulke he notes, He remained wrapped in the American flag. Never take it off—why should he? On his head the red, white and blue V for Victory, God bless America yarmulke. Dressing like this made not a scrap of difference to anything, transformed nothing, abated nothing, neither merged him with what was gone nor separated him from what was here, and yet he was determined never again to dress otherwise. A man of mirth must always dress in the priestly garb of his sect. (751)

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In further elaborating on the uncanny, Freud notes that, “this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (833). Looked at through this lens the repressed is here not only the memory of Morty but also a return of the repressed contents of Sabbath’s identity as American and Jewish. Roth has always been invested in the confluence and divergence between Jewishness and Americanness, and here in the final tragio-comic mode of the novel he combines them through these tattered objects belonging to his beloved brother killed precisely for being American rather than Jewish. While imagining that Roseanna is pleasing herself rather than being pleased by the young Christa, Sabbath would like to cheer her on when he fantasies Roseanna’s climax he lifts his “God Bless America yarmulke in admiration of the crescendos and, the diuminuends of the floating and the madness” (770). These disremembered cloth objects of Morty’s remind us that on the other side of the Atlantic he could have been killed for being Jewish and this is an alternative reality that is never far from the thoughts of many of Roth’s characters (and many characters in Jewish-American fiction, and many diaspora Jews). By simultaneously having Sabbath wear the flag and Yarmulke, Roth in one sense brings together these modes of identification; but by being ridiculous in this garb, by pissing on Drenka’s grave in this garb, by lifting the yarmulke as a toast to the “floating and the madness,” Roth, of course, makes deep fun of the very project of hyphenated identities. The donning of the flag and the yarmulke resonates with Eli, from Goodbye, Columbus’s “Eli, the Fanatic,” who, as I discussed in Chapter 1, in a moment of either madness or clarity, dons the garb of the Hasidic man whom he had previously been trying to kick out of the assimilated little town in which he lives. Wearing the “Jewish” clothes comes to stand in for a Jewish identity forged through the more quotidian forms of community identification. Virtually all of Roth’s male characters, not least because of their onanism and shiksalove, are configured as outside the hallowed and somehow cleaner imagined monogamous Jewish homes with the wife and husband (homes, in fact, much like the one in which Roth was reared in Weequahic). When Sabbath recalls Drenka’s final moments, the pair of them relive the strangely emotionally laden scene of golden shower fun, and also prefigure the yarmulke and the flag together: “ ‘My American boyfriend.’ ‘Shalom’ ” (755). This (sarcastic?) response of Sabbath’s also recalls “Eli” because when Eli says “Hello” to Tzuref, the latter

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invariably replies “Sholom” (263). This is then reversed when, wearing the black Hasidic coat, an attendant says “Nice day” to Eli, to which he responds in a whisper, “Sholom” (288). Sabbath wears these garments while he remembers visiting Drenka on the night that she died: “Driving Morty’s things north for safekeeping, wrapped in the flag and wearing his yarmulke, driving in the dark with Morty’s things and Drenka and Drenka’s last night” (288). By configuring Sabbath as driving with “Morty’s things and Drenka,” Roth leaves open the possibility that his character is hauling around Drenka’s ghost … or is it merely the memory of Drenka’s last night? Roth underscores the importance of these uncanny objects of Morty’s by indicating that they helped prevent Sabbath from killing himself (746). Drenka hails Sabbath in his Americanness and he responds with Jewishness (“Shalom”) as though he were then wearing the flag and the yarmulke as he is in the moment of remembering but not during his last night with Drenka in the hospital. In keeping with the Rothian pattern of inserting black characters at strategic moments to serve as plot turners, as Sabbath leaves Fischel Shabas’s house with the stolen flag and kippah he encounters, again, the young black woman who had told him to keep banging on Fischel’s door (and Sabbath, naturally, sexualizes this: “That black girl from across the street coming over for dessert. Don’t stop bangin’. Wouldn’t mind hearing that from her every day” (725)). But as he leaves the house he sees her again and not only does he examine her racially (“features that could be part Indian … . Admixture of races, always mystifying” (740–741)) but he also Jewifies himself by replying, when she asks his name, “Rabbi Israel, the Baal Shem Tov—the Master of God’s Good Name” (741). It is almost as though he were responding to his own stereotyping and/or delimiting of the complexities of other subjectivities to racial identities by performing a similar such preemptive stereotyping on himself. It can be so tricky to discuss the race and gender politics of Roth’s writing. Yes, the women often come across problematically sexualized, stereotyped, lambasted; the feminists appear as sexless prudes; and yet the men are jokes as well. Greenham argues that Roth “is so far from being a misogynist that it is inexplicable why he has been read this way. Roth charts the crisis of masculinity” (173). While I disagree that it is “inexplicable” that Roth has been charged with misogyny, I do agree that he is a most excellent purveyor of the trials and tribulations of masculinity and that this is often threaded through the blurring of aggresee and aggressor. But one does not preclude the other. Tracing the “crisis of masculinity” does not mean one is free of misogyny; in fact, one could say

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that some crises of masculinity include a denigration of women in order to construct a counterpart that is figured as more powerful. The formulation that Stuart Hall uses to describe the articulations between race and class could also apply to race and gender. Hall notes that “Race is, thus, also the modality in which class is ‘lived,’ the medium through which class relations are experienced, the form in which it is appropriated and ‘fought through’ ” (341). We could say that gender and race are inextricably lived one through the other as well. As I discussed in the introduction, there is a substantial difference between Roth’s careful fleshing out and detailing of white (mostly Jewish) characters and the skeletal sketching (mostly black) characters receive when they appear in order to offer a plot twist. Apart from Coleman Silk (who “passes” for Jewish), there are no major black characters in Roth’s oeuvre. But figures such as the woman across the street from Sabbath’s aged cousin repeatedly drop in willy-nilly. As I discussed in Chapter 1, a minor character, a little boy who loves Gauguin and who befriends Goodbye, Columbus’s Neil, offers a moment of attempted identification between black and Jew that recedes as Neil becomes more like a racist character he initially resisted. The movement between victim of oppression and perpetrator of racism is often dramatized in Roth through the vicissitudes of these thwarted identifications. As Shostak has argued (cited in the introduction), Roth can be seen at once to be exploding and in some case reproducing misogynist stereotypes; perhaps the same can be said for these seemingly random and incidental appearances of characters of color. By their very profusion coupled with the light outlines they receive from Roth’s pen, can we not say that Roth is in fact implicitly commenting upon the way white privilege can imagine that race itself is peripheral—even though this very marginality is itself an enduring fiction? Moments of touching on questions of race without delving into them proliferate in Sabbath’s Theater: at the instant that Sabbath picks up Christa, the young German woman with whom he and Drenka have a threesome and who then reappears at the close of the novel as Roseanna’s gorilla-like lover, Sabbath puts on some jazz in the car.5 “ ‘Are they black?’ the German girl asked. ‘No. A few are black but mainly, Miss, they are white. White jazz musicians. Carnegie Hall in New York. The night of January 16, 1938.’ ‘You were there?’ she asked. ‘Yes. I took my children, my little children. So they would be present at a musical milestone. Wanted them beside me the night that America changed forever’ ” (421). That Roth places the question of racial identity in the German

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girl’s mouth is obviously loaded on the eve of war. Sabbath locates the change and the “milestone” as a musical one but, of course, 1938 was also arguably the year when, five years into Hitler’s dictatorship, the world realized the depth of the violence behind the virulent anti-Semitic rhetoric that had always been on the surface of his many speeches. In November 1938 Kristallnacht made the headlines all over the world.6 Sabbath, who was born in 1929 (four years before Roth), then lies to Christa by telling her he was at Carnegie Hall with his children (he would have been nine at the time and furthermore was childless). Roth then tells us in an aside that, as Sabbath plays at being “Father Time,” “There is no other way to play it” (422), thus prefiguring racial play that characterizes The Human Stain. This echoes the conversation about the musicians’ race—as they play they are mostly not black but mixed. In the same scene Christa goes on to tell Sabbath that she left New York for the village of Madamaska Falls because people in the city only wanted to use her. Sabbath queries, “ ‘People in New York are worse than people in Germany?’ ‘History would seem to some to tell a different story’ ” (422). This reverses the Jamesian view of America as innocent and Germany as corrupt, which I discussed in Chapter 2. Indeed, Roth is careful here to invert the usual association of Americanness with the apple-pie happiness that is so meticulously destroyed in American Pastoral. As Christa and Sabbath drive on through the quiet, wooded night, as Sabbath thinks through how best to seduce this young woman, found on the road cross-dressed (more playing) in a tuxedo, he wonders that she finds this odd reversal between New York and Germany and marvels that he “could take her up to Battle Mountain and strangle her to death in her tuxedo. Painting by Otto Dix. Maybe not in congenial Germany but in cynical, exploitative America she was running a risk out on the road in that tuxedo” (423).7 Like the moment I cited above when Sabbath aligned himself with a Nazi, he here plays at being a perpetrator of a violent crime—murder, as he also imagines murdering Nikki. As Christa recounts for Sabbath her former life as a club girl in the city, she tells him that “Lots of black men” were into her club scene (425). Sabbath was terrified that if his musical tape switched from jazz to klezmer his hunt for her cunt would be over: “All she had to hear was Elman’s klezmer trumpet oleaginizing ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Sheyn’ and she’d leap from the moving car, even out in the middle of nowhere” (425). Black people, Christa is used to, even though she insists on labeling her fellow club-goers racially, Jews, on the other hand, no way. If klezmer, marked like the yamulke or the utterance of “shalom,” were to begin spooling out of the car, this would frighten the “German girl.”

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These scenes between Christa and Sabbath underscore how, in Roth’s novels, the Holocaust is an ever-present, if only sometimes explicit, theme. Here, Sabbath notes that the “history” of Germany would indicate that people there might not be “worse” than those in New York. Roth’s repetition of the phrase “the German girl” to describe Christa and the understanding that if Jewish music were played she would escape further thickens the referential web. The scene also highlights the play or the continuum between victim and perpetrator that is at the heart of my reading of Roth. Here we have a woman whose German ancestors likely perpetrated crimes related to the Holocaust herself figured here as the object of Sabbath’s manipulative tendencies. Meanwhile, the Jewish Sabbath envisions himself as a murder, Mussolini, or on trial at Nuremberg. Another in a long chain of totemic and immensely underdeveloped black characters appears to Sabbath as he vainly searches for Nikki. Having discovered someone with her first initial and last name in the phone book in Baltimore, he knocks on the address listed there in the hopes of finding his lost first wife Nikki: “It’s Mickey, Nikki” (495). When there is no answer save that of the bark of an unseen dog, Sabbath raps on the neighbor’s bungalow door. She turns out to be “an alarmingly thin and wrinkled elderly black woman” (495) who assumes that Sabbath had beaten his wife and this is why she had run away. She offers no confirmation that Nikki is her neighbor and, after making her pronouncement, abruptly slams the door on Sabbath. As he returns to New York after this encounter Sabbath reflects, “It had taken that blind old black woman to get him to understand that he had been jilted, discarded, abandoned!” (496). Here Sabbath trades in Oedipean mythologies of blindness as knowing, of blackness as mystery. But again by choosing to feature so many of these characters as plot-drivers, is he exposing and critiquing their very marginality? These characters are marginal in that their consciousnesses are almost never disclosed and yet they remain simultaneously crucial as presences that preside over key moments of various protagonists’ anxietyfilled transitions. A persistent thematics of unmasking runs throughout Roth’s oeuvre and is manifest in the revelation offered to Sabbath by this unnamed woman. Sabbath meditates that his finances are in shambles due to the combined forces of arthritis (his twisted, gnarled fingers having arrested his ability to perform as a puppeteer) and his “unmasking … as a degenerate” at the college (378). The title of the Roth documentary resonates with exploration of the veil drawn

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back: Philip Roth: Unmasked. American Pastoral offers the ideal model for what is everywhere in Roth: the shiny grape peeled away only to find that its slimy innards look more depraved than could have been envisioned. All of this unmasking and unveiling reveals that the perfect American family is always already corrupted and that the Mickey Sabbaths of the world merely manifest the latent content of every household.

American Pastoral (1997) He soon discerns, and weltering by his side/ One next himself in power, and next in crime,/ Long after known in Palestine, and nam’d/ Beëlzebub. —Milton, Paradise Lost (1674)

American Pastoral inaugurates Roth’s nonchronological American trilogy, narrated (with varying degrees of complexity) by Nathan Zuckerman. The novel is divided into three sections, whose titles herald their debt to Milton’s epic Paradise Lost: “Paradise Remembered,” “The Fall,” “Paradise Lost.” The arc of these three headings reflect the structure of the text as moving from a nostalgic memorial mode, to a description of the fall from grace of the main character, to the confirmation that his American paradise is indeed lost. The other two texts in the trilogy are I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000, discussed in next chapter); as Roth told Charles McGrath in 2000 (i.e. before 9/11), I think of it as a thematic trilogy, dealing with the historical moments in postwar American life that have had the greatest impact on my generation. I’d say the greatest impact on me, except I don’t believe my response is singular. Which moments? The first was the McCarthy era. You read the newspapers even as a student and you were frightened, you were mesmerized, you were outraged. Even more potent was the impact of the Vietnam War. That was the most shattering national event of my adulthood. A brutal war went on and on—went on longer even than that other great milestone, World War II—and brought with it social turbulence unlike anything since the Depression. The third moment was 1998, the year of the presidential impeachment. In 1998 you had the illusion that you were suddenly able to know this huge, unknowable country, to catch a glimpse of its moral core.8

If Mickey Sabbath was gnarled and twisted, he mostly wore his secrets on his sleeve and did not bother to hide his “perversions.” In stark contrast, the

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three heroes of the American trilogy, Swede Levov, Ira Ringold, and Coleman Silk, all appear to be straightforward but in fact shield secrets: they seem free of doubling and yet the texts reveal them as doubled. American Pastoral’s Swede Levov (the nickname given to this Jewish character because of his very “Aryan” appearance) offers a perfect façade. He is a counter-Sabbath seemingly without a counterlife (23), and he constructs a “highly pressurized perfectionist family” (97). Devilishly handsome, “startlingly Aryan” in appearance (10), tall, an expert athlete (baseball, basketball, football), ethical, unruffled, untwisted, and imagining himself in the pastoral setting he has secured for himself as the wholesome figure of Johnny Appleseed, the Swede seems the least likely man to have fathered a terrorist precisely because, despite coming from a Jewish family, he, nevertheless, embodies the American dream. The Swede would never tell anyone because it seemed too childish but he loved to picture himself as “Johnny Appleseed … just a happy American. Big, Ruddy. Happy. No brains probably but didn’t need ‘em—a great walker was all Jonny Appleseed needed to be … and everywhere he went he scattered the seeds” (316). This large, jovial, wholesome image could not be further from the scattering that Sabbath engages in—on graves, of sperm, no life, no pastoral. The landscapes in Sabbath’s Theater are overwhelmingly cemeteries, whereas the landscapes in American Pastoral are overwhelmingly the beautiful old fields and forests that entranced the first American colonizers. And yet because, Roth argues, it is in the pastoral that the terrorist enters, not into the squalid world constructed by Sabbath’s theatrics, the polarities of seeming innocence and guilt switch places. American Pastoral begins with Nathan narrating in the first person, remembering the Swede, a distant figure he idolized as a child. The first lines are as follows: “THE SWEDE. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood” (3, capitalized in original). From the opening, then, the Swede is set up as “magical,” and violence of the Vietnam War and the protests against it are foreshadowed through the childhood being set during World War II. As David Brauner points out of this “quasi-deification,” the Swede is “feted as much for what he symbolizes as for his feats on the sports field” (“What,” 23). In the text’s present it is 1995 and the Swede, who barely knows Zuckerman but who had bumped into him ten years earlier at a Mets game, writes to Nathan to ask for help in penning a tribute to his father, Lou Levov. Nathan then meets the Swede in the city (at Vincent’s) for dinner but is disappointed about the lack of a substratum and his perceived absence of “doubleness”

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(20): “No guile. No artifice. No mischief ” (20). Nathan can’t believe it. At this point in the Swede’s life, he is almost 70, married to a “good looking fortyish blonde” (23) (about whom we know next to nothing) and the father of three strapping boys, 18, 16, 14, with the anodyne names of Chris, Steve, and Kent. Nathan tells us, “I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface” (23). Nathan longs to “roil the innocence of this regal Swede” (34) but to no avail. This meeting takes place at the end of the first chapter of the book, in the section entitled “Paradise Remembered” but Roth closes with Nathan declaring that he was “wrong” to think that “There’s nothing here but what you’re looking at” (39). As Nathan tells us, “I understood right off that I wasn’t going to get anywhere near the substratum” (21). The trauma below the surface is the unexplained circumstance of his having fathered a bomber who ends up killing four people in protest against the capitalism that her father and grandfather both benefited from and take great pride in navigating justly. For Merry, “being an American was loathing America” (213) and she thus sets a bomb in 1968 at Hamlin’s General Store and Post Office that accidentally kills Dr. Fred Conlon, who had the misfortune to be up early posting a letter. Merry then becomes a fugitive and goes on to be a perpetrator of more bombings, a victim of many rapes, finally becoming a Jain in an effort to align herself with a peaceful renunciation of all violence. After the bombing, Conlon’s wife tells the Swede, “You are as much the victims of this tragedy as we are” (216), thus further underscoring the permeability of the structural poles of perpetrator and victim. Nathan had been a classmate of the Swede’s gruff, unlikeable brother Jerry and had thus been part of the Swede-idolizers in school. Nathan tells us, “He’d evoked in me, when I was a boy—as he did in hundreds of other boys— the strongest fantasy I had of being someone else” (88). Like James’s “fortunate, brilliant exceptional” character, the Swede causes envy to erupt; Sabbath, on the other hand, seems “of a quite different pattern.” And yet what Roth performs by the very juxtaposition of these two characters is to demonstrate that the perpetrator may not always be the way he appears and conversely the innocent may not always be so. If the Swede is “perfect” (this word appears multiple times to describe him), his imperfect brother, Jerry, is consistently marked as the detonator of all sentimentality and falsehood. Jerry is “unseared by memory” (72); when he runs into Nathan at the reunion, Jerry suspects that Nathan would have found the “sentimentality repellent” (61) and Nathan agrees and claims that Jerry would have also found it nauseating. Jerry declares of the reunion:

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“It’s nostalgia. It’s bullshit” (61). Nathan will spend the rest of the novel digging into all the substrata below the Swede’s handsome mask. While Nathan initially narrates in the first person, his voice drops out and the narrative becomes mostly third person, largely focalized through the Swede’s consciousness but on occasion switching to other perspectives. Thus, while at the outset Roth makes Nathan’s mediation of the story patently clear, his eventual erasure means that we never know how much of the back story of the Swede Nathan made up whole cloth versus how much can be considered “reliable” within the fictional world of the novel. Nathan is upfront about all of his fabrications: “I was working with traces,” he tells us, and, “it’s up for grabs … as to whose guess is more rigorous than whose” (76, 77) when it comes to describing the Swede and his family. At the opening of his novel within the novel about the Swede (89–423), Nathan notes, “I dreamed a realistic chronicle. I began gazing into his life—not his life as a god or a demigod” (89). Nathan then “inexplicably” (89) begins the novel within a novel with a sexually ambiguous kiss between the Swede and the then 11-year-old Merry. This scene of seduction (in Freud’s terms) never becomes the stable etiology of the violence that would erupt from Merry’s political convictions. Through Nathan’s narration the Swede wonders whether that kiss were the “wound” (92) that had created the bomber. Throughout the course of the novel, several possible wounds are offered by different characters and narrators to explain the violence that erupted out of the most precious American pastoral scenes. None of these possible explanations are ever effectively credited with “explaining” how Merry became violent and we are left with a satisfying question by the end—a question that is then covered in laughter. But it is fascinating that the novel within the novel begins with this scene of aborted seduction between father and daughter. By beginning the novel within the novel with this nod to Freud and to the debates that raged as to whether Freud then indicated widespread child abuse or rather widespread fantasies of sexual play with parents, Roth highlights the vicissitudes at the heart of all attempts to locate the source of an anxiety or neurosis. The Swede’s brusque brother Jerry unsentimentally announces to Nathan the death of his elder brother, a couple of months after he and Nathan had met at Vincent’s to discuss writing a tribute to Mr. Levov senior. Jerry describes his brother as a “sweetheart whose fate it was to get himself fucked over by some real crazies” (65). By the time one reaches the end of the text, it is very easy to forget that the protagonist who, in terms of its inner chronology, was last seen

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as a happy father (this time his offspring seem to be unstained by terrorism) of three strapping boys. Jerry tells Nathan that when they met at Vincent’s the Swede would have known that the cancer had metastasized but chose not to tell Nathan. This obfuscation indicates more masking. In other words, just as Nathan did not initially know about the bombs Merry detonated, he also does not know about the imminent explosion of the cancer that fells the merry giant Swede. Very soon before the Swede’s death, Merry is also reported to be dead— we never know exactly how or when; Jerry speculates that Merry’s death in effect caused her father’s cancer and in his typically antisentimental tone asks, “Is it true, the family’s fucking monster’s really dead?” (71). Thus, by the time Nathan’s novel within a novel begins its two main characters are dead. While the Swede is, naturally, usually compliant with the wishes of his father, Lou, the champion of the glove business he nurtured into a booming success and which the Swede took over, there is one important moment of defiance against him. The Swede chooses for his wife not a nice Jewish girl but rather the Catholic daughter of a plumber from Elizabeth, New Jersey, who was so pretty she became Miss New Jersey—but only for the scholarship! Dawn Dwyer is also a pretty façade. The prickly Rita Cohen imagines Dawn’s immense aversion to anything behind the mask: “The frivolous, trivial beauty-queen mentality and no imagination for her own daughter. ‘I don’t want to see anything messy, I don’t want to see anything dark.’ But the world isn’t like that, Dawnie dear—it is messy, it is dark. It’s hideous!” (136, italics in original). Rita continues her rant at the Swede to accuse him of only caring about “skin. Ectoderm. Surface” (137), thus recalling Nathan’s disbelief that he could find nothing below the silky smooth surface of the Swede’s apparently perfect life. Indeed, the novel devolves around several masks. The opening of the second chapter is a long speech not given by Nathan to his High School Reunion group—a “speech to myself masked as a speech to them” (44); at the reunion Nathan ponders whether they are not all in some “futuristic theme of a senior prom” in which they had all turned up in “humorous papier-mâché masks” (46). Indeed Roth drives home throughout the novel the thematic of the cracking façade, “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” as Yeats would have it. In Dawn’s case the façade is quite literal because it is through a facelift that she recovers her composure some years after her daughter, the terrorist, has left home in flight from the FBI. In the case of the Swede there is no getting behind the façade—that’s all there is. The Swede, in fact, is the very image of perfection

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doubled by the figure of failure. Merry represents this failure by turning first terrorist and then later antiviolent, and thus effectively and definitively eschewing the illusion of American perfectionism that was always already denied in the Rothian corpus. Merry was to have been “the perfected image of himself as he had been the perfected image of his father, and his father the perfected image of his father’s father …” (85–86, ellipses in original). American Pastoral dissects the myth of the perfect American family that acts as a screen ultimately obfuscating the heart of darkness of “the American dream.”9 For the Swede, the pastoral as found in his ideal old stone house becomes for his fiery daughter a prison and she longs to escape to the urban worlds that represent the space where Jewish immigrants originally landed and where their mostly bourgeois descendants set up with all the expected cosmopolitan trappings: as Nathan imagines the story of the Swede and Merry he inserts asides such as “Conversation #34 about New York” (109) or “The brutality of the destruction of this indestructible man. Whatever happened to Swede Levov” (83). In both of these interventions from the narrator Roth makes Nathan’s tone deadpan; in the second citation he offers a fragment without a question mark to underscore that this is Nathan’s commentary on this perfect man he strives to understand fully. Even though Nathan can never explicitly crack the code that keeps the Swede seemingly all on the surface, the Swede fancies that he talks with Angela Davis; in a strange amalgam of a passing childhood fascination of Merry’s with all things Catholic (her mother, Dawn, after all was brought up in the faith), the Swede dubs Davis “St. Angela” (162) and commences nightly, imaginary conversations with her. The Swede is anxious to tell Davis all about Vicky, the forty-year black employee of Newark Maid whose attachment to the glove company, the Swede discovers, equals his in its profundity. The Swede trots the example of Vicky out to Davis in order to make an argument for his position as a nonexploitative capitalist. Rita Cohen (a possible accomplice of Merry) and Merry had both viciously attacked him for being an imperialist capitalist pig and he had consistently defended himself as, instead, an employer who trains well, pays well, and treats well his employees. But the Swede lies to Angela Davis. Whereas the example of the loyal Vicky, with her two kids in college, and general success story can take him only so far, he does not tell Davis that he was in support of Governor Hughes’s sending in tanks to protect the factories; he does not tell Davis that he would have absolutely no trouble picking up and deserting (as most other white factory owners did after the riots) the formerly glorious downtown Newark were it not for the fact that this very abandonment

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would confirm exactly what Merry had been accusing him of: “Victimizing black people and the working class and the poor solely for self-gain, out of filthy greed!” (163, italics in original). The historical (as opposed to the apparition version) Davis had made a speech replayed in Free Angela and All Political Prisoners (2013): There is a conspiracy in the land. It’s a conspiracy to wipe out, to murder every single Black Panther in America and to wipe out the black community as a whole. Brothers and sisters this is genocide. We want to call it by its name. This is genocide. This conspiracy to commit murder and genocide on our people forces us to exercise our constitutional right to bear arms and to use those arms to defend our community, our families, and ourselves. Power to the people! (20.25–21.16)

By emphasizing the word “genocide” Davis in a sense aligns the victims of the Holocaust with the conspiracy against the Black Panthers and other revolutionaries. Lou Levov also draws these connections but in a different way. After imbibing news reports about the “police hunt for the underground weathermen, among them Mark Rudd and Katherine Boudin” (255), Lou links their determination to bomb with their inability to glory in their freedom from oppression: “What the hell happened to our smart Jewish kids? If, God forbid, their parents are no longer oppressed for a while, they run where they think they can find oppression. Can’t live without it. Once Jews ran away from oppression; now they run away from no-oppression” (255). It turns out that Angela Davis has known former Weather Underground and Black Liberation Army revolutionary Kathy Boudin for a very long time. In an interview on Democracy Now! (March 7, 2014), Davis hailed Boudin as a close friend and told Amy Goodman that they had attended the same high school in the village. Kathy Boudin is not exactly the model for Merry in American Pastoral, but it is, nonetheless, clear that Roth brings in newspaper and other accounts of the activities of the Weathermen with whom Boudin was associated in constructing his plot.10 Boudin is (at the time of writing) an adjunct professor at Columbia’s School of Social Work. She served time for her role in the 1981 Brink’s truck robbery that resulted in the deaths of two police officers, and she had been present during the March 6, 1970, Greenwich Village Townhouse explosion that killed three other Weathermen. Roth mentions this townhouse explosion and seamlessly brings together the historical with the fictional. After describing the blast, Roth has the Swede imagine that the unidentified bomber

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is his daughter: “One is the twenty-five-year-old daughter of the owners of the townhouse, a member of a violent revolutionary faction of the Students for a Democratic Society called the Weathermen. The other is unidentified. The other is Rita. The other is Merry” (149). Roth echoes one of the New York Times articles about the bombing, thus further emplotting the historical into the fictional. Compare the following accounts: After the explosion, two dazed young women stumble, bruised and lacerated, out of the building. One of them, who is naked, is described as being between sixteen and eighteen. The two are sheltered by a neighbor. She gives them clothes to wear, but while the neighbor rushed off to the bombed-out building to see what more she can do, the two young women disappear. (American Pastoral, 149) Two women said to have been in the building at the time of the explosion … were cared for by a neighbor. They had disappeared by the time the fire was brought under control … Witnesses said that the two women, both nude, were … dazed and bleeding from cuts … We saw a woman screaming in the nude with lacerations over her body. (Robinson, New York Times, March 7, 1970, 1, Col. 3)

The similarities between the two passages indicate that Roth was working with news reports in constructing the fictional experience of the bombing, thus tying Merry in with the historical Weatherman more fully. That the historical SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and Weathermen leaders conflated war and racism in much the same way as their fictional versions here can be seen in Mark Rudd’s memoir, Underground (2009). Rudd describes himself as a “confirmed idealist” who wanted “to end the underlying system that produced war and racism” (viii). Rudd, who was born in 1947, grew up in the same place as Roth, just a few years later. He notes in his memoir that Roth describes the Weequahic section “brilliantly” (8) and also that, like many other Jewish families, his clan moved out of Newark because, according to his grandmothers, the “schvartzes” were “destroying Newark” (8). Rudd, like so many of Roth’s characters, imagines an alternative history in which he became a victim during the war: “I saw myself among the dead. Over and over I pondered what would have happened to me and my family if my father hadn’t emigrated in 1917, or if my mother’s family hadn’t come to this country in 1911? Why was I allowed to be born while so many millions of other Jewish kids perished?” (23).11 In part Rudd credits this counterfactual imagining of having perished in the

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Nazi genocide with fueling his desire for justice in America. Tom Hayden and the other drafters of the Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society argued thus in 1962: “ … the specialization of human activity leaves little room for sweeping thought; the horrors of the twentieth century, symbolized in the gas-ovens and concentration camps and atom bombs, have blasted hopefulness. To be idealistic is to be considered apocalyptic, deluded.” Roth would have been familiar with this widely circulated treatise; his representation of Merry and Rita’s attacks on the powers that be is influenced by how the ‘horrors of the twentieth century” have “blasted hopefulness.” Just before beginning his novel-within-the-novel, Nathan delivers one of the most important descriptions of this “blasted hopefulness”: “The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral—into the indigenous American berserk” (86). The madness of Merry’s bombing jolts the Swede out of his edenic paradise and into a reckoning with the structural forms of violence embodied within the very capitalist enterprises he takes to be wholesome. Jonathan Dollimore, in a brilliant essay describing what he terms “dangerous knowledge”—the knowledge that can uncover the deep similarities between seemingly ideologically opposed phenomena such as modernism and fascism—lists several moments where the beautiful is offered as sound justification for violence. Among his examples we find, “the symbolist poet who declared of an anarchist bomb attack, ‘What do the victims matter if the gesture is beautiful?’ ” (46). Merry is similarly positioned to disregard the victims of her bombing. Does her gesture have the potential to stop greater victimization in an unjust war—in this case the Vietnam War? American Pastoral examines the continuum between victim and perpetrator by embedding the perpetrator of a terrorist act into the soi-disant perfect American dream family; that this act of terrorism unravels the family and that Merry switches to what Roth represents (somewhat problematically perhaps) as the terrorist’s antipode, a Jain who tries not to kill even insects, are all modes of exploring the evermoving line between guilt, atonement, perpetration, and its renunciation. Soon after describing the multiply interpretable scene of seduction, Nathan tells us, “Merry’s other great love that year, aside from her father, was Audrey Hepburn” (93). Given the high likelihood that Roth knew that Hepburn was Otto Frank’s first choice to play the title role in the 1959 film of The Diary of Anne Frank, and given that Roth had had Nathan fantasizing an alive Anne

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Frank many years earlier in The Ghost Writer (1979, see Chapter 2), and given that the recovery of the Audrey Hepburn scrapbook comes up again with the curious Rita Cohen, it seems only a little stretch to find a shadow of Anne Frank here. Indeed, in her brilliant discussion of the 1972 draft of what would become American Pastoral, Debra Shostak notes that it is “startling” to find among the possible titles Roth was considering for his much-delayed work, “The Diary of Anne Frank’s Contemporary” (Philip Roth, 124). For her part, Hepburn felt aligned with Frank: “Anne Frank and I were the same age … so I felt very drawn to her. I must have been one of the first pilgrims to the office building on the Prinsengracht where she had lived in hiding, which later was converted to a museum in her memory” (Harris, 53). Hepburn apparently refused the offers to play Anne Frank because she “would have cried too much” (Harris, 53). Later on, though, in 1990, Hepburn chose selections from The Diary of Anne Frank and narrated them to music composed by Michael Tilson Thomas based on themes from the Kaddish in a series of performances beginning at the United Nations and moving on to other locations (Harris, 284–285; Oestreich). Roth would most likely have been keenly aware of these connections between Frank and Hepburn, and by making one of Merry’s rotating series of obsessions Audrey Hepburn, he likely (if implicitly) called up the confusion between the ultimate symbol of victimization (Frank) and the young perpetrator and bomber Merry. That he considered using Anne Frank’s name in the title of the text further underpins this connection. Anne Frank and Merry were misunderstood teenagers grappling with different forms of stricture: Anne’s literal trapping in a hiding place from which escape meant almost certain death and Merry bucking against what she increasingly perceives as the capitalist strictures of her silly, apolitical, good-for-nothing-but-looking-good parents. Merry’s stutter may have been a symptom of the anxiety increased by these strictures. In one of the many arguments between the Swede and Merry about access to New York City with all of the radicals with whom Merry wants to hang out, she complains to her father that those people “feel responsible when America b-blows up Vietnamese villages. They feel responsible when America is b-blowing little b-babies to b-b-b-b-bits. B-but you don’t, and neither does Mother” (107). In other words, Merry finds her parents complicit in the victimization of the Vietnamese; so whereas for the generation of the children of immigrant Jews (Nathan and the Swede’s generation) Americanization is a separation from the relocated shtetls, for Merry’s generation for whom identification with America is a given

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rather than a choice, that identification comes at the cost of responsibility to answer for state actions. As is often the case, Roth takes pains here to stress the Americanization of the Jewish characters who populate his fictions: “the first postimmigrant generation of Newark’s Jews had regrouped into a community that took its inspiration more from the mainstream of American life than from the Polish shtetl their Yiddish-speaking parents had re-created around Prince street” (10). In another of the battles between Merry and the Swede (and Roth numbers them to underscore their repetitive nature), the Swede warns her of the dangers of the city, including the possibility of rape, to which Merry replies, “Girls wind up getting raped whether they listen to their daddies or not. Sometimes the daddies do the raping. Rapists have ch-ch-children too. That’s what makes them daddies” (111). Here Merry both refers implicitly to the kiss between father and daughter and prefigures her eventually being raped multiple times while a fugitive from justice after the bombs. Roth presents Merry as ever sensitive to the continuum between victimization and perpetration by plotting the fathers as perpetrators here. Hepburn returns again through the scenes with Rita Cohen, a character hard to discuss for the simple reason that she may not exist within the fiction. She appears to the Swede at the glove factory one day and after receiving an extensive tour and a pair of lovely, made-to-order gloves, she reveals herself to be a friend of Merry by demanding the latter’s beloved Audrey Hepburn scrapbook. But years later when the Swede finds Merry in her squalid and starving state, some sixteen years before her death, she denies any knowledge of Rita Cohen. Whether or not we are to understand that the Swede’s fevered imagination conjured Rita (much as he imagines Angela Davis in his house), Rita links the critique of capitalism more explicitly with racism: “You’re nothing but a shitty little capitalist who exploits the brown and yellow people of the world and lives in luxury behind the nigger-proof security gates of his mansion” (133). Rita makes no distinction between paid factory workers and slaves: “You own ‘em, you sleep with ‘em, and when you’re finished with ‘em you toss ‘em out. Lynch ‘em only when necessary” (135). Rita thus accuses the Swede of masking his racism and greed behind a do-goodish exterior as a beneficent owner of the glove factory. The Swede himself seems to betray some inkling of this conjoining of innocence and violence. At a certain point, Nathan’s narration gives way (with only a paragraph break to designate the change, 210) to that of the Swede, in

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the first person. The Swede remembers his time as a marine, remembers his determination to join the forces against Japan, and then describes himself as having been simultaneously innocent and murderous: “What a patriotic kid that innocent kid was. Wanted to fire the tank killer, the hand held bazooka rocket” (211). This is yet another moment where innocence is brought into the same purview as the violence of military weaponry. The narration then abruptly—and this time without a paragraph break—switches back to Nathan (213); a marked difference in style separates the Swede’s narrative from Nathan’s—the former speaks in choppy, fragmented sentences, whereas Nathan offers rich, full descriptions. While Nathan still overtly narrates, he muses that the Swede had “abolished from his world everything that didn’t suit him—not only deceit, violence, mockery, and ruthlessness but anything remotely coarse-grained” (36). It will be precisely all the abolished phenomena that will come back to invade the Swede by the novel’s close. Named anxieties filter throughout the novel along with many free-floating unnamed ones. Nathan describes Lou Levov as “a spidery man even more agitated than the father whose anxieties were shaping my own” (10–11). In the imagined, neverdelivered speech to the forty-fifth high school reunion, at which he bumps into Jerry Levov, Nathan defines an “undercurrent of anxiety” (41) that marks his Jewish neighborhood. If at the opening of the novel, anxiety is manifestly cast in a major role, it is laughter that takes the final scenes. The closing laughter had been foreshadowed several times in the novel: “They were laughing at him. Life was laughing at him” (216), the Swede thinks, when meditating on how ultimately silly a protest Merry’s first bomb was. And then again Roth has the Swede imagine that those who so vociferously buck the system were laughing at him: He heard them laughing, the Weathermen, the Panthers, the angry ragtag army of the violent Uncorrupted who called him a criminal and hated his guts because he was one of those who own and have. The Swede finally found out! They were delirious with joy, delighted having destroyed his once-pampered daughter and ruined his privileged life, shepherding him at long last to their truth, to the truth as they knew it to be for every Vietnamese man, woman, child, and tot, for every colonized black in America, for everyone everywhere who had been fucked over by the capitalists and their insatiable greed. The something that’s demented, honky, is American history! It’s the American empire! It’s Chase Manhattan and General Motors and Standard Oil and Newark Maid Leatherware! Welcome aboard, capitalist dog! Welcome to the fucked-over-by-America human race! (256–257, original emphasis)

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These angry Weathermen and Panthers term the Swede a “criminal,” thus again bringing him out of his imagined pastoral innocence and into the realm of perpetration. The “truth” revealed congeals the Vietnamese victims of the war with the black population of Newark, “colonized” by the likes of the Swede with his supposedly benevolent capitalism. By inserting the word “honky” here the perspective of this rant seems to be focalized through a black voice—a Panther?— whom the Swede imagines mocking him. Whereas he wants to phantasize about himself as a Johnny Appleseed, this screed tears away the façade and reveals the twisted underside the Swede refuses to see. This passage represents one of the moments in American Pastoral where Roth has the Swede realize his implication in and complicity with the structural systems that uphold oppression. In a very different register Lou Levov, toward the close of novel, flips the poles of innocence and guilt around in ways that resonate with the screed of this imagined mocking Panther. The scene takes place against the backdrop of the Watergate hearings, whose flickerings as they are broadcast on TV illuminate the characters. Lou Levov has reserved his “greatest contempt” (286) for one of the lawyers who helped funnel money into the Watergate operation. He terms this lawyer along with Nixon’s chief of staff Ehrlichman and others “fascists”: “Von Erlichman, Von Haldeman, Von Kalmbach” (287). And then Lou continues, to Dawn: “These so-called patriots … would take this country and make Nazi Germany out of it. You know the book It Can’t Happen Here? There’s a wonderful book, I forget the author, but the idea couldn’t be more up-to-the-moment. These people have taken us to the edge of something terrible” (287). As I discuss in Chapter 6, Roth would later imagine a fascist America and draw the Sinclair Lewis alternative history that Lou finds so wonderful. By terming all the president’s men “fascist” and by indicating that it is the “patriots” who could in fact turn America into Nazi Germany, Lou moves the discourse of perpetration and victimization once again from the “capitalist dog[s]” (of which he, as the founder of a large glove factory, can count himself among) to the insidious perfidy of the Nixon presidency. Roth knits the laughing rant of the imagined Panther to Lou Levov’s outbursts by having Lou echo the Panther’s “capitalist dog” with the phrase “fascist dog!” (299), which he slings directly toward President Nixon.12 The laughter that closes American Pastoral resonates with the laughter of the Panther’s screed. And Marcia’s laughter is also prefigured during the space where Nathan discusses the Swede with his cranky brother Jerry and then imagines how he will imagine his life as a novel. Jerry finds that “One day life

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started laughing at him and it never let up” (74). The final laughter comes, perhaps oddly, from the throat of a minor character, Marcia Umanoff, the bulky caftan-wearing, city-dwelling bourgeois revolutionary who so sharply contrasts with the tiny (103 lbs, Roth repeats) always neat and well-dressed Dawn. Marcia and Barry Umanoff appear as the adults to whom the Swede begs Merry to turn when she is in the city and they reappear as the regular guests of Seymour and Dawn, especially when Lou and Sylvia Levov are to come up from Florida for a visit. The Swede is attached to Barry, his former teammate and “closest high school friend” (338), not to Marcia, whom he tolerates only because she is Barry’s wife. The fact that Roth sets the third and final section of the novel, “Paradise Lost,” within the diegetic time of a dinner party shortly after he finds Merry, now a Jain starving and in utter squalor in Newark, underscores the stark difference between all that remains hidden (he initially tells no one that he has found Merry) and all the social niceties; throughout the course of the dinner party all of these niceties break down: Dawn is dry-humped by her lover, William Orcutt III, the ultimate WASP if there ever was one; Orcutt’s drunken wife, Jessie, stabs Lou Levov just below the eye with a fork; and the Swede privately storms at his former lover, Sheila Saltzman, Merry’s speech therapist and, he has just discovered from Merry, the person who hid her for several days after she planted her first bomb. The entire section toggles between the dinner party with its often-tense, Albee-esque overtones and the Swede’s failed attempts to come to terms with the reality of his discovery of his daughter, alive but not at all well. Within the penultimate paragraph of the novel we find Marcia’s laugh: she began to laugh at their obtuseness to the flimsiness of the whole contraption, to laugh and to laugh and laugh at them all, pillars of a society that, much to her delight, was going rapidly under—to laugh and to relish, as some people, historically, always seem to do, how far the rampant disorder had spread, enjoying enormously the assailability, the frailty, the enfeeblement of supposedly robust things. (423)

This laughter has, no doubt, many literary precedents, among them the Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz’s short story “Bontsha the Silent” (1894), whose final lines are as follows: “Then the silence is shattered. The prosecutor laughs aloud, a bitter laugh” (230). “Bontsha” relates the story of a trampled man who remains silent throughout all sorts of mishaps and then silently dies; in heaven he is granted anything he wants and what does he request? “every morning for breakfast, a hot roll with fresh butter” (230). This desire is met by the angels

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with an enormous silence as they “bend their heads in shame at this unending meekness they have created on earth” (230). Then the prosecutor breaks the silence with his bitter laugh. Another excessive laughter appears in Dostoyevsky’s (Roth mentions Dostoyevsky in passing at least once in the novel, 85) Demons, wherein Stephan Verkhovensky notes of his revolutionary son: “Il rit. Il rit beaucoup, il rit trop” (215).13 Demons displays a whole range of political positions only to then deconstruct them. In much the same way, American Pastoral (which ultimately owes more to Milton than to Dostoyevsky) leaves us no one with whom we can agree: Merry’s positions fluctuate and even at their most fervent seem incoherent (i.e. why would blowing up the general store stop the war in Vietnam?); the Swede tries to produce a coherent position as a benevolent capitalist but by the end of the novel has fully abandoned his workers in Newark and jumped ship to Puerto Rico; Barry and Marcia Umanoff are consistently left-wing and yet they live an utterly bourgeois life and cannot be described as revolutionaries; and on and on. All the possible positions remain unstable. And it is this very instability that Marcia relishes at the end; the closing tension resolved finally as all the masks, façades, and social niceties dissolve into starvation, squalor, adultery, lying, and violence.

5

Playing It Any Way You Like: The Human Stain

He wanted to hear her story. And he wanted to know nothing more about her … . Let the liberal white bastard squirm, he thought. —James Baldwin, Another Country (1962) When Ellie asks Coleman “What are you anyway?,” he replies, “Play it any way you like.” The ambiguity of his appearance excites them both, driving an identity game in which rules evaporate fast and anyone can be anything, depending on how one plays. The main character in Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), Coleman Silk, an African American dean of faculty at the fictional and aptly named “Athena College,” has refashioned himself as Jewish in order to attain freedom as the “greatest of the great pioneers of the I” (108). Playing it any way one likes and the delicious mystery of not being able to be “read” initially entice Coleman, but the confusions of not maintaining a fixed identity eventually overcome him. They lead him to “pass” as Jewish, thereby illustrating that the identity politics Roth questions in this work cannot be ignored. In this sense, The Human Stain offers an extended and cranky plea for a return to a universal “I” decoupled from the identity politics many of Roth’s characters see as creating the “we-think” of “political correctness” that they believe has hijacked academia. Coleman is the perfect exemplar of the anxiety around the continuum of victim and perpetrator because he is mistakenly perceived as racist when, unbeknownst to everyone, he comes from a black family. He is perceived as a perpetrator of hate speech when his family has historically been positioned as victims of institutionalized racism and the inheritors of the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade. Once we know that Coleman has “passed” we can also see that Roth uses this to comment on the sting of “Jewish selfhatred” that was often foisted on him, especially, as I discussed in Chapter 1, in the wake of Portnoy’s Complaint, but also after the publication of “The Conversion of the Jews” (published in The Paris Review No. 18, Spring 1958, and then reprinted in Goodbye Columbus and Five Short Stories). Just as Roth

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was accused of hating himself so Coleman’s misunderstood gaffe in class, once his family background is realized, could be similarly misconstrued as “selfhatred.” Coleman, I would argue, along with Nathan Zuckerman, is another “stand in” for Roth; and if that is so then the series of attempted but thwarted identifications with black characters that I discussed in Chapter 1 comes full circle here and we find not only an identification with this “passing” character but also then an intensification of a mode of identification that finally works. As Judith Halberstam notes on passing, Eccentric, double, duplicitous, deceptive, odd, self-hating: all of these judgments swirl around the passing woman, the cross-dresser, the non-operative transsexual, the self-defined transgender person, as if other lives—gender normative lives—were not odd, not duplicitous, not doubled and contradictory at every turn. (24)

In a sense Roth consistently underscores how these normative lives are always already “doubled and contradictory” and forces us to recognize as a straw man that the racially and gendered lives conceived as normative are most often shadowed by secrets and contradictions that undo that very normativity. If Coleman is a stand-in for Roth he is, like American Pastoral’s Swede, a somewhat idealized figure of masculine wonder. In a very compelling paper delivered at the Roth@80 conference, “Queering Philip Roth: Homosocial Discourse in The American Trilogy,” David Brauner lingered on the scene from Human Stain in which Coleman and Nathan dance, sweat, and get close. Brauner reads this as part of the queering of Roth, but one might also understand this scene as self-love. Given Roth’s obvious interest masturbation (Portnoy’s Complaint and Sabbath’s Theater have got to get the world record for onanistic novels), I wonder if that scene cannot be read less as queer and more as yet another manifestation of self-love: two Roth stand-ins, Coleman Silk and Nathan Zuckerman, embrace. This would then twist around the concept of selfhatred that is at the core of so much (unjustified) critique of Roth and to which he has replied often within and outside of his fiction. Because Coleman has chosen to identify himself as Jewish, he cannot escape the “tyranny” of categorization; read as either black or Jewish, Coleman alternately suffers racism or anti-Semitism. The Human Stain argues against itself: while it glories in an “I” free from the cloying groupthink of the “we,” its characters continually prove that the external demands of the historically determined “we”—especially that of race—cannot be jettisoned by sheer acts of will. If only, Roth seems to be arguing, the indeterminacy of “playing it any

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way you like” could transcend the trenchant categorization that marks much contemporary discourse on race, if only we did not need to read race (here, for the moment, including reading Jewishness), then racial reconciliation could be achieved. But no; The Human Stain finds that because we are still obsessed by reading race racism and anti-Semitism persist. Indeed, according to the logic of The Human Stain, racial reconciliation can only be achieved by eschewing identity politics. I borrow the term “racial reconciliation” from former president Bill Clinton, who functions as a character in Roth’s novel and who, in 1997, created the “President’s Initiative on Race.” Through “racial reconciliation” Clinton’s initiative imagined a means of overcoming racism in contemporary America. By arguing that racial reconciliation relies on jettisoning the group identity associated with “identity politics,” many of Roth’s characters take a neoconservative argument against “political correctness” (PC) and transform it into a classical liberal argument about the powers of self-fashioning. The genesis of PC is often understood as a neoconservative attack on radical professors. But Richard Feldstein locates the first uses of PC in the 1940s as a Jewish leftist critique of communist party hardliners who remained faithful to the party after the Hitler–Stalin pact of 1939. Feldstein contends that through the 1970s and 1980s PC became an in joke among lesbian feminists gently chiding their own desire to be nonoffensive to all genders, races, classes, sexual orientations, and so on. It has only been since the late 1980s that “PC” became a term of abuse flung against the left by neoconservatives wishing to mock the opening up of the canon to “others” (4–6).1 Roth positions many of his characters as critical of PC or as representatives of its hypocrisy, especially when they share the fantasy of the dissolution of the category of race in favor of an uncompromised and untethered selfhood.2 Hence Coleman’s sister, Ernestine, decries the “buffoonery” of having to “be so terribly frightened of every word one uses,” lest one be accused of racism (328–329). Racial reconciliation, Roth implies here, can never be achieved as long as the “reactionary authorities” of political correctness remain unchecked (329). In short, in The Human Stain’s paradoxically liberally inflected neoconservative view, political correctness prevents racial reconciliation by insisting on stifling categorization. While The Human Stain thus charts the conundrums of racial reconciliation, it also leaves open the possibility of what Roth, in discussing Kafka, calls

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“personal reconciliation.” Kafka haunts Roth, and, as Sanford Pinkser notes, “if ever a contemporary American writer imagined himself as Kafka’s doppelgänger, it is Roth” (225). In “ ‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka” (1973), another alternative history in which Roth imagines a bedraggled Kafka as his Hebrew teacher, Roth traces the difference between Kafka’s angst-ridden earlier stories and a later piece written on the eve of his death. Here he seems to have found some form of peace due in part to his relationship with the much younger Dora, who nurses him on his deathbed. Roth notes of Kafka’s later work: this fiction imagined in the last “happy” months of his life is touched by a spirit of personal reconciliation and sardonic self-acceptance, by a tolerance of one’s own brand of madness … The piercing masochistic irony of the earlier [stories] has given way here to a critique of the self and its preoccupations that, though bordering on mockery, no longer seeks to resolve itself in images of the uttermost humiliation and defeat. (256)

While “bordering on mockery,” The Human Stain is similarly “touched by a spirit of personal reconciliation.” This Roth/Kafka version of reconciliation—a denuded form of the much more idealized model proposed by President Clinton’s initiative on race—is a means of coming to terms with the defects of the self, not a means of overcoming them. In modeling himself on Kafka, in being Kafka’s doppelgänger, then, Roth offers a work that chronicles the struggle for reconciliation at both personal and social (in this case racial) levels. Roth’s novel revolves around the following event: Coleman Silk, a dean at a fictional New England liberal arts college, makes the unwitting mistake of referring to two perpetually absent students in one of his courses as “spooks.” Unbeknownst to him, these two students are African Americans; they interpret his comment—which he meant in the first dictionary definition as “spectral or ghostly”—as a racial slur. Eric Sundquist notes that this word implies a curious twist: “since ‘spook’ was originally used by blacks to refer to whites as ghostlike, the epithet itself is built on a psychological inversion” (Strangers, 513). After Coleman utters this cursed word a brouhaha erupts, Dean Silk must retire, his Jewish wife, Iris, dies from the heartbreak of the scandal, Coleman takes as his mistress a significantly younger woman, Faunia Farley, and Coleman and Faunia are followed and harassed by Faunia’s exhusband, a traumatized Vietnam veteran named Les Farley, who eventually kills them both. Interspersed with all this, Roth details Coleman’s interesting

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life as a Valedictorian and boxing buff before World War II, delves into his crucial relationship with a whiter-than-white young woman named Steena, and records the Clinton-era friendship that emerges between Coleman and Nathan Zuckerman, who discovers Coleman’s secret due to the arrival of the dean’s more clearly African American sister at his funeral.3 Preceded by American Pastoral (1997, see previous chapter) and I Married a Communist (1998), The Human Stain is the third installment of Roth’s American trilogy, all narrated by Nathan Zuckerman. The critical reception of The Human Stain was markedly mixed. The British novelist William Sutcliffe panned it, claiming that “the book is both overwritten and underwritten” and that it lacks the “mysterious alchemy that makes a novel work” (47). Galen Strawson agrees with Sutcliffe that the writing is sometimes “overwrought,” but he, nonetheless, finds it a “highly successful novel” (4). Similarly, Peter Kemp finds that “The Human Stain pulses with the strengths that make Roth a prime contender for the status of most impressive novelist now writing in and about America.” And David Lodge claims that the trilogy of which The Human Stain is the final installment is “triumphantly successful” (28). Jay Parini notes that “the Roth book, despite its many virtues, drifts too easily into the realm of caricature. A satirist at heart, Roth uses the campus setting as a way to vent his rage against political correctness” (B13). As Jay Halio puts it, “Not since David Mamet’s Oleanna has there appeared so powerful an indictment of political correctness and a travesty of student rights and faculty vulnerability in higher education” (174). Elaine Safer notes, “The range of humor in The Human Stain constantly shifts from the grim tone of black humor to farce” (212). William Tierney situates The Human Stain as a novel of academe and agrees with Parini that Roth has drawn a “silly portrait,” yet he also claims that in the novel, “academic identity intertwines with today’s great challenges: how to reconcile race, class, and gender” (168). Exemplifying the critical disagreements, Lorrie Moore finds that “The Human Stain is an astonishing, uneven, and often very beautiful book” (7).4 Thus most readers agree that because an uneveness of tone besets the novel, it is by turns brilliant, compromised, silly, smart, and overdone. This kind of mixed critical reception has characterized the reviews of several of Roth’s many novels, hence making his relationships to his readers sometimes vexed, sometimes hortatory. Roth structures The Human Stain by revealing Coleman’s secret to the reader long before Nathan Zuckerman discovers his past. While we imagine the story has switched to another narrator, we discover at the close of the

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novel that Nathan had been narrating in the third person throughout almost the entire text. Because Nathan only sometimes narrates in the first person, we do not share Nathan’s surprise upon discovering, after Coleman’s death, that his family had not been Jewish. Coleman’s identity as white had been visible to Nathan, but it had not been “read.” Indeed, even while Nathan reads him as Jewish, he simultaneously also reads him as black. Early on in their fastblossoming friendship Nathan reflects that Coleman appeared as “the small nosed Jewish type, with the facial heft in the jaw, one of those crimpedhaired Jews of a light yellowish skin pigmentation who possess something of the ambiguous aura of the pale blacks who are sometimes taken for white” (15–16). Thus Nathan simultaneously sees and refuses to see Coleman’s secret. As with the rest of the characters in Roth’s novel, Coleman wears his secret so openly that it can be read, purloined-letter style, while remaining invisible. Coleman plays this Janus-faced game of exposure and masquerade with his supposed Jewishness. By choosing to be Jewish rather than merely white, Coleman lays himself open to a whole series of readings, mis-readings, and oppressions. Indeed, Zuckerman sympathizes with Coleman for being (as he then thinks) mistaken for black, while bouncing back and forth between anti-Semitism and racism. Long before Nathan learns how to read Coleman correctly, he relays the following story: because his name didn’t give him away as a Jew—because it could as easily have been a Negro’s name—he’d once been identified, in a brothel, as a nigger trying to pass and been thrown out: “Thrown out of a Norfolk whorehouse for being black, thrown out of Athena college for being white.” (16)

Coleman was not born to a Jewish family and he did not convert to Judaism, yet his community perceived him as Jewish and Les Farley’s murderous aims against him were fueled by his supposed Jewishness. As Zuckerman notes, “Buried as a Jew … and, if I was speculating correctly, killed as a Jew. Another of the problems of impersonation” (325). Being read as Jewish, in this case, contributed to Coleman’s downfall because of Farley’s anti-Semitism. Indeed, one of the many themes of this novel is literacy and the larger question of reading/knowing the other. Faunia pretends that she cannot read when she is in fact literate (although no one ever reads the “proof ” of this—her posthumously discovered diary). Also, Lisa, Coleman’s once beloved and now estranged daughter, teaches illiterate children how to read. Coleman thought of Carmen, a 6-year-old who, despite twenty-five weeks of Lisa’s dedicated

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instruction, still cannot differentiate “couldn’t” from “climbed,” when he found that the underside of his “disgrace”—that is, his relationship with Faunia—had been exposed to him by her loose and rough behavior with a group of male janitors. (In marginalia on one of the many drafts of The Human Stain in the manuscript rooms of the Library of Congress, Roth notes that he considered titling this work “Disgrace” but that J.M. Coetzee had beat him to the title with his 1999 novel Disgrace.)5 In a surreal scene in the chapter aptly entitled “What Do You Do with the Kid Who Can’t Read?,” Coleman imagines that an infantilized Faunia takes Carmen’s remedial reading class, and his answer to the question that titles the chapter is “what he did with the kid who couldn’t read was to make her his mistress” (161). The nexus of thinking of his daughter, while thinking of his mistress (who is more or less his daughter’s age), while assimilating the mistress into the 6-year-old student of his do-gooder daughter leaves one in a tailspin of perverse speculation. But the reflection on reading and on the importance of reading the other remains a compelling part of this imaginary scene. While the “Kid” in the chapter’s title would seem to refer to Faunia and Carmen, it also refers to Bill Clinton. As one of the unnamed young male faculty members whose discussion of the Monica affair opens the chapter notes: “He [Clinton] could read her. If he can’t read Monica Lewinsky, how can he read Saddam Hussein? If he can’t read and outfox Monica Lewinsky, the guy shouldn’t be president. There’s genuine grounds for impeachment” (147–148). According to this commentator, inaccurate reading, rather than affairs in the Oval Room, is ground for impeachment.6 The tenuous nature of a good read also affects Delphine Roux’s and Nelson Primus’s relationships with Coleman. After her job interview, Delphine confesses that “It had been impossible to read his reading of her” (185). All of these struggles with getting an accurate read reflect on the characters’ obsessions with reading race, gender, and desire, and the curious structure of their desiring exposure while shielding themselves from it. In the same way as Nathan simultaneously discovered and suppressed Coleman’s secret, Roth structures Delphine’s consciousness like a paradox of ill-fated discovery: “Afraid of being exposed, dying to be seen—there’s a dilemma for you” (185). Or, in the context of Roux’s guess that Faunia substitutes for her in Coleman’s imaginary, one “at once cleverly masquerade[s] and flagrantly disclose[s]” (195). In another sign that his masquerade, which recalls all the masks and façades that populate American Pastoral, was also flagrantly disclosed, Coleman insults a “waspy” lawyer, Nelson Primus, after Primus tells him to drop his affair with Faunia in order to

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protect him against Les Farley. Coleman insults him with: “I never again want to hear that self-admiring voice of yours or see your smug, fucking lily-white face” (81). Primus ponders the slur, asking his wife repeatedly why Coleman chose whiteness as a means of derision. Primus, assuming Coleman is Jewish, also, therefore, assumes he is white and cannot read the racial categorizing of Coleman’s slur. The term “lily-white” had been slung at Coleman by his elder brother, Walter, who was furious at Coleman for passing and renouncing his loving family. Walter tells Coleman, “Don’t you dare ever show your lily-white face around that house again!” (145). By taking his brother’s slur against him for passing and flinging it at this so-called waspy lawyer, Coleman might have given himself away had Primus been able to read him differently. Thus Roth would appear to argue that racial reconciliation can be achieved only when the identity politics of the “we” are replaced by the originality of the self-fashioned individual. Yet each of the characters in the novel shows that racial reconciliation is always thwarted by the toxic power of unreconciled personal secrets. The alternating series of racial designations that Coleman moves through suggest the troubles of misreading and the dangers of racism. Yet because of the academic mood in late twentieth–century America, Coleman’s problems also highlight the trouble with political correctness. But Roth goes too far here. In linking the “piety binge” of late twentieth–century political correctness to the horrors of pre–civil rights racism, Roth vents his anger against what he sees—more in conspiratorial than historically accurate terms—as a new manifestation of the violence of “we-think.” Yet despite this slippage from the “piety binge” to pre–civil rights racism, Roth is right to suggest that the desire to read people racially is at the heart of the American resistance to reconciling racism. As I have been discussing throughout this book, Roth turns frequently to characters of color to both turn the plot and to comment on the very marginality he structurally replicates. By forging a main character in The Human Stain who is black but appears white, Roth deepens this hitherto mostly peripheral discourse on race into a larger questioning of what it means to appear one way and perform one way while one has been historically “labeled” differently. As was eventually the case with the Swede, despite Nathan’s initial inability to see, Coleman certainly contains multitudinous substrata for Nathan to explore. Bill Clinton’s infidelities with Monica Lewinsky haunt The Human Stain and are explicitly compared with Coleman’s supposedly secret affair with Faunia. Coleman rants against the smallness of people so interested in propriety that

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they can be discomfited by his and Clinton’s affairs: “The luxury of these lives disquieted so by the inappropriate comportment of Clinton and Silk!” (154). Clinton appears throughout the novel as both an excuse for Nathan to vent his rage against the superficial “piety binge” that beset the country in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and as the focal point for the Vietnam veteran Les Farley’s rage against those draft dodgers who have never faced the horrors of war and its attendant post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Thus whereas in American Pastoral Merry and her cohort use violent means to protest the Vietnam War, here, Les Farley represents the violence produced by that war through the PTSD experienced by many of the soldiers who fought. In discussing the Clinton scandals, Toni Morrison mused that “white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President” (32).7 In this somewhat tongue-in-cheek assessment, Morrison, nonetheless, points toward another of the implicit connections between Coleman and Clinton. Not that Clinton passed as black, but he rather, in Morrison’s words, “displays almost every trope of blackness” (32). Through his “President’s Initiative on Race,” Clinton tried to institute a national dialogue on race in order to “promote racial reconciliation.”8 Roth mentions neither the initiative nor its unachieved culmination in a presidential apology for slavery. Still, the echoes of these presidentially driven desires for reconciliation make themselves felt in Clinton’s transformation, remarked upon in The Human Stain, from a figure that Americans seem unwilling to pardon to one who is finally not impeached and is forgiven. On June 14, 1997, the presidential advisory board on race met to discuss the possibilities of a national conversation on race and an apology for slavery (One America). The chairman of the advisory board, Dr. John Hope Franklin, claimed that “a national conversation about race and ethnicity has not occurred in our history”; Governor Kean added that Clinton “is the first president who’s been willing to do this.”9 So the president to whom Roth compares Coleman, because they both share the secret of affairs with much younger women, is also the president who tried to initiate a national call for racial reconciliation. At the same time as the initiative on race, in the late 1990s, Clinton also considered issuing a formal apology for slavery cut from the same cloth as his formal apology for the Tuskegee experiments. However, Newt Gingrich and other conservatives were opposed to the idea, and the apology never took place. In conversations with Rob Seibert, the archivist for the Clinton Presidential Materials Project, I found a reticence to discuss why the apology did not take place; Seibert speculated that Clinton preferred to focus on the present rather

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than the past.10 Elazar Barkan puts a darker spin on the absence of the apology by claiming that, “as the country indulged in Monicagate, the conversation on race fizzled” (288). Yet, as Joan Didion so powerfully argues, the national “indulgence” in Monicagate was engineered by conservatives who instigated the “piety binge” in order to “purge” the country of Clinton and all that he stood for. In Didion’s words, the conservatives launched a “covert effort to advance a particular agenda by bringing down a president” (254, 281). Perhaps the final irony in this ironic novel is that Roth blames the smoke of political correctness for the flame of conservative politicking. In comparing Coleman to Clinton, Roth comments on the failure of racial reconciliation to transcend the petty curiosity about sex that plagued late twentieth–century American popular discourse. By treading a thin political line between a neoconservative condemnation of so-called political correctness and a progressive idealization of a self free from the victimization of categorization, Roth’s novel invites us to test our own reading practices and their attendant modes of conflating the rich complexity of the un-we’d. In a talk at the Center for Democracy in a multiracial society at the University of Illinois, George Lipsitz argued that instead of identity determining politics, politics should ground identities.11 In a similar vein, Michael Rothberg takes posthistorcism (or postmodernism) to task for denuding politics: “In the name of polticizing identity, posthistoricism actually depoliticizes difference.”12 One might hope for movement away from the multiculturalist insistence on difference and perhaps herald a new turn toward a postracial consciousness where identities need not be grounded primarily in race. But that’s a fantasy, of course, that there can ever be such a “postracial” world even if we are demographically approaching an era where racial categories will literally break down. President Obama is currently not only the first “black” president but, perhaps more tellingly, the first biracial president. That it was the white Clinton who, because of his Southern saxophone-playing persona, was often declared (comically, as Morrison does) as America’s first “black” president cannot have escaped Roth’s attention as he posits him as a background figure throughout the novel. Human Stain argues that identity should be fluid and that the good intentions of the multiculturalists can sometimes be thwarted by a rapidly outdating adherence to identity. As K. Anthony Appiah notes, “If we are to move beyond racism we shall have, in the end, to move beyond current

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racial identities” (32). But as Appiah is keenly aware this “beyond” remains elusive. Human Stain can be read as a treatise on how race should (in the best of all possible worlds) be fluid. Soon after its publication, many critics who discussed The Human Stain suspected that Roth based Coleman on Anatole Broyard. Gail Caldwell notes that Broyard’s “bohemian life in mid-century New York mirrored some of Coleman’s” life (M1); Elaine Safer suggests that “it is possible that the inspiration for Coleman Silk was Anatole Broyard” (“Tragedy,” 212); William Tierney adds that “Silk is loosely based on Anatole Broyard” (166); and John Leonard tells us that Broyard and Roth “were almost neighbors in Connecticut.” (8). In my initial readings I also (wrongly) thought Silk was based on Broyard and found that because Broyard refused to be classified he offered Roth an opportunity to prefigure how we can surpass racial identities, and to imagine a postracial consciousness where the limiting identitarian strictures that feed racism can be abolished. That this remains firmly idealized cannot be doubted. Because Wikepedia included in its discussion of The Human Stain that Roth had based Coleman on Broyard, Roth tried several times to have the online encyclopedia retract the entry and when they refused he wrote an open letter in The New Yorker (September 7, 2012). He asserted that he based Coleman on his friend Melvin Tumin, a sociology professor at Princeton with whom Roth became acquainted when he was a writer-in-residence there in the 1960s. Tumin had in fact asked of two absent students whether they were spooks and been falsely accused of racism. As Roth notes of Tumin, A myriad of ironies, comical and grave, abounded, as Mel had first come to nationwide prominence among sociologists, urban organizers, civil-rights activists, and liberal politicians with the 1959 publication of his groundbreaking sociological study “Desegregation: Resistance and Readiness,” and then, in 1967, with “Social Stratification: The Forms and Functions of Inequality,” which soon became a standard sociological text. Moreover, before coming to Princeton, he had been director of the Mayor’s Commission on Race Relations, in Detroit. Upon his death, in 1995, the headline above his New York Times obituary read “MELVIN M. TUMIN, 75, SPECIALIST IN RACE RELATIONS.” (“Open Letter,” np)

As ever keenly sensitive to irony, Roth here pulls out of Tumin’s story the circularities at the heart of it, not least of which, as he mentions at another point in The New Yorker letter, that suspicions circled around whether Tumin himself

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has chosen to “pass.” Roth goes on to forcefully deny that Broyard inspired Coleman. In response to this stringent denial, Bliss Broyard, the daughter of Anatole, argued in Salon.com that Roth does not necessarily get to be the final arbiter of what goes on in his fiction or how it is read and through which interpretative lenses. Bliss Broyard also claims that there were several more interactions between her father and Roth including one in which her father introduced her to Roth whereupon he declared her to be like a “ghost.” In 1968 Roland Barthes famously and very playfully announced the “Death of the Author” and argued that, “it is language which speaks, not the author” (143). This, of course, gave license to many literary scholars to find in the text what is there rather to seek confirmation from the author regarding intention and inspiration; now one can say schematically at least that there has been of late an opening up to the biographical, the intentional, the desire of the author in interpretation. That being said, a close reading of Roth’s denouncement of the inspiration from Broyard undoes some of his own he-doth-protest-too-much claims. Roth catalogs all the things he does not know about Broyard, echoing his use at his eightieth birthday celebration in Newark, of proslipsis, but then remembers that Yet after admiring for its bravery the article about his imminent death, I got Broyard’s home number from a mutual acquaintance and called him. That was the first and last time I ever spoke to him on the phone. He was charmingly ebullient, astonishingly exuberant, and laughed heartily when I reminded him of us in our prime, tossing a football around on the lifeguard’s beach in Amagansett in 1958, which was where and when we first met. I was twenty-five then, he thirty-eight. It was a beautiful midsummer day, and I remember that I went up to him on the beach to introduce myself and tell him how much I had enjoyed his brilliant “What the Cystoscope Said.”

That Roth took the time and effort to phone Broyard at this time, that he remembered in such poetic detail the time and place their first meeting, that he recalled with such precision Broyard’s 1954 short story—all perhaps indicate that, despite his protestations, Roth thought more—even if albeit unconsciously—about Broyard than he would like to admit. Ultimately I see no reason why one can’t claim that Roth based Coleman on the story of Melvin Tumin with some kind of amalgam or shades of Broyard in the mix; or, even if we take at face value Roth’s correction, Broyard’s story (and some of the stories he wrote) offers interesting resonances with Coleman and thus discussing in some detail Broyard’s life and works sheds light on some of the intricacies

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of passing that might help us understand the structure of Roth’s novel. Finally, I am unclear as to the stakes of Roth’s denial: if there are interesting reverberations between an historical and a fictional story of passing, if, as I try to demonstrate below, Broyard’s fiction, memoirs, and reviews illuminate Roth’s rich novel, then in some sense it matters little that Roth takes pains to distance Coleman from Broyard.13 Broyard, unlike Coleman, decided to pass as white and non-Jewish, but their lives were, nonetheless, strikingly similar. Both used the army during World War II as a vehicle for class and race mobility, both haunted the Village in the postwar years, both enjoyed picking up lovers in New York’s subways, both were relieved to produce “white” children, and both maintained (with varying degrees of success) the secret of their passing until their deaths. There are also many similarities between Coleman’s first serious girlfriend, Steena, and Broyard’s wife, Sandy (even their names sound similar). For example, Broyard and Sandy met on a subway, as did Steena and Coleman. (Coleman describes his subway skills thusly: “It was like fishing down there. Go down into the subway and come up with a girl” (21)). Sandy’s family was Norwegian (Bliss Broyard describes her mother as having “classic Nordic looks” (35)) in Minnesota and Steena’s family was Icelandish and Danish in Minnesota. In addition to these correspondences, there are also some important differences. For instance, when Broyard’s friends informed Sandy of his hidden past, she was unfazed; Steena, on the other hand, promptly leaves Coleman after he takes her home for a racially revelatory Sunday dinner. Broyard’s children met one of their paternal aunts after Broyard’s death, whereas Coleman’s children never met their paternal family; Coleman justified the omission of all knowledge about his family by telling his children that their original name, Silberzweig, was shortened to Silk at Ellis Island and that all traces of his childhood were obliterated by a belligerent landlord who dumped his parents’ belongings out into the street. As for his knowing nothing about what city in Russia his family was supposedly from, Coleman chalked it up to a “general Jewish geographical amnesia” (176). Thus, with some important divergences, many resonances knit Sandy Broyard to Steena Palsson and Anatole Broyard to Coleman Silk. While the story of the “spooks” incident, nonetheless, remains firmly grounded in Melvin Tumin’s history. In Broyard’s works I find a series of cryptic references to passing that could be explained away as nods to the self-fashioning hungrily embarked upon in the heady post–World War II era, when shedding the bland past was, if not a

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national pastime, certainly a common Village event. These allusive references in Broyard’s work emblematize how Coleman, in Roth’s novel, thrives on the secrecy of passing. Roth argues that the creation of the self (or of many selves) requires and feeds off of a multicolored carousel of disclosure and concealment. That is, Broyard cultivated a persona that broadcast a rich array of ambiguous signs so that all coming of age involves adopting, in Broyard’s terms, a set of fictions about the self. Because he demonstrated the performativity of race, Broyard’s story echoes that of Roth’s main character.14 Coleman and Broyard exhibit a similar structure of simultaneously hiding and revealing their origins. Judith Butler locates this curious structure in one of the classic works on passing, Nella Larsen’s novella Passing (1929), where Butler finds “hiding [is] in that very flaunting” (“Passing,” 268). This structure of simultaneous display and obfuscation not only marks Coleman but also inscribes many of the other characters in The Human Stain, whose secrets resist being read even while they are flaunted. Further, along with Butler, we may link the repression of desire with the repression of race: “The question of what can and cannot be spoken, what can and cannot be publicly exposed, is raised throughout the text [Larsen’s Passing] and it is linked with the larger question of the dangers of public exposure of both color and desire” (268). While the text in Butler’s statement is Larsen’s Passing, the sentence applies equally well to The Human Stain where, as I discuss below, the exposure of both desire and race—the revelation of passing—poses dangers to both Coleman and Delphine Roux. When I examine the secret that Coleman harbored, his concealment only has meaning in terms of his own construction of what constitutes racial dissimulation and what can be said to be authentic. As Amy Hungerford argues, “the idea of passing in The Human Stain in fact is imagined as working against racial essentialism” (143). Indeed, while Roth’s novel is about passing, it is also about the possibilities of thinking of race outside of the constrictions and categorizations that enable racism. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discusses passing in a The New Yorker article about Broyard, “White Like Me,” whose title alludes to the 1964 film Black Like Me (based on John Howard Griffin’s book and starring James Whitmore), which recounted the travels of a white journalist who passed as black in order to experience Southern racism firsthand. The implication of Gates’s ironic title, then, is that despite his passing, Broyard is no whiter than Gates himself. As Gates notes about passing: “When those of mixed ancestry—and the majority of blacks are of mixed ancestry—disappear into the white majority, they are traditionally

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accused of running from their ‘blackness.’ Yet why isn’t the alternative a matter of running from their ‘whiteness?’ ” (78). Why indeed must Broyard’s and Coleman’s stories be construed as harboring the “secret” of their blackness when their whiteness is more visible than their blackness? As far as anyone who experienced both Coleman and Broyard are concerned, they “appeared” white— should this not simply be understood as being (not just looking) “white”? That he passed as Jewish instead of merely generically white, as Broyard had done, disrupts the race-as-continuum theory in the story of Coleman Silk because Jewishness as ethnicity has not always been considered a form of whiteness. Indeed, in How Jews Became White Folks (1994) Karen Brodkin uses her own family history to chart the transformation of Jews into whites via a postimmigration boom phenomenon that firmly took root with the advancements offered by the G.I. Bill.15 Thus, shortly before Coleman decided in 1946 to try to pass as Jewish, his passing would have been construed as one person of color becoming another, slightly less oppressed person of color. When Coleman decided to pass as Jewish, quotas for limiting Jewish entrance to colleges were still in place, and anti-Semitism was still an accepted part of much popular discourse. Nonetheless, he equated this version of whiteness with freedom.16 Passing as Jewish, then, was an uncomfortable passing that did not, in 1946, unequivocally guarantee the privileges of whiteness. In order to demonstrate how Broyard’s particular relationship to passing— his refusal to allow racial identities to limit him—functioned in his life and writings as well as in Coleman’s character, I examine how Broyard performed his elected identity and then turn to Broyard’s readings of Roth’s works as well as some of Broyard’s essays and short stories. I should note here that I use the word “passing” throughout this chapter for want of a better term; indeed, Broyard and Coleman (or rather Roth) both avoid this term because it continues the notion of discrete races that both try to negate. However, it is difficult to dispense with the term “passing” in this context. I therefore use it under the caveat that it does not adequately explain Broyard’s stance toward racial fluidity. In addition to the resonances noted above between characters and historical people, Roth and Broyard were casual acquaintances, not fast friends. Upon hearing that Broyard had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1989, Roth wrote the following in a letter to him: “I read where you don’t suffer comforters lightly, but I have to tell you I was shocked to read about your cancer. It doesn’t pay to write a wonderful story like ‘What the Cystoscope Said,’ not so long as Aristophanes is God” (Intoxicated, 89).17

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As I discuss in the analysis of “Cystoscope” below, the short story is one of many works by Broyard where the unsaid speaks volumes. That Roth wrote to Broyard with such praise, and recalled how “brilliant” the story was in his New Yorker letter indicates his affection not only for the person but also for his writing, some of which was about Roth. Born in 1920, Broyard moved from New Orleans to Brooklyn as a child. During World War II, he entered the army as white and used the G.I. Bill to enroll in The New School and thereby ensconce himself in the Village scene. After running an eclectic bookstore he began a successful career as a literary critic and writing teacher, including long stints at the New York Times and The New School; despite publishing hundreds of book reviews characterized by an ironic and highly critical tone, Broyard remained unable to write his much desired Great American novel. Through his position at the Times Broyard rubbed elbows with many of the literati who dominated the postwar era. In 1963 Broyard and his family moved to Connecticut (near Roth) where he became immersed in an almost entirely white suburban life. When he was 69, the family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where, after battling the disease for fourteenth months, Broyard died in 1990 of prostate cancer. At his funeral, his “darker” sister, Shirley, appeared, thereby surprising the other guests by revealing the (not so well-kept) secret of his passing. Even though Broyard’s second wife Sandy (Broyard married a black woman before World War II, but left this wife and their child shortly after the war) knew his “secret,” Broyard makes no mention of his passing in his posthumously published memoir Kafka Was the Rage (1993). Indeed, despite a flurry of rumors of waxing and waning intensity, Broyard’s children did not know the “secret” of their father’s race until Sandy Broyard revealed it around his deathbed. For Broyard it was enough that the children had not had his secret written on their bodies, and he was relieved when the children were born “white.”18 Sandy Broyard (née Alexandra Nelson) published a memoir detailing her struggle to come to terms with her husband’s illness and death. Although this memoir, Standby, appeared fifteen years after Broyard’s death and almost ten years after Henry Louis Gates, Jr., wrote the important article about Broyard for The New Yorker, Sandy Broyard makes no direct mention of her husband of twenty-nine years’ passing; her book is, however, littered with cryptic suggestions that can be read as allusions to this passing. For example, in describing the process of working on Kafka Was the Rage, which Sandy Broyard edited and finished after her husband’s death, she notes that the

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work is in part about “struggles with [Broyard’s] roots”; she also suggests that Broyard was driven to find solutions to the “unresolved issues of his own childhood” and that writing was a “reinvention of himself.” Sandy Broyard tells us that she “married an exotic man” but that “some of what I know … I will keep to myself ” and that “there are some things that as his wife of thirty years only I know” (133, 205, 142, 150, 166).19 There is no reason, of course, why in this memoir about her coming to terms with death, about her learning from psychics, consulting gurus of every stripe, juggling two houses (one on Martha’s Vineyard and the other in Cambridge), and deciding to date again, that Sandy Broyard should discuss her husband’s passing. Yet, in this age of racial consciousness, where such questions of self-transformation are au courant, and when an article about her husband’s passing had been published in a widely circulated magazine, it is curious that she chose to remain mum on this score. Her silence is in keeping with Broyard’s own silence on the subject, and her cryptic references mimic her husband’s encoded literature and Coleman’s suggestive language. I assume that her silence about her husband’s passing indicates that Sandy Broyard agrees with her husband that in order to achieve postracial consciousness we should stop foregrounding racial difference. That she was willing to discuss her husband’s passing when pressed is evidenced by the fact that Sandy Broyard spoke quite openly to Gates about her husband’s denials and steadfast maintenance of his “secret” even though she decided not to discuss this in her own subsequently published memoir. In 1996, six years after Anatole Broyard’s death, Gates published the gripping article about him entitled “White Like Me.” Gates reveals that even though Broyard’s friends told Sandy that her fiancé was black, Broyard continued to claim “that he wasn’t black, but he talked about ‘island influences’ … Anatole was … very slippery” (71). As their children, Todd and Bliss grew, Sandy Broyard pestered her husband to reveal his past to them. He steadfastly refused, and, at her urging for revelation would “totally shut down and go into a rage” (75). Gates argues that this shutting down stunted Broyard’s literary talents. In both contrast to and as a revelatory explanation of the silences that characterized Sandy Broyard’s memoir, Bliss Broyard wrote a series of short stories about her father entitled My Father, Dancing (1999), and then a memoir specifically about her discovery of her father’s passing, One Drop (2007). Toward the end of his life, as Bliss Broyard narrates it, their mother prodded their father to disclose his passing whereupon he suggested that if the children

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wanted to know their father better, they should have read more of his writing: “Todd laughed sourly. ‘I’m supposed to understand my father by knowing his opinion on the latest Philip Roth novel’ ” (21). When Sandy Broyard tells the children “Your father’s part black” (26), the revelation of the long-suppressed secret is met by Bliss Broyard “with a laugh” (26), thus obviously marking the vast difference between racial identifications in the 1930s when Anatole Broyard was rejected by the white kids because they knew his family was black and by the black kids for being too white (26). Todd Broyard reads the revelation as a “pick up line” which he imagines delivering as “I may look white, but I’m really Afro-American where it counts” (27). While Bliss Broyard never discussed his passing with her father, she reconstructs posthumously his attitudes toward race some of which, to her ears, sound “racist” (62). According to Gates it was precisely Broyard’s inability to address the question of his passing that prevented him from writing what was then one of the most anticipated (and nonexistent) novels. Gates suggests that had Broyard decided to write about his distinctly unordinary life, including his passing, he might well have been able to produce the next Great American novel. Broyard was apparently such a popular figure that Norman Mailer tells us that, “he’d buy a novel by Broyard the day it appeared” (69). Gates claims, “the man [Broyard] wanted to be appreciated not for being black but for being a writer, even though his pretending not to be black was stopping him from writing. It was one of the very few ironies that Broyard, the master ironist, was ill equipped to appreciate” (76). This irony is duplicated in the irony that drives The Human Stain. For, had Coleman disclosed his identity, presumably the racist charge would have been dropped and his august status would have been returned. Yet, like Broyard, this was not something Coleman was prepared to do. In another ironic twist, Nathan did write a Great American novel in the form of The Human Stain (the eponymous novel within Roth’s novel) but he only began writing (as was also the case with the Swede’s novel as written by Nathan in American Pastoral) after he discovered Coleman’s past (213). Broyard, though, paid for his vision of a world beyond race by not being able to formulate his longed-for novel. Were racial categories fluid when Broyard was writing, he would presumably have been able to write beyond the limiting confines of the designation “black writer.” The subtitle to Gates’ essay reads: “Anatole Broyard wanted to be a writer, not a black writer. So he chose to live a lie rather than be trapped by the truth.” This thwarted growth finds an echo in The Human Stain for Coleman Silk’s fear

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of being “trapped” drives him to pass for white—although in his case Jewishly white (another form of trapping, particularly in the 1940s). Gates finds that Broyard maintained his secret through “evasions, with distance and denials and half denials and cunning half-truths … he wanted race to be an elective affinity” (66). This is also how Coleman evades declaring his past identity and what he ardently wishes for—and indeed achieves: race as an “elective affinity.” Broyard, then, refused to grant race anything more than a performative hold on his persona; at times Broyard would let on that he came from a family who identified as African American, but most of the time he remained “slippery” and “evasive.” Yet, in his case, it was unclear what he was being “slippery” about; his skin was there for all to read, and if he appeared one way, and performed one way, then who’s to say that he was not white? Gates retells a story that captures the performativity of Broyard’s relationship to race; Brent Staples, who was an editor at the Times at the same time as Broyard, remembered that “ ‘When Anatole came anywhere near me … his whole style, demeanor, and tone would change … I took that as him conveying to me, ‘Yes, I am like you’ ” (77). Thus, with Staples, who identifies as black, Broyard would play at being black like him, whereas with others he would play at being white. As is clear from this story about Staples, even while trying to disrupt racial categories, Broyard was, of course, ineluctably caught within them. But where, Roth asks through his portrayal of Coleman, is the “truth” of all this, and why can’t one adopt one identity in one scene (either lived or fictional) and another identity in another moment? Broyard’s philosophy of race, then, argued for the explosion of racial categories in order to allow for slippage between racial identities and in order to perform postracial consciousness.

Broyard reads Roth It is no doubt because of his air of mystery, because of the many valences of his performance of self, that Broyard appeared as inspiration for fictional characters. For example, William Gaddis employed him as a model for Max in The Recognitions (1955) and he was featured in at least one other novel as well. As though commenting on these uses of himself, in an article about real people becoming characters, Broyard discussed Roth’s supposed portrayal of Bernard Malamud as the model for Lonoff in The Ghost Writer as a launching point for a reflection on the practice: “What, I [Broyard] asked Mr. Malamud,

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do writers owe to people whose lives they’ve borrowed?” In reflecting on the answer to this question, Broyard goes on to note that Anaïs Nin depicted him in her diary, whereupon Broyard felt “not so much used as misused, falsely accused of being someone else” (“Being,” 55). Broyard appears very briefly in Nin’s diary where she describes him among “three striking figures: Anatole Broyard, New Orleans-French, handsome, sensual, ironic; Vincent, tall and dark like a Spaniard; and Arthur, with mixed Negro and Jewish blood” (180). Broyard, in claiming to be “falsely accused of being someone else,” rejects Nin’s association of him with two other “striking” figures whom she depicts not only in racial terms but interestingly alongside a mixed black/Jewish character. While Nin’s description of Broyard does not suggest his race, her depictions of Vincent and Arthur do; thus, because she groups him with these two other figures, Nin implies that Broyard is racially different than white, thus engendering his gripe that he had been “falsely accused.” The practice of borrowing biographies for use as real characters is also a means of passing; as with passing racially or in terms of sexual orientation, the secret of the origin or the hidden reality trails the development of a literary character. Because of his ambivalent relationship to Roth one indeed wonders what Broyard would have made of Coleman, based on Tumin but with all these echoes of himself. Broyard was interested in Roth and reviewed many of his works over the years. For example, he reviewed Reading Myself and Others in 1975; while finding most of the essays in the collection uneven (as many of today’s readers found The Human Stain) and sometimes weak, Broyard notes that Roth’s Kafka essay “ ‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka” (1973) fuses “the fantastic, the comic and the pathetic in just the right proportions” (“Dentist”). Some years later, Broyard enhanced his view of Roth’s essay on Kafka by musing, “The story is so good that it almost seems to be a collaboration by Kafka and Roth” (“Magazine,” 13). In his review of My Life as a Man (1974) Broyard echoes Gates’s claim about Broyard’s inability to write the Great American novel when he launches a critique of Roth by claiming that “no other major American writer has had more trouble finding an approach to fiction that does full justice to his talent” and “the book’s faults outweigh its virtues” (“Cultivating”). Broyard further critiques Roth for dwelling in hysteria and noting that “Existential ruefulness … may well be to the Jewish writer what the blues are to blacks—part suffering and part transcendence” (“Cultivating,” 47).20 As Gates discusses, during Broyard’s early years as a journalist, he was known as a knowledgeable commentator on black culture. Gates asks, “But was he merely

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an anthropologist or was he a native informant? It wasn’t an ambiguity that he was in any hurry to resolve” (68). Thus, when Broyard, playing on the ambiguity of his biography, makes generalizations about blacks and Jews—in this case associating Jewish “existential ruefulness” with the blues—he claims out-group status while actually playing on his in-group biography. When Roth tells us that Coleman was “someone that people sometimes couldn’t quite figure out” (105), this applies equally well to Broyard. In other words, whatever his “roots” may have been, Broyard’s lived reality remained between or among different racial categories; he performed these roles at narrative levels by adopting different personae in his work. The title of the review in which Broyard discusses existential ruefulness, “Cultivating his Hysteria,” refers to a favorite line of Broyard’s from the nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire’s “Au Lecteur”: “La sottise, l’erreur, le péché, la lésine,/ Occupent nos esprits et travaillent nos corps,/ Et nous alimentons nos aimables remords,/ Comme les mendiants nourissent leur vermine” (33) (“Ignorance, error, cupidity, and sin/ Possess our souls and exercise our flesh;/ Habitually we cultivate our remorse/ As beggars entertain and nurse their lice” (1456)). The English translation renders the third line “cultivating our remorse,” but Broyard seems to have remembered it as “cultivating our hysteria” because in his last work, Intoxicated by My Illness (1992; a Baudelarian title itself), he recalls the title of the 1974 review when he notes that, in talking with his doctor, he would like the doctor to understand if he “told him that, like Baudelaire, ‘I cultivate my hysteria with joy and terror’ ” (42). (Roth echoes this in The Dying Animal when Kepesh describes the embattled relationship between him and his sometimes estranged son who spent time “cultivating this archaic addiction” to “the pathos of feminine need” (84)). Whereas Baudelaire disparages the cultivation of remorse by comparing it with beggars encouraging their lice, Broyard is not wrong to imagine that there is a commingled sense of joy and terror in Baudelaire’s take on cultivating generally negative attributes. Yet Broyard has replaced “remorse” with “hysteria” as though the fear of remorse were so intense that the word needed to be suppressed and reconfigured. As Roth would have been, no doubt, aware, the second stanza of this poem of Baudelaire’s contains the words (at least in translation) “human” and “stain”: “Nos péchés sont têtus, nos repentirs sont lâches;/Nous nous faisons payer grassement nos aveux,/ Et nous rentrons gaiement dans le chemin bourbeux,/Croyant par de vils pleurs laver toutes nos taches” (33) (“Our sins

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are stubborn. Cowards when contrite/ We overpay confession with our pains,/ And when we’re back again in human mire/ Vile tears, we think, will wash away our stains” (1456)). The “human stain” of Roth’s title can be seen in Baudelaire’s poem where the poet highlights the impossibility of removing our “stubborn” sins; once we have returned to the “human mire” we imagine (but only imagine) that we can “wash away” our stains. I do not know if Roth was thinking of this poem when he constructed the title of his novel, but it is clear, as I discuss below, that Roth refers to a different Baudelaire poem in a scene in The Human Stain in which Coleman will mistake a word in a poem by Steena for a word that reveals his secret. Thus a complicated puzzle of references is at work here. First, Broyard refers to Baudelaire in a 1974 review of Roth; then, Broyard returns to this reference, but with “remorse” again replaced by “hysteria,” in his meditation on his own death; then, we discover that not only does the poem to which Broyard refers contain the title words of the novel in which he will resonate with the main character but also that, within that same novel, a character obliquely refers to a different Baudelaire poem in a crucial scene. These references to Baudelaire typify the intricate meshing of Roth, Coleman, and Broyard that I have been uncovering. Moreover, they also indicate the resonances between Coleman’s passing and Broyard’s refusal of categorization. Returning to Broyard’s readings of Roth, Broyard also reviewed Portnoy’s Complaint when it was published in 1969. The review memorably starts with the image of Roth as a writer who is stuck in the same predicament vis-àvis his writing as Portnoy is regarding his anatomy: he has one undescended testicle. However, Broyard goes on to credit Roth with beginning to descend the other side and for portraying the emancipation of the Jewish id: “Like the homosexual and Negro, the Jew seems finally to have emancipated himself … . He has discovered his id, and if you think the Jewish super-ego was formidable, just wait” (43). Throughout the review Broyard plays with a Jewish persona for the reviewer by inserting Yiddish words into his writing. For one example among many consider the following: “He can’t rise to Jewish girls. Nu, what else is new?” (44). Despite his use of Yiddish (nu can mean anything from “what’s happening” to “why” depending on the context) and despite his writing a story, which I will discuss below, featuring a Jewish character named “Paul” (Broyard’s middle name), there seems to have been no suggestion that Broyard had passed—or tried to pass—as Jewish. His

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generalizations about what “the Negro” or “the Jew” were doing en masse read today as stereotyping and certainly as insensitive to multicultural values and the specificity of individual behavior and choices. But these generalizations also position Broyard as beyond the markers designated by them. Thus, in his reviews, Broyard situates himself ambiguously in terms of his in- or out-group status; at times he intimates that his knowledge of black culture is native, and at times he suggests that his knowledge of Jewish culture is native. Broyard thus plays on the ambiguity of race by demonstrating the malleability of racial categories, by performing their difference, and ultimately by making terms such as “black” or “Jew” meaningless. The tone of these three reviews of Reading Myself and Others, My Life as a Man, and Portnoy’s Complaint were completely different than the hortatory, hero-worshiping tone Broyard took when, in 1981, he described an apparently memorable hour passed after he and Roth met accidentally, in 1971. Struck with Roth’s keen ear and his desire to listen to critics such as himself, Broyard remembers being deeply impressed with the then-emerging young writer (Broyard was thirteen years older than Roth). During an intense, coffee-laden hour in New York, when Roth asked Broyard what direction his writing should take next, Broyard replied that, if Roth planned to continue focusing on parents, he should “give them another turn of the screw, filter them through Kafka, aerate them somehow” (39). The transformation in Broyard’s opinion of Roth, then, seems to owe a lot to the imaginative reconstructions of memory. But it also seems clear that Roth was never far from Broyard’s thoughts. (Just as Broyard, as the references to Baudelaire indicate, seems to have occupied a place, even if small, in Roth’s imagination.) For example, in his memoir Kafka Was the Rage, Broyard uses Portnoy’s Complaint not only as a way of distinguishing the difference between sex in the late 1940s and sex in the 1960s but also as a means of reflecting on the obfuscation of the marks of gender. Broyard notes, “In Portnoy’s Complaint, Portnoy says that underneath their skirts girls all have cunts. What he didn’t say—and this was his trouble, his real complaint—was that underneath their skirts they also had souls” (136).21 Broyard’s claim reads almost like a feminist correction to Roth’s sexist reductionism, with the addition that the discourse about gender is also about concealment. Thus, throughout Broyard’s discussions of Roth’s work, an alternation between adoration and criticism mixes with a discourse around concealment and the open wearing of secrets.

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Broyard’s spontaneous generation A scene from Kafka Was the Rage strangely touches upon this open wearing of secrets. In describing his first Village girlfriend, Sheri Donatti, Broyard obsesses over the fear that an ill-timed gust of wind will demonstrate to the world that Sheri wears nothing under her soul-filled skirt. In the absurd scenario, Sheri pays an uninvited visit to Broyard’s family in Brooklyn, whereupon she sits on Broyard’s mother’s unsuspecting lap and rifles through their family photo album: Sheri’s bare legs flew up, and in that split second while they rose, I thought that now we would see—yes, this is what she had come for. She had come to Brooklyn on the subway, and had searched out our house on a map to show my mother and father that the woman I lived with wore no underpants. (77)

This scene curiously reverses the fear of discovery we might expect Broyard to be feeling while a woman who knows nothing of his past (or his passing) immerses herself in it, not only by meeting his parents (remember that Steena left Coleman after he brought her home and thus disclosed his passing) but by rifling through his photo album. The scene exemplifies a moment where sexuality replaces race as the locus of fear of discovery; it is a transposition that Broyard had already made (as I discuss below) in an earlier text about concealment. In other works, Broyard has interesting things to say about the nature of disclosure and concealment that photography offers. But returning to Sheri, Broyard describes her as someone who had “erased and redrawn herself, redesigned the way she walked, talked, moved, even the way she thought and felt” (3). This character, whose last name Broyard changed, is based on the artist Sheri Martinelli (1918–1996). As had Broyard, Sheri Martinelli had transformed herself, in her case, from Shirley Burns Brennan into “La Martinelli” the muse (and mistress) of Ezra Pound, correspondent to Charles Bukowski, buddy of Charlie Parker and Alan Ginsberg, and part of Anaïs Nin’s circle.22 Pound, in the introduction to a small, rare pamphlet dedicated to Martinelli’s interesting modernist/Picasso-influenced portraits and figurative sculptures, offers the somewhat cryptic remark that she is the “first to show a capacity to manifest in paint, or in la ceramica what is most to be prized in my writing” (11).23 While it perhaps remains to be seen what is most prized in Pound, the poet indeed offers the artist high praise.

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Thus, as both Broyard and Roth demonstrate, the possibilities for selffashioning in the postwar Village life were endless. Yet as Stephen Greenblatt describes in his classic text, self-fashioning is tenuous: “any achieved identity always contains within itself the signs of its own subversion or loss” (9). We might see in both Coleman’s and Broyard’s passing an infinite array of signs of subversion; the figures themselves display some of these signs and others are imposed externally. Broyard’s memoir and his collection of short stories (to which I turn below) are full of intimations of a self fashioned from a different mold, yet one reads these intimations differently once one backshadows the secret of his past. As Sheri looks through photos in the bizarre intimate proximity with his mother’s lap, Broyard transforms fear of discovery just as he had transformed “remorse” into “hysteria.” As another example of a cryptic allusion to passing, consider the following passage from Kafka Was the Rage: When I left Brooklyn to live in the Village, I felt as if I had acquired a new set of relatives … men … who had shunned family life and been shunned in turn, who were somewhere between black sheep and prodigal sons of a paradoxical kind. An aura of scandal, or at least of ambiguity hovered over [them]. (28–29)

While it is certainly possible to understand this unmooring from roots in terms of generational alienation afflicting all races, it can also be read more specifically as a veiled reference to Broyard’s passing. According to both Broyard and Roth, then, the Village after the war was a place where everyone tried to unmoor themselves from their roots and recreate themselves in a new, bohemian, mold. Broyard notes, “Nobody in the Village had a family. We were all sprung from our own brows, spontaneously generated the way flies were once thought to have originated” (29). Thus, while Broyard is not here specifically discussing his passing, it is evident that this possibility for self-creation includes the mobility of racial stability. As an inevitable part of this unmooring and self-remaking, in Kafka Was the Rage, Broyard describes entering into psychoanalysis and, in the first session, guessing that he has bored the analyst, speculates that the analysand is as “easy to read as a Rorschach blot”; because Rorschach blots offer competing interpretations, this form of being easy to read reveals the difficulty of reading such an ambiguous patient (49). In his second therapy session Broyard tells his fragile German émigré therapist that he wants to be “transfigured”: “I had never even used the word transfiguration before … When I came out with the

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word, I was like someone who sneezes into a handkerchief and finds it full of blood” (51).24 One imagines that this blood stains like the human stain, the indelible mark that goes beyond fictions of the self. In analysis Broyard wanted to talk to his analyst “as if we were two literary critics discussing a novel … I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself ” (52). Broyard thus explicitly portrays himself as a figure ripe to be read as a literary construct rather than an historical character. Like Coleman, then, Broyard self-consciously constructs himself as outside historical parameters, as free from the constraints of identification, as free as a character in one of the novels he was always reading, selling, or reviewing. Broyard ran a small used bookshop on Cornelia Street that traded in then hard-to-find translations of Kafka, Mann, and others as well as his favorites Wallace Stevens and D.H. Lawrence. The obsession with fiction which took hold not only of Broyard but of the “Village life as advertised” stemmed from fiction’s enabling one to refashion oneself: “I could trade in my embarrassingly ordinary history for a choice of fictions. I could lead a hypothetical life, unencumbered by memory, loyalties, or resentments” (29). Reading and becoming immersed in fiction allowed Broyard to mold himself free from racial identities. The postracial consciousness Broyard exhibits, then, is bolstered by a merging of the fictional and the real—a becoming fictional. In a sense, when Nin and others plunk Broyard into their texts, they literalize Broyard’s self-understanding as a fiction. Broyard published a collection of his crisp, short essays under the title Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes (1977); many of these essays powerfully reflect the mark of his unsaid past. In “Reflections on an Unphotogenic Childhood,” Broyard meditates on the stillness of 1920s–1930s photographs as compared to the motion of contemporary images. Read against the knowledge of Broyard’s “secret,” the entire essay becomes a reflection on the transfigurations of self-fashioning and passing. It is hard not to read Broyard’s works as though his own knowledge of his “secret” had not, in Roth’s words, “permeated his everyday thinking.” For example, the urban photos Broyard discusses (but which are not included in the essay) were taken first in New Orleans and then in New York, and show the children (Broyard and his two sisters, one of whom, Shirley, was “much darker” than him) against the backdrop of laundry-littered, tarry rooftops. Broyard muses on the difference between these photos and those of his own children, which, in contrast, show them playing in Connecticut streams. The class and

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(implicitly) race difference of these two kinds of images are subsumed under Broyard’s reflections on motion versus stasis, yet, reading with his “secret” in mind we see that the fact of having passed permeated his writing. In this fascinating essay about photography, Broyard examines the relationship between self-fashioning and images of the past: “We had no idea of embellishing the outward appearance of our lives; I believe we felt that you could not lie to a camera, that it would inevitably show you up (13).” This is remarkable in light of how these photos of his family would indeed have revealed Broyard’s past had he not suppressed them. Recalling Sheri sitting on his mother’s lap one cannot help wondering how she read the photos shown to her. But Broyard notices that the strength of the southern New Orleanian sun “rather bleached us out” and that it “left us looking pale and insubstantial, like dried flowers (13).”25 This whitening reflects the bleaching of his own history. Broyard ends the short essay by musing that his grandchildren will never be filmed in stasis, and that video will replace the still photograph completely. This will allow his grandchildren to erase the unwanted tapes and to therefore “step out boldly into the future without the embarrassment of a past” (15). By refusing his own past with any of its potential “embarrassment,” Broyard was able to erase the tape containing his past (but not his memory of it) spent between New Orleans and Bed-Stuy, where he would transform himself through a subway ride to Manhattan. As W.F. Lucas, a friend of Broyard’s from Bed-Stuy, notes, “He was black when he got into the subway in Brooklyn, but as soon as he got out at West Fourth Street he became white” (cited in Gates, 67). Broyard wrote a short fictional piece entitled “Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn” (1954) that anachronistically seems to comment on this phrase of Lucas. This story features a narrator, Paul (both Broyard’s middle name and the name of his father, who also “passed” for white on occasion), who returns home from the Village for a Sunday dinner in Brooklyn with his parents. Broyard’s nickname was “Buddy” and the narrator’s nickname is “Bud.” The story is driven by an examination of the abyss separating the parents from their son. The parents do not know what to make of the son, cannot figure out how to read him, and do not even know whether to be proud of him. As I discussed above, the Village in 1954 was a place for self-invention so, without knowing about Broyard’s passing, it is possible to read the story (as was true of some parts of Kafka) as a narrative of cultural change and intergenerational alienation. However, with Broyard’s passing in mind, the story takes on a different dimension. In addition, a pivotal scene in The Human Stain involves a visit home (in this case to Coleman and

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Roth’s home of New Jersey) for a Sunday dinner to black parents who do not know that their son passes for white nor that he has a white girlfriend. But, returning to Broyard’s “Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn,” we see that the structure of disclosure and concealment can be found within the text. As a stark contrast to the all-American cookie-cutter houses and Sunday dinners of Brooklyn, in “Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn,” Broyard describes the Village as a place replete with “singers, folk dancers, conga drummers, communists, anarchists, voyeurs, frotteurs, fairies, dogs, children, Negroes, sightseers, psychotics, anthropology professors, heroin pushers, tea pushers, carriage pushers, lesbians, New York Times readers …” (22). The inclusion here of the word “Negroes” in a list of people otherwise characterized by beliefs or actions stands out; there are no other ethnic categories in the list (which is much longer than the part cited here). The word in this context also serves to separate the narrator from the “Negroes” in the Village; thus, as with his comments on Jews and blacks in his reviews, Broyard here maintains the ambiguity of his narrator’s identity. Paul’s father, apparently bending over backwards to “show [him] that he was a liberal,” tells his son that he had given up his “seat in the subway to a Negress.” The narrator comments, “Jews are smart. Everybody does things without knowing why. Nobody can say who’s right and who’s wrong” (28). This is the only indication of the family’s Jewishness. That Broyard mentions this in the context of his father’s gentlemanly conduct (the offer of a seat to an African American woman) indicates a close connection between Jews and blacks in terms of mutual understanding of postwar discrimination. (It was, after all in 1955, a year after Broyard published “Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn,” that Rosa Parks famously refused to be relegated to the back of the bus, and many Jewish civil rights workers headed to the South to join the revolution.) As with Broyard’s use of Yiddish words, or his ambiguous positioning vis-à-vis African American culture, the one intimation in the story that this family is Jewish remains somewhat cryptic. Why, after portraying his father’s largess, did the narrator need to add “Jews are smart”? As part of Paul’s mother’s desire to be closer to her mysterious son, she wants to suggest (but doesn’t) that he bring his dirty laundry home to her. Paul muses that “Maybe those dirty shirts would tell her what she was so anxious, and so ashamed, to know. A smear of lipstick, a smell, a stain, might paint a Japanese picture” (28, emphasis added). The stain here resonates with the human stain of Roth’s book; but what the mother might be looking for in the son’s life is presumably not really evidence of his amorous adventures but rather evidence

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of who he has become. This scene prefigures the transposition of gender onto race that the odd moment with Sheri’s legs indicated by switching the site of shame from one to the other. In the context of a story based on a Jewish character, because the parents imagine their son might be passing as gentile, the intergenerational abyss is enlarged: “Each time we raised our eyes from the plate, we were startled to discover each other, so camouflaged by time. As soon as our eyes met, we jumped back, as from an abyss” (27). Paul criminalizes the abyss between parents and son: “Like a criminal, I might alter my appearance, but they were not to be fooled. Each time I arrived, I could see their moist eyes washing away my disguise” (23). Almost forty years later, in Intoxicated by My Illness, Broyard notes, “Several times in the past I’ve dreamed that I had committed a crime—or perhaps I was only accused of a crime, it’s not clear” (5). Similarly, in The Human Stain, at the army registration office, Coleman makes the link between committing a crime and passing palpable when he feels that, due to the intense beating of his heart which, it seemed, had decided to register him as white, his heart beat like “the heart of someone on the brink of committing his first great crime” (109). When Broyard notes repeatedly that he feels like a criminal—although he never specifies why—we might imagine that he experiences a similar sensation as Coleman at this moment in Roth’s novel. And this is certainly why Kafka is so important to Broyard: The Trial’s Herr K. imagines himself guilty of a crime because he is treated as a criminal even though he is “innocent.” In the case of both Broyard and Coleman, were racial categories to be properly understood in the fluid terms that they should be, were we to “move beyond current racial identities” (in K. Anthony Appiah’s words), then both Broyard and Coleman could be understood to be just as “white” as they seem. And yet both imagine passing as a criminal act because of the rigidity of externally imposed racial identities. In a strange, striking passage in “Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn,” Broyard highlights the intensity of rootedness and the imposition of categories upon identities: This homely love was my history. Like a navel, it was a reminder that I hadn’t been struck fully formed from my own brow. I remember a story an Army doctor told me, about a Negro solider whose belly was ripped open in a fight. They sewed him up in time and saved his life, but when they pulled off the adhesive tape, his belly button—he had the old-fashioned protruding kind—came away with it. When he saw what had happened, the soldier was beside himself, in the full sense that expression, and they couldn’t calm him down until the doctor

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sewed his belly button back on. I knew how he felt. Although I liked to imagine myself unfettered by human history, faced only by free choices, exquisitely irresponsible, it was still comforting to know that I hadn’t been born in a bad novel like most of the people who spent their evenings in Village bars … . They seemed to have risen spontaneously from rotting social tissues, the way flies were thought to generate in filth, or in a wound. (29–30)

The curiousness and violence of the story of the man who is so distressed by the removal of the literal nub of the attachment to his mother, his belly button, that its loss upsets him more than a near-fatal wound, indicates the intensity of the loss of home that passing has meant for Broyard. And, of course, in “Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn” Broyard makes no accident of creating a “Negro soldier” who longs for home. A profound contrast marks the violence of the war story and Paul’s empathic comments on the story. Whereas nothing “comforting” or “homely” (the two phrases that bracket the soldier’s tale) relieves this gory description of rootedness, Broyard chose this most uncomfortable narrative to depict the comforts of home. The jarring quality that this soldier’s story inserts into what might have been an entirely much cozier description of the joys of re-evaluating one’s connection to home underscores the deep ambivalence Broyard’s character bears toward the notion of home. The final image in this passage, about flies spontaneously generating, anticipates the image Broyard will use again some forty years later in Kafka Was the Rage and which I cited above. Broyard combines the image of flies with the soldier’s story because people generate themselves here from a “wound.” Broyard’s essays and short stories, then, are replete with allusive references to the “passing” that he refused to discuss publicly. But his characters, because of their situation in the postwar Village scene, can enact intergenerational alienation that resonates across race lines. Thus Broyard’s writing performs postracial consciousness as both a wound and an opportunity, a freeing yet also a “criminal” reinvention.

The back of Coleman’s Negro Like the pain exhibited by the “Negro soldier” in Broyard’s fiction, we might say that Coleman’s life, until the “spooks” incident, was generated from the wound of leaving his family forever behind. When Coleman tells his mother he will marry Iris and renounce his family forever she replies (among other things), “You’re white as snow and you think like a slave” (139). This image underscores the discrepancy between Coleman’s external appearance and the inner lack of

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freedom for which his mother charges him. But it is precisely in order not to think like a slave, not to be fettered at all, that Coleman wounds his mother so terribly by freeing himself from her. The scene in the novel that precipitates this wounding takes place over Sunday Dinner in East Orange. The Sunday dinner that Steena and Coleman experience in The Human Stain is somewhat different from the Sunday dinner in the early story of Broyard analyzed above, yet both narratives share an overbearing sense of generational isolation and family distance. The characters taking Sunday dinner in The Human Stain conduct themselves with the utmost composure on all sides—even though Coleman’s family were shocked that he had a white girlfriend (and did not know he was passing) and Steena was shocked that he had a black family because she thought he was white: “Chances were that if Coleman had gotten to blindfold the three women [Steena, his mother, and his sister] before introducing them and to keep them blindfolded throughout the day, their conversation would have had no weightier a meaning than it had while they smilingly looked one another right in the eye” (124). The lightness of the conversation described by Roth is shared in the sense of talking around an abyss that marks Broyard’s “Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn”; the difference is that in Roth’s novel the protagonists are actively suppressing drawing attention to newfound knowledge of racial difference that they previously had not been aware of, whereas in Broyard’s short story Paul’s passing is one possible answer to the alienation between the generations. Coleman justifies his rather strange decision not to tell Steena before he takes her home for Sunday dinner that his parents are African American by claiming that “words … would seem to her only another form of concealment” (121). Coleman arrives at this curious decision through reasoning that because Steena “knew no Negroes, she would imagine the kind of Negroes she saw in the movies or knew from the radio or heard about in jokes” (118). In other words, Coleman reasoned, he could only break through the stereotypes Steena would have inherited by showing her face to face how boring and all-American his family was; in fact, by demonstrating to her that they were as bland as the all-too-all-American family in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, that Steena had left behind in her quest for spicy difference in New York City. This justification for silence by claiming that words only conceal finds an antecedent in Broyard’s “Sunday Dinner” where Paul’s parents had “hatched [him] like a plot and then couldn’t read their own writing” (30). Just as they had no way to understand or interpret him, Coleman lived in fear of being read accurately.

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In a scene preceding the Sunday dinner in East Orange that ended his promising relationship with Steena, Coleman misreads a poem Steena hastily pens and leaves in his mailbox. Whereas Steena had written the word “neck,” Coleman, reading quickly in a dim light, reads the word “negro”: “how much of me is being seen, how much of me is being discovered? Now I know who you are. I see clear through to the back of your negro” (113, original emphasis). The fact that there is something nonsensical in “back of your negro” does not stop Coleman’s long-suppressed fear of “discovery” from rising to the surface; nor does it stop the sweat from pouring down his neck. Roth diminishes the nonsensicalness of the interpretation of “neck” by the poem’s echo with Baudelaire’s “La Chevelure”; the first line of this poem is “O toison, moutonnant jusque sur l’encolure!” (53) (“Ecstatic fleece that ripples to your nape” (1459)). This poem was written to Baudelaire’s island mistress so the thickness of her hair is part of a racialized description of the lover; thus what Coleman misreads as a reference to race in Steena’s poem is, in fact, a reference to race in Baudelaire’s poem. Coleman will go on, after Steena, to choose his Jewish wife Iris precisely because the thickness of her hair, if passed along to their children, would conceal any “blackness” that might be readable in their hair. But the dense hair in “La Chevelure” also functions as a metaphor for the thickness of meaning that the symbolists strove to depict. The third line of this first stanza of Baudelaire’s poem reads “Des souvenirs dormant dans cette chevelure” (53) (“with memories shrouded in that head of hair” (1459)). This association of hair with memory heightens the sense of depth and thickness of the hair but also reverses Coleman’s intentions vis-à-vis Iris’s hair. Whereas Coleman wants Iris’s hair to perform racial forgetting by subsuming their father’s African American past into his Jewish present and future, the hair in Baudelaire’s poem is a repository of memory. Thus, in constructing Steena’s poem to recall Baudelaire’s “La Chevelure,” Roth simultaneously reminds his readers of Broyard—for I assume that Roth remembered Broyard’s review of My Life as a Man with its Baudelaire-referencing title “Cultivating his Hysteria” (Bliss Broyard identifies Baudelaire and Kafka among her father’s favorite authors in One Drop (33))—and comments on the futility of making Iris’s hair a beacon of forgetting when the density of hair, and by extension the density of meaning, can only ever recall that which one longs to forget. The scene with Steena’s poem stands out in The Human Stain because the later Coleman, passing as Jewish rather than gentile-white as this young Coleman does, never seems to sweat his passing.

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As a bridge between his failed affair with Steena and his marriage to Iris, Coleman embarked on a brief liaison with a “colored girl,” Ellie; initially, he felt relief at being able to talk openly with her about his passing and was intrigued by her disclosures of other passers, but when Iris appeared and he decided to pass as Jewish, his relief took a different form; he had the “gift to be secretive again” and could live off the “elixir of the secret” (135, original emphasis). Thus, whereas the fear of revelation makes Coleman extremely anxious, the energy of living a double life proves more compelling than the relief of revelation. Coleman thus thrives on exhibiting a postracial consciousness where the very limits of passing and its attendant discovery can be rejected. Passing as Jewish is essential to Coleman because this is an identity between white and black that can cover the features that Sandy Broyard cryptically termed “exotic.” One might imagine that Coleman should have had difficulty passing himself off as Jewish to a Jewish wife who would naturally have expected him to be circumcised. But Iris’s “Yiddish-speaking father was such a thoroughgoing heretical anarchist that he hadn’t even had Iris’s two older brothers circumcised” (127). Ironically, Coleman himself was circumcised, a fact which Roth explains by the following: “His mother, working as a nurse at a hospital staffed predominantly by Jewish doctors, was convinced by burgeoning medical opinion of the significant hygienic benefits of circumcision” (130). Indeed, while we do not know how many African Americans were circumcised in America in 1926, there was a late nineteenth–century push toward circumcising Christians. Dr. Peter Remondino, for example, argued for circumcision in a widely read 1891 treatise where he claims that “The practice [of circumcision] is now much more prevalent than is supposed, as there are many Christian families where males are regularly circumcised soon after birth, who simply do so as a hygienic measure” (iv).26 While there was a considerable backlash against the burgeoning practice of circumcision, it, nonetheless— due in no small measure to Remondino’s popular treatise—became standard practice for hospital-born gentile infants. In his history of circumcision, David Gollaher argues that in the first decades of the twentieth century (i.e., when Coleman was born) circumcision became a middle-class marker. In order to differentiate themselves from the teaming hordes of immigrants perceived as “dirty,” “contaminated,” or “polluted,” middle-class whites opted for hospital births involving surgical circumcision as a symbol of cleanliness and as a shield against the onanism seen to be associated with retention of the foreskin. That Coleman’s mother had her son circumcised in a hospital setting indicates her

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desire to assert her middle-class status. Ironically, circumcision as a social marker performed in sanitized hospitals was designed explicitly to set one apart from the Jewish ritual circumcision practiced privately, at a bris, by a mohl. Thus, while Coleman’s circumcision was performed as a means of asserting a certain kind of black middle-class status, to distinguish him from the majority of uncircumcised African Americans, it is taken as a marker of his Jewishness. Apart from his circumcision, we know nothing about the contents of Coleman’s adopted Jewishness. Perhaps because of Iris’s secular Jewish upbringing, Coleman is never embarrassed by not understanding a Jewish reference and can therefore immerse himself quite comfortably in his role. After his transfiguration into a Jew, Coleman allows himself to sink into the postwar “Jewish self-infatuation” that was at its “pinnacle among the Washington Square intellectual avant-garde” (131). Roth’s description of this self-infatuation is borne out by Arthur Goren, who, in reflecting on the postwar “Golden Decade” of American Jewry, discusses the “new self-consciousness American Jewry displayed after the conclusion of the war” (13). Coleman’s sui generis creation makes sense only when he becomes Jewish, instead of merely white. As Nathan notes, becoming Jewish was the “secret to his secret,” and “As a heretorfore unknown amalgam of the most unalike of America’s historic undesirables, he now made sense” (132). Writing against the backdrop of the supposed strife between African Americans and Jews, Roth’s novel reflects on that strife by combining these two “undesirables” into one category. And indeed, that Coleman indulges in “ravings about black anti-Semitism” (16) indicates his acute awareness of the animosity that developed between blacks and Jews in America after the Civil Rights Movement. In an emotional polemical article about African American and Jewish relations, Norman Podhoretz asks, “How was it borne in upon us so early, white and black alike, that we were enemies beyond any possibility of reconciliation?” (83).27 Perhaps one of the most offensive passages in this generally offensive essay is Podhoretz’s comparison of Jewish history to African American history. Whereas, he argues, the Jews have a “memory of past glory and a dream of imminent redemption,” African Americans can merely lay claim to a stigmatic past: “His past is a stigma, his color is a stigma, and his vision of the future is the hope of erasing the stigma by making color irrelevant, by making it disappear as a fact of consciousness” (91). This “stigma” seems close to Roth’s idea of the human stain—that part of ourselves that we cannot escape, change, or reconcile. In his descriptions of the reasons

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for Coleman’s passing, Nathan makes it clear that Coleman too wants to make “color irrelevant” and that he sees his color as a stigma. Podhoretz’s neoconservative claim that African Americans desire the dissolution of identity politics—the disappearance of color—is not supported by other analyses of the interactions among blacks and Jews. Like his ambivalent relationship to Roth, Broyard bore an ambiguous relationship to Jewishness. Whereas some of his alter egos are Jewish, others are anti-Semites.28 For example, in 1954, the same year he published “Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn,” Broyard wrote a short story about the death of his father, who, like Broyard, died of cancer. “What the Cystoscope Said,” admired by Roth, also features a young narrator named Paul, but this narrator is the son of a “halfhearted anti-Semite” who, nonetheless, prefers Jewish doctors (103). In revisiting some of the same thoughts about death and dying that he treated in “Cytoscope,” forty years later, in the context of his own cancer, Broyard adjusts the assessment of his father’s anti-Semitism and writes thus: “My father, who was an old-fashioned Southern anti-Semite, insisted on a Jewish doctor”; Broyard shares this preference for Jewish doctors and claims that, when he was diagnosed with cancer, he was “aware of a certain predisposition in myself in favor of Jewish doctors” (36). He goes on to note that “A Jewish doctor knew what survival was worth because he had had to fight for his” (37). The resonance between fighting for survival as Jewish and fighting for survival as someone who is passing is hard to miss. In The Human Stain Roth alludes to this shared fight in both literal and figurative senses in setting up Coleman’s route to passing. Roth first mentions Coleman’s passing in the context of an attempted bribery by the parents of a schoolmate, Dr. Fensterman, to allow his son to achieve the Valedictorian status that Coleman’s stellar grades were preventing him from attaining. Fensterman proposes that, because “prejudice in academic institutions against colored students was far worse than it was against Jews,” Coleman should have no trouble getting into Howard as Salutatorian, whereas his Jewish son, Bert, would need to be Valedictorian to be considered for the top schools with their Jewish quotas (86). Thus, the first time in the novel (and this scene appears about a quarter of the way through) that Coleman’s race is revealed, Roth discusses it in comparison with prejudices against Jews and African Americans. Roth further frames his passing by having Coleman become, under Doc Chizner’s tutelage, “the colored kid whom all the privileged Jewish kids got to know—probably the only one they would ever know” (97). Coleman notes

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with more than a hint of comic irony that in his “sui generis score-settling joke” he had become a “magical convergence into his father’s Fensterman son” (131). Thus, it is first as a fighter that Coleman passes for Jewish and he eventually becomes a doppelgänger of the Jewish boy against whom he competed for the top of the class. This magical convergence of a new self forged in the mold of his one-time rival but remaining secret will feed off of “the power and pleasure … in being counterconfessional” (100) that Coleman enjoys. When Broyard seems to be confessing, in Intoxicated by My Illness, we find, rather, a false confession: “I want to begin by confessing that I’m an impostor” (33); here, his words conceal as much as they reveal. He claims he is an imposter because he has had no relationship with doctors and he will, nonetheless, embark on a discussion of illness and medicine, but we might imagine (and he must have suspected at least some of his readers would imagine) that this imposture refers to passing. When read, as I have here, against the history of his transfiguration, Broyard’s criticism and short stories reveal their secrets; as his close friend, Michael Miller, said of his writing, “with Anatole, it’s interesting that he was constantly hiding it and in some ways constantly revealing it” (cited in Gates, 75). The imbrication of disclosure and concealment that marked Broyard’s writings reverberates with Coleman, a character who forwards Roth’s claim that we are always in the process of reinventing the self, whether racially or otherwise. By perpetually performing in person and in writing a postracial consciousness that disbands the confining categorizations that enable racism, Broyard models Appiah’s vision of moving beyond racially grounded identity while at the same time the discomfort with this substratum of secrets confirms that a truly “postracial” consciousness remains fictive.

The “harshly ironic fate” of The Human Stain The harsh irony driving the novel—to borrow from Roth’s “harshly ironic fate”—is that Coleman’s secret would have been the one thing that could have saved him from his downfall, yet it is the one thing he cannot reveal (333). The central irony of the novel is thus fueled by the suppression of desired disclosure. While Dean Silk loses his position at the university, takes early retirement, and retreats into a bitterness into which he tries to draw Nathan Zuckerman, by imploring him to write an account of his experiences, to be appropriately entitled “Spooks,” he could presumably have cleared himself of the charge of

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racism and saved himself the disgrace to which he keeps referring. Yet had he done this, the “unexploded bomb” that was his secret would have exploded the lives of his Jewish wife and four Jewish children (320). Had his community read his race differently, they would have read his utterance of “spooks” accurately; Roth thus sets up a conundrum whereby misreadings multiply. More than one critic has noted that Coleman is the true “spook” in this novel. John Leonard finds that “Silk himself will prove to be a ‘spook’ ” (8); and Michael André Bernstein notes that “in his ghostly Jewishness, Silk is the novel’s only real ‘spook’ ” (21). Ross Posnock claims that “ ‘spooks’ describes with uncanny aptness what Coleman’s purity of self-making engenders” (“Purity,” 97). In these assessments, Coleman’s acquired Jewishness lends him a spectral quality. Yet the concreteness of Coleman’s Jewishness bolsters Roth’s argument about the malleability of racial categories. Roth takes great pains to describe the physicality of his main character, and to describe his comfort in his own skin. Roth depicts his main character as quite at ease with his adopted identity, even though he makes no attempt to describe the possibly uncomfortable process of passing as Jewish. Indeed, it is when Coleman decides to pass as Jewish instead of generically white that passing becomes comfortable for him. The Athena town and college community, without knowing about his passing, also disgrace Coleman for his affair with Faunia, a supposedly illiterate woman nearly half his age who is the ex-wife of a crazed Vietnam veteran, Les Farley. Coleman divulges the secret of his past and his passing to Faunia and “Faunia alone,” thereby moving toward reconciling his past and present lives (213). Perhaps it is a bit unfortunate that in both Roth’s novel and in his retelling of Kafka’s life, a young woman acts as muse and salvation— in Coleman’s case through Viagra-fueled sex and in Kafka’s case through a “chaste” and almost familial relationship. Roth partially exposes this male fantasy of regeneration through coupling with a much younger woman when he imagines Faunia resisting Coleman and Nathan’s pastoral fantasies of her as at one with nature, milking cows and wishing to be a crow (227); Faunia, although somewhat caricatured, reveals an interiority and layering that allows for the slow unveiling of her secrets. As I discussed above, the cultural background for Coleman’s affair with a younger woman is Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. In fact, the novel opens with a sweeping historical panorama that places Clinton’s troubles at its heart. It is 1998 and America obsesses over the fripperies of a silly, get-richquick time in which the country had nothing better to do than obsess over the

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unpolished peccadilloes of a self-indulgent president. As Nathan notes, “It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn’t stop … when the smallness of people was simply crushing” (3). In contrast to the post–9/11 mood in America, or to the crushing poverty and unemployment that besets many in the wake of one of America’s worst recessions in the early decades of the twenty-first century, Nathan’s reminder of this late twentieth– century “smallness” is striking. Frank Rich, writing in the New York Times op-ed section a few days after September 11, catalogs a series of “summer ephemera” such as Lizzie Grubman and Gary Condit. He observes that they were “typical of an age in which we inflated troublesome but passing crises into catastrophes that provided the illusion of a national test of character” (A23). Nathan captures Rich’s tone exactly, yet Nathan recoils from the inability of Americans to forgive the human failure of the president. Wishing to distance himself from the “piety binge” that beset us in the wake of the Monica scandal, Nathan wants to drape a Christo wrapping over the White House that reads “A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE” (2–3). This plea for forgiving the (in Nathan’s view) justifiable lapses of the president parallels his desire to see Coleman forgiven. Indeed, Nathan suggests that just as the Athena College community should have forgiven Coleman for his innocent utterance of “spooks” and for his affair with Faunia, so Americans should have forgiven their fallible president for his affair with Monica. This desire for forgiveness of duplicity resonates with the structure of concealment that marks The Human Stain. In the novel everyone, including Clinton, bears a secret that masks his or her true identity, desires, or psychological state. Like the open secret of Coleman’s affair with Faunia, Clinton’s “secret emerged in every last mortifying detail” (2); indeed, all the characters’ secrets, as indeed, did Broyard’s, if posthumously, will emerge in all their mortifying details. For example, Delphine Roux, the young ambitious French academic whose secret crush on her nemesis, Dean Silk, will undo her, sends Coleman an anonymous note announcing, “everyone knows.” While we might imagine the note refers to his passing, it rather refers to his affair with Faunia. Delpine inadvertently broadcasts the mortifying details of her secret crush on Coleman by sending a personal ad to the entire faculty.29 Thus, whereas for Coleman the danger of exposure revolves around race, the danger of exposure for Delphine revolves around desire. Further, her desire for Coleman will presumably be complicated if not doused completely by the revelation of his race. Delphine, the crusader for political correctness, secretly wants to affix an addendum to her personal ad that reads “Whites only need apply” (262). Delphine wonders if, instead of such an

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obviously un-PC exclusionary statement, she might ask potential suitors to send a photograph. However, she rejects this option out of fear that the photograph might be “designed to mislead specifically in the matter of race” (263, original emphasis). This is particularly interesting in light of Broyard’s discussion of the photographs that were “bleached” apparently by the sun but also implicitly by passing. Indeed, had Delphine seen a photograph of Coleman, she would have taken him for white. Thus, where Butler had located in Passing a dual danger of the display of desire and race, in Roth’s novel we find that the revelation of Coleman’s race would threaten the secret desires of Delphine. Further, Roth’s jab at the spectacle of the PC Delphine desiring only whites continues his attack on the hypocrisy of PC that preoccupies this novel. In addition to Coleman and Delphine’s secrets, Faunia, too, harbors a secret: while everyone thinks she is illiterate and working class, she in fact comes from a well-to-do Boston family and is literate, if not well educated. Because she had left her well-appointed home at the age of 14 to escape a sexually abusive stepfather, her class status is severely diminished through successive escapades with ne’er-do-well men. Faunia and Coleman are haunted and tracked throughout their affair by Faunia’s ex-husband Les Farley, who suffers from PTSD. His fury at his ex-wife stems from her having left him and from her having accidentally killed their children by leaving them alone with a space heater that caught fire. Les must grapple with his PTSD by visiting the traveling version of Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial, by eating at Chinese restaurants, and by struggling with his anger. His anti-Semitism flares up against the aging Coleman when he asks himself, “Why is he [Les] suffering so much for what happened to him when she can go on giving blow jobs to old Jews?” (259). Eventually, Les’s anger overcomes him and he kills Coleman and Faunia by a supposed auto accident. Les’s secret is, therefore, that he has murdered his ex-wife and Coleman. Thus, while Clinton’s open secret opens the novel, the revelation of every other major character’s secrets sustains Roth’s examination of disclosure and self-re-making. When Roth wants to drive home the irony of Coleman’s fate—that he cannot disclose the self he has made at the moment when this knowledge would save him—he compares him to Dr. Charles Drew, an African American researcher who discovered how to bank blood so that it would not clot. Roth claims that Drew was injured in an automobile accident and the closest hospital refused to accept African Americans, causing him to bleed to death at its gates. Historian Howard Zinn confirms Roth’s story (including its irony)

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about Charles Drew, but does not mention his death: “It was, ironically, a black physician named Charles Drew who developed the blood bank system. He was put in charge of the wartime donations, and then fired when he tried to end blood segregation” (406). Nathan tells us that “the harshly ironic fate of Dr. Drew took on a significance—a seemingly special relevance to Coleman and his harshly ironic fate” (333). Both the irony of Coleman’s secret being the one thing that could save him from disgrace and the irony that the scientist who developed an anticlot system was killed for lack of access to his own technology revolve around blood: in one case, Coleman’s hidden bloodlines, and in the other, Drew’s literal blood loss. The blood in the story of Charles Drew also continues the exploration of the “stain” in the title of the novel, and it does so in a manner that highlights the historical depth of the question of blood and its stain. The stain of this novel also refers to the infamous stain Clinton left on Monica Lewinsky’s dress. Faunia most clearly explicates the title for us when she muses thus: The human stain … . we leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse error, excrement, semen—there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. (242)

In this bleak vision, there is no hope for redemption or reconciliation. Roth thus demonstrates how we are all stained with the blood of our past and with the immobility of that past. As Nathan narrates the story of Coleman’s secret, he makes it clear that Coleman found it relatively easy to alter the way people read him. Coleman was barely 18 when he joined the service in 1944, claiming to be a Jew; by the time he finished serving in 1946 and used the G.I. bill to enroll at New York University, his passing was complete. Nathan describes Coleman’s justification for his transformation from black to white in classically liberal terms that value freedom and social mobility: he had chosen to take the future into his own hands rather than to leave it to an unenlightened society to determine his fate—a society in which, more than eighty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, bigots happened to play too large a role to suit him … far from there being anything wrong with his decision to identify himself as white, it was the most natural thing for someone with his outlook and temperament and skin color to have done. All he’d ever wanted, from earliest childhood on, was to be free: not black, not even white—just on his own and free. (120)

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This fantasy of an I “pioneered” sui generis from a sense of self, one divorced from sociocultural constructs, collapses when Coleman finds—and rather quickly—that one cannot be “free” from America’s obsession with race. Thus, the irony of Dr. Charles Drew’s fate is reflected in the irony of the “spooks” incident. Coleman passes precisely because he cannot reconcile himself to the confines of a world in which race matters. His thinking on race derives from his idea of freedom from categories. His self-fashioning into a Jew reflects his rejection of the arbitrary nature of race and blood and his expertise as the “greatest of the great pioneers of the I” (108). Roth’s concept of the self ’s ability to create and live by its own fictions combats the “tyranny of the we that is dying to suck you in, the coercive, inclusive, historical, inescapable moral we with its insidious E pluribus unum” (108). What Roth here terms the “tyranny of the we” might also be understood as identity politics, as the liberation of the oppressed self into the comforting culture of the “we.” Paul Gilroy discusses the power of the “we” by laying claim to its inherent political nature: “Identity helps us to comprehend the formation of that perilous pronoun ‘we’ and to reckon with the patterns of inclusion and exclusion that it cannot help creating … . Calculating the relationship between identity and difference, sameness and otherness is an intrinsically political operation” (Against Race, 99). In claiming that Roth’s novel condemns the “ ‘tyranny of the we and its we-talk’ propagated by political correctness,” Ross Posnock explicitly links this “we-ness” with political correctness (“Purity,” 86). In this light, Roth demonstrates the absurdity of identity politics and political correctness by tracking Coleman’s bitter ironic fate after the needless “spooks” event. The individualist vision to which Coleman adheres, where he imagines that he can pioneer or fashion an “I” free from the “prison” of his upbringing, comes crashing down around him during the “spooks” incident. Here the extreme difference between 1946 and 1998 in terms of race relations is made manifest. In 1946, when Coleman considered how to chart his future, his options for college were limited to “colored” schools such as Howard, which Coleman attended for a brief unhappy period. In Roth’s caricatured vision of 1998 academic life, political correctness means that a ridiculous incident such as the one that turns Coleman’s life topsy-turvy and that actually happened to Melvin Tumin results from the tyranny of the “we.” In her memoir, Black, White, and Jewish, Rebecca Walker resists this “tyranny” by refusing to be categorized by any of the identity markers in her title. She claims instead, “I do not have to

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define this body. I do not have to belong to one camp, school, or race, one fixed set of qualifiers, adjectives based on someone else’s experience. … I am transitional space, form-shifting space … ” (4). This is exactly the kind of playful ambiguity that Coleman claims for his self-fashioned “I” before he discovers that the freedom of this transitional space evaporates when pushed against the societal limitations of postwar America. In an analysis of the supposed animosity between blacks and Jews, Gates argues that some African American leaders use anti-Semitism to bolster the isolationism essential to their identity-driven platforms. These leaders use antiSemitism because of—and not in spite of—the large numbers of Jews in the Civil Rights Movement. In “The Uses of Anti-Semitism” Gates finds that the “trans-ethnic, transracial cooperation—epitomized by the historic partnership between blacks and Jews—is what poses the greatest threat to the isolationist movement” (222). In a curious sense, Gates’s assessment agrees with the critique of political correctness that Roth voices throughout The Human Stain. For Gates, the “isolationist” goals of certain African American groups rely upon what Roth would disdainfully term “we-think”—and transracial cooperation threatens such identitary thinking. Were Roth to have his way, we would all pioneer our “I”’s and transfigure ourselves into complex beings incapable of being read into the unbearable constrictions of a binding “we.”

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Counterfactual Terror: The Plot Against America

Then watch the Terror! God knows there’s been enough indication that we can have tyranny in America —Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (1935) The Plot Against America (2004) puts into play a traumatic vision of a violently anti-Semitic United States that Roth depicts with a level of detail as to make it utterly “believable.” In fact he suggests that the Holocaust can and could have happened here, and Roth’s lifelong love of America is severely tested but ultimately salvaged through the curious plot twists he creates. For Roth loves America, which does not mean he is not one of its keenest critics. Indeed, he is sometimes corny in his approach to the American dream but that sensibility only serves to highlight the stark juxtapositions between the (always false, never attainable) ideal and the (always corrupted, doubled, shadowed) reality. As I discussed in Chapter 4, in American Pastoral Roth brilliantly details the needless and ultimately self-destructive ruination of Newark during riots that rocked the Eastern Seaboard. In The Human Stain, which I discussed in the previous chapter, Roth exposes both the possibility for self-transformation that is the core of the American dream as well as its painful underside. The same dual analysis—the love letter colored by its realist aching double—characterizes The Plot Against America.1 Three photographs together tell a story of glamor and promise sullied by fascist associations and capture the doubling that Roth achieves in The Plot Against America (Figures 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3). The first features two dapper young men, attired elegantly in tuxes, tall, handsome, goyisch; it appeared in the New York Times with the caption “The two most popular young men in the world.”2 Taken on June 12, 1927, the photograph depicts Charles Lindbergh, who had just made monumental history by crossing the Atlantic in the world’s first solo

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Figure 6.1 New York Times, June 12, 1927

flight on May 21, 1927, and the then Prince of Wales, who was going to become the shortest-reigning British King, Edward VIII, before abdicating in 1936 in order to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson. A few days after his flight, Lindbergh made the acquaintance of the Prince of Wales, and their shared, handsome, high-profile bachelorhood prompted the association between them. The other two photographs, taken roughly ten years later, feature each of these dapper young men, now a little older, now both married, now both having undergone a great deal of stress, but, nonetheless, in both photos beaming while offering a firm handshake to or standing in support of a Nazi leader. One depicts Lindbergh shaking hands

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Figure 6.2 Lufwaffe Commander Hermann Göring exhibits a sword for Charles Lindbergh. Berlin, July 28, 1936. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München/Bavarian State Library Munich/Picture archive

Figure 6.3 Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor visit Hitler at the Berghof, Obersalzberg, Berchtesgaden, October 22, 1937. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München/Bavarian State Library Munich/Picture archive

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with a sturdy older man wearing a Swastika and the other portrays the Duke of Windsor (as he became after his abdication) smiling while his wife shakes hands with Hitler. The sentiment Roth expresses so forcefully in Plot Against America, that the whole ruse of the Just Folks movement is a thin veneer that hides the violent anti-Semitism beneath the surface of the American myth of equality, finds an echo in the disjunction among these three photographs. The first photograph represents a mythical Nordic ease, and the second two reveal the violent underside of that masculine bravado. In the ten years between the first and the two later photographs, Lindbergh explored the world multiple times via plane, married Anne Morrow, and suffered the horrific loss of his firstborn child; Edward became king only to abdicate to assuage a supposedly fussy citizenry who would wrinkle their noses at his marriage to a divorcée. From American and British perspectives these formerly “most popular” eligible young bachelors would become enamored of Nazism as a supposed bulwark against the onslaught of the “Jewish” Communist world threat.3 Roth, with his endless fascination with the traumatic hidden truth behind the glowing mask of the American dream, would have found in Charles Lindbergh the perfect model for the double image of the American hero: on the one hand, the Nordic god, “America’s Prince” (as Scott Berg, who wrote the most comprehensive Lindbergh biography, reports the press often dubbed him), the promoter of aviation, and the sufferer of the “greatest crime of the century,” but, on the other hand, a Nazi sympathizer and an anti-Semite. For Roth, racism, anti-Semitism, and other hatreds are the stains that discolor the happier possibilities of the human project. For a young American boy such as Philip Roth in the 1930s there was no model more compelling than Charles Lindbergh, and thus no archetype more tempting to explode completely than the all-American goyisch Prince as a fascist president. At the heart of the novel lies a confusion between victim and perpetrator that makes of this fascist president Lindbergh possibly both. Whereas throughout most of the text we assume that Lindbergh delighted in fostering pogroms and rampant anti-Semitism in this dystopic alternative history, it turns out that his hands were tied by the promise of the return of his son if he played along with the fascist game. Thus Roth situates Lindbergh structurally as both a victim of this titular Plot Against America and also a perpetrator of the violence that rocks the country.

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Mission accomplished When The Plot Against America appeared it was instantly surrounded by a great deal of excitement about the similarities Roth drew between America’s then president, George W. Bush, and Roth’s fictional president, Charles Lindbergh.4 I suspect that many readers would agree with Ralph Goldstein’s assessment that “many, maybe even most of the 58 million who voted for Bush in November would have voted for Lindbergh had they been of age in 1940” (1). Despite denials and refusals from Roth, who claimed, “Some readers are going to want to take this book as a roman à clef to the present moment in America. That would be a mistake,” the resonances are plentiful. Just as Roth weighed in to try to stop what he viewed as a misrecognition of traces of Broyard in The Human Stain’s Coleman, he wanted to discount traces of Bush in the fictional version of Lindbergh. This disavowal is lessened as Roth also claims, “George W. Bush [is] a man unfit to run a hardware store let alone a nation like this one” (“Story” C10). Thus while I, of course, want to take seriously Roth’s insistence that The Plot Against America is not about the Bush years, I think it is safe to say that there are undeniable echoes that allow for legitimate and fruitful comparisons.5 Consider that, in The Plot Against America, during one of his speeches Lindbergh swoops down from his plane and speaks “without removing his leather headgear or flight goggles” (30), a deft publicity stunt clearly reminiscent of Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 2, 2003, after the invasion of Iraq. And here not only are the two presidents, real and fictional, echoing each other, but Bush may well have been intentionally or unintentionally mimicking the historical Lindbergh. Another similarity between the fictional and historical presidents is the power that the little-seen but highly influential vice-president in Roth’s novel holds. The media’s representation of then VicePresident Dick Cheney as the man pulling the strings, especially marked at the beginning of the Bush presidency, is scarily borne out at the end of Plot. It is thus, as are most of Roth’s novels, a very real-world fiction, but one in which the border between what is, what has recently or historically been, and what could have been is ephemeral to a striking degree. In what follows I demonstrate how The Plot Against America portrays precisely what the American myth of infinite freedom forbids: an imagination of what the Holocaust in America would look like. Here is the myth Roth debunks in this novel: that America saved the world’s Jews, that, because

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freedom prevails in the United States, the level of violent anti-Semitism that was the condition of possibility for genocide in Europe does not apply in America, that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did all he could to save the Jews of Europe. This powerful and widely circulated myth to some degree accurately reflects Roosevelt and American heroism, yet, as Roth’s novel demonstrates, everyday anti-Semitism in America may well have erupted into violence had the political alchemies been differently aligned. And Roosevelt, legitimately a hero in many respects, failed to act strategically at key times on behalf of European Jewry.6 But what is fascinating about The Plot Against America is that Roth’s exposé of the anti-Semitism that could have been is thickened by the racism that Roth explores somewhat obliquely here. As I have been discussing throughout this book, though, Roth is a keen observer of racism in America even if it is sometimes hard to pin down what is happening with race in his texts. In Plot the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) rears its ugly head, there are comparisons to the genocide of Native Americans, and perhaps most interestingly, Roth includes a tangent about Leo Frank, the Jewish man who was lynched for a supposed liaison with a gentile factory girl. Indeed, “the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and the leader of the American Nazi party have jointly called upon the acting president to ‘implement extreme measures to protect America from a Jewish coup d’état’ ” (310). Thus Roth shadows his discussion of actual and imagined American anti-Semitism with its implicit comparison to actual American racism. The choice of Lindbergh as the fascist president allows both of these to unfold because, in Roth’s assessment, Lindbergh stands in for that doubled American—the apple pie smile that hides an anti-Semitic, racist, core.

Lindy for president At the end of The Plot Against America, one of the wild stories circulating is that Lindbergh was trapped; what appeared to the world as his fascist sympathies are revealed as nothing more than his being held hostage by Nazi Germany because it was they who had his son captive, alive, and thriving as a model Hitler Youth. But this story is quickly discredited and in fact Roth refuses to resolve the plot against America—to determine what actually happened within the fiction— whether President Lindbergh was indeed a rabid anti-Semite whose seemingly innocent “Just Folks” movement actually masked the Holocaust in America or

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whether, because the Nazis had kidnapped his son, he was in fact the “American Gauleiter” (i.e., regional Nazi leader, Plot 323) whose speeches were written by the Nazi elite and whose every move was designed by Hitler. In keeping with one of Roth’s favorite devices, he violently tears away the look of innocence of the American dream, the American family, and the American hero. Roth refuses to clarify whether his fictional Lindbergh is a victim of a sinister plot or a perpetrator of epic proportions. The historical Lindbergh had in fact been a vocal member of the isolationist America First movement, and there was talk of him running for president, but he declined even though when he gave speeches the large crowds often shouted, “Lindy for President.” In a speech delivered in Des Moines, on September 11, 1941, Lindbergh claimed that while he understood why German Jews wanted to overthrow Hitler, American Jews should realize that “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government” (Plot 387; Berg 427). While an entry in an encyclopedia of anti-Semitism claims that Lindbergh was not in fact anti-Semitic, his remarks were often understood to be so, even though he did not frequently expound on Jews, and even though some of his best friends, most notably the Guggenheim family, were Jewish (see R. Levy 423–424). After reading Scott Berg’s magisterial biography, Lindbergh, it becomes clear that Lindbergh was anti-Semitic; I agree with Roth’s assessment that “Lindbergh as a social force was distinguished not only by his isolationism but by his racist attitude toward Jews … . He was at heart a white supremacist” (“Story” C10). Indeed, Lindbergh shared with Hitler a belief that international Jewry rampantly agitated for war. (Just as, in speech after repetitive speech, Hitler vehemently and strangely charged Jews with war mongering; see Kershaw.) The historical and fictional Lindberghs both ardently admired Hitler. After attending the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the historical Lindberg wrote, “He [Hitler] is undoubtedly a great man, and I believe he has done much for the German people” (qtd. in Plot 369). Michael Mackenzie argues that there was a transformation in how the Nazis in charge of the Olympics perceived its propaganda power: The ideologues of the Nazi party rejected the Olympic movement for its internationalism and pacifism, and, at first, it was uncertain that the Berlin games would actually take place. Yet when the 1936 games did take place as scheduled, the National Socialist bureaucracy hosted the Olympics on “a lavish scale never before experienced” and turned the games into a spectacle meant to

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show the world that the new Germany was—despite the remilitarization of the Rhineland—a decent, friendly, peace‐loving nation. (302)7

The image that has ossified of the Berlin Olympics as the spectacle that would have impressed foreign visitors such as Lindbergh is interestingly historicized by Mackenzie, who reminds us that this “fascist Olympics” was itself embedded in competing associations of a suspect internationalism (which, in Nazi thinking always reads as “Jewish”) and a desire to project a beautified image of the idealized bodies that would go on to become trademark Nazi images. Granted, in 1936, when Lindbergh enjoyed the Olympic Games, the Holocaust had not yet happened and Germany was, indeed, much better off economically than it had been in the earlier interwar years; nonetheless, Hitler had by this time incarcerated thousands of communists and anti-fascists, and anti-Jewish legislation had been instituted. Roth’s Lindbergh is depicted as a clever antiSemite who incorporates prominent Jewish-Americans within his ranks; these include the powerful (fictional) Rabbi Bengelsdorf, who becomes the narrator’s uncle via marriage. Lindbergh concocts and begins to enact “Homestead 42,” which deports Jews not to concentration camps but to the American Midwest, where they are supposedly indoctrinated with gentile values. “Homestead 42” clearly echoes the Department of Homeland Security, organized in response to the attacks on September 11, 2001. By choosing Lindbergh, the darling of aviation-loving boys (and many others too) around the world, Roth was able to scrape the underside of the American hero—and he did this by drawing out the isolationism and antiSemitism practiced by the historical Lindbergh. By creating a fascist president out of a boyhood hero, Roth underscores the imbrication of victim and perpetrator yet again. Roth wonders what “if Lindbergh had run? With that boyish manly aura of his? With all that glamor and celebrity, with his being virtually the first great American hero to delight America’s emerging entertainment society” (“Story” C10), what would have happened? Berg’s biography is full of the adoration Lindbergh instilled in children—particularly young boys who supposedly dreamed of adventures such as those enjoyed by the aviator. From Swedish stock—indeed Lindbergh is the actual Swede— Lindbergh represented the perfect goyisch hero; from what we know of Roth’s general take on “shiksas,” it is not such a stretch to see how that vivid imagination about gentile “girls” would translate into an obsession with the epitome of a goyisch boy. Lindbergh offered Roth the perfect symbol of a fascist president not only because of his own, historically accurate, proclivities

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toward Nazi Germany but more importantly for Roth because the flip side of America’s golden boy as fascist supports Roth’s general trope of exposing the undesirable double behind the happy façade and flipping the image of the historical Lindbergh as the victim of the unimaginable crime of having his child abducted and murdered to having him appear as the perpetrator of pogroms. In the case of the historical Lindbergh, while the world adored its first solo trans-Atlantic flyer, this pilot had been from a typical American family— that is to say, a deeply unhappy, scandal-laden, and fragmented family. Not from the typical American family of the American dream but from the kind of background many—if not most—people actually experience. Berg notes that “Charles Augustus Lindbergh seemed the perfect antidote to toxic times” (112), which is exactly why he is the perfect model for Roth—he seemed a perfect antidote and yet he was toxicity itself. Anne and Charles Lindbergh (in the columnist Will Rogers’s words, “our Prince and our President combined” (cited in Berg 143)) visited Reichsmarschall and Luftwaffe head Hermann Göring several times. Thus while debunking the myth of the unconditionally “good” America opposing the unconditionally “bad” Germany, Roth also debunks the widely held myth that America (and Britain to boot) was without exception universally condemnatory of the German dictator from his rise to power in 1933 onwards. Hidden in plain sight, in every newspaper and historical record, in contrast, is the fact that many in America and Britain supported the Hitler regime as a bulwark against what they saw as the rising threat of international communism.

The fascist United States Narrated by a young character called “Philip Roth,” The Plot Against America does indeed make us feel the chill of what could have been had fascism come to America. The novel’s beginning captures the tone: “Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn’t been president or if I hadn’t been the offspring of Jews” (1). Underscoring and echoing these opening words, the final chapter of The Plot Against America is titled “Perpetual Fear,” and throughout the course of the novel Roth charts the subtle changes that irrevocably transformed the 7- to 9-year-old narrator’s Jewish-

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American family (the novel spans two years). His family was deeply patriotic; for many Jewish-Americans such as this fictionalized version of the author Roth’s family, patriotism was (and is) a way of asserting an alliance with a homeland outside Israel. Roth had illuminated how distant the idea of Israel seemed to him in The Facts (1988): Ordinarily nobody more disquieting ever appeared there than the bearded old Jew who sometimes tapped on our door around dinnertime; to me an unnerving specter from the harsh and distant European past, he stood silently in the dim hallway while I went to get a quarter to drop into his collection can for the Jewish National Fund (a name that never sank all the way in: the only nation for the Jews, as I saw it, was the democracy to which I was so loyally—and lyrically— bound, regardless of the unjust bias of the so-called best and the violent hatred of some of the worst). (30)

Like many highly assimilated German, French, or other Jews in areas of the world taken over by or collaborating with the Hitler regime, the characters in the fictional Roth family did not distinguish between their Jewishness and their Americanness. Again in The Facts, Roth expounded, “growing up Jewish as I did and growing up American seemed to me indistinguishable. Remember that in those days there was not a new Jewish country, a ‘homeland,’ to foster the range of attachments—the pride, the love, the anxiety, the chauvinism, the philanthropy, the chagrin, the shame—that have, for many American Jews over forty, complicated anew the issue of Jewish self-definition” (122). Just as was the case in Nazi Germany, change came incrementally, so that whereas many see the violent anti-Semitism of Germany from a post-Holocaust perspective, what is harder to grasp fully is the way in which small pieces of legislation were issued one by one—that the prohibition of Jewish people swimming in public pools, for instance, should have ended in genocide was no more visible to German Jews than the violent outcome of the concentration of Jewish families in the Midwest was to the Roth family in The Plot Against America. Through a fictional setting, then, Roth helps us to envision the sort of concrete changes that would have—and indeed could have—taken place had history looked different. But this book argues that this sort of doubling is a repeated trope in Roth’s universe: the underside, the hidden story, the changed mask or face, and the trauma behind the exterior of the American dream house, like the one in The Plot Against America that sits on “a tree-lined street of frame wooden houses with red-brick stoops, each stoop topped with a gable roof

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and fronted by a tiny yard boxed in with a low-cut hedge” (2). As Alan Cooper phrases it, in The Plot Against America, “readers are drawn into terrors that can lurk behind the most friendly apple-pie-American smiles” (252). In The Plot Against America, it is a fascist president who forces the skeletons out of the happy American family closet; but, as I noted in Chapter 4, this same doubling appears in American Pastoral through the terrorist daughter of the perfect masculine model of Swede and the tiny perfect wife, all three doubled with a traumatic secret. This doubling also appears in The Human Stain (Chapter 5) where the happy Jewish-American family hides a secret of passing and a traumatic rejection of loving parents and siblings. It is part of what makes Roth an incisive portrayer of the transformations in American life from the 1950s until the early 2000s—that he exposes the trick behind the mirage of the tree-lined American street with its whitewashed fences and tidy hedges. Benjamin Hedin notes of The Plot Against America that “Roth has conjured this alternate past to revive the shock of the present, the blindness that crowds each moment of life only to be blunted by memory and hindsight” (96). This doubling is perfectly conjured up through a vision that is so enduring it ended up being forged into the cover of the novel when the young narrator daydreams about how the fascist takeover of America has colored these whitewashed fences: It was when I looked next at the [stamp] album’s facing page to see what, if anything, had happened to my 1934 National Parks set of ten that I fell out of the bed and woke up on the floor, this time screaming. Yosemite in California, Grand Canyon in Arizona, Mesa Verde in Colorado, Crater Lake in Oregon, Acadia in Maine, Mount Rainier in Washington, Yellowstone in Wyoming, Zion in Utah, Glacier in Montana, the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee—and across the face of each, across the cliffs, the woods, the rivers, the peaks, the geyser, the gorges, the granite coastline, across the deep blue water and the high waterfalls, across everything in America that was the bluest and the greenest and the whitest and to be preserved forever in these pristine reservations, was printed a black swastika. (43)

From the perspective of the narrator, the child who is in love with America, with its freedom and its beauty, the whole country, is overlaid with the ultimate symbol of the violent anti-Semitism he and his family and friends have suffered. Roth here exhibits an at times almost corny adoration of America but it is (thankfully) colored with a good dose of America’s ironies, pitfalls, treachery,

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and comedy. This is part of the doubling that Roth achieves. At the time he wins a surprise presidential victory, Lindbergh had been the darling of the stampcollecting Philip and his older brother Sandy, so from the child’s eye view it becomes difficult for the boys to fathom the dismay of the Jewish adults in their lives at the rise of a fascist president in America. Things go from confusing to worse as Philip and Sandy are traumatized by the burgeoning anti-Semitism of the Lindbergh era. Indeed, because the Roth family of the novel is so patriotic, they had planned, long before Lindbergh was elected, to drive “three hundred miles to Washington, D.C., to visit the historic sites and the famous government buildings” (44). The family had been saving, since “FDR was a second-term president and the Democrats controlled both Houses” (44), in, ironically enough, a “Christmas Club” account for the trip. The fictional Roth’s father adored America and had been looking forward, during the two years of saving, to showing his sons the monumental sights of the city. As they approach Washington, the Roths take a wrong turn and find themselves face to face with “the biggest white thing I had ever seen” (57). Upon seeing the Capitol for the first time, Bess, Roth’s mother, begins to cry and Sandy, his older brother, falls into a “patriotic stupor” (58). This fervent patriotism is quickly checked by three anti-Semitic events that follow rapidly upon one another and that function to let the family know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Lindbergh’s America is a racist, unwelcoming, transformed place. The first incident happens at the Lincoln Memorial. As the Roth family stands before the colossal statue, overcome with patriotic fervor, another group forms nearby. In the overhearing and bravado that results from Herman Roth’s remarking aloud that Lincoln’s assassination was a tragedy, two members of the other group hiss “loudmouth Jew” (65), quickly followed by the response: “I’d give anything to slap his face” (65). It is not lost on Philip’s father, Herman, that this anti-Semitism is uttered literally in the shadow of the engraved words “All men are created equal” (65). In an effort to placate Herman, Mr. Taylor, their quiet but knowledgeable guide to the sites of the capital city, attempts to steer Mr. Roth’s attention toward a mural: “See there? An angel of truth is freeing a slave” (65).8 By so closely associating anti-Semitism with racism here, Roth makes an implicit analogy between them. Indeed, the second anti-Semitic incident that befalls the fictional Roth family is a scene that would most likely have been very familiar to black Americans. Tired from their emotional and trying time at the Lincoln Memorial, the family decides to retire to their

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hotel for a brief nap before imbibing more of Washington’s sights. However, when they return to their hotel their belongings have been packed up and the manager explains that they are not welcome. No reason is given by the manager but Philip whispers to Sandy, “ ‘What happened?’ ‘Anti-Semitism,’ he whispered back” (69). So the reason for their unfair expulsion is given only by Sandy, neither by the manager nor by the policemen who come to sort out the matter—and who entirely support the anti-Semitic decision of the manager. After the first anti-Semitic incident at the Lincoln Memorial, Philip reports, “it was impossible any longer to feel the raptures of patriotism turning me inside out” (66). And immediately after the second incident, the roar of a plane overhead elicits the Roths’s attention and it is Sandy, who could “recognize just about anything flying from its silhouette” (71), who shouts out that it is the “Lockheed Interceptor!” (71). Mr. Taylor then explains that President Lindbergh enjoys taking the plane for a little spin every afternoon and the people enjoy the spectacle. “We all watched along with Sandy, who was unable to conceal his enchantment with the very Interceptor that the president had flown to and from Iceland for his meeting with Hitler” (72). Here again Roth doubles the historical intertext by reminding us at every turn that this spectacular presidency is stained by fascism. In Philip’s words: “It was the most beautiful panorama I’d ever seen, a patriotic paradise, the American Garden of Eden spread before us, and we stood huddled together there, the family expelled” (66). This fall from Eden recalls Roth’s nod to Milton when he titles the third section of American Pastoral “Paradise Lost,” thus again alluding to the underside of various paradises that reveal their ugliness: anti-Semitism in the heart of US power, the fork through the cheek of the father while the wife plays with her lover in the kitchen—the paradises are always lost. In Plot, after its expulsion, the American family retires to a café for a snack only to be for a second time beset with anti-Semitism. This time a walruslike man accosts Herman, charging him again with being a “loudmouth Jew” (78)— indeed the chapter in which these incidents occur is aptly named “Loudmouth Jew.” Roth is careful to demonstrate how these anti-Semitisms accrue in young Philip’s soul, as he began “envisioning all our humiliation sticking to the skin like a coat of thick filth that you could never get off ” (79). I have lingered over these scenes because they expose the careful doubling of Roth’s vision of America: anti-Semitism in the very place where the end of slavery is most monumentally celebrated; the neat, well-scrubbed white American family being evicted from a hotel for no other offense than being Jewish while the

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President flies the same plane he used to visit Hitler. In each case the traumatic double of the apparently ordinary is exposed. Roth demonstrates this doubling brilliantly. But what is harder to untangle—and what several scholars of his work have grappled with uneasily—is the corny side of this doubling, the edenic image of America before it was shattered, as we saw with the postcard nature of the swastika over pristine America. For many leftists, for example, there has never been an Eden precisely because America had always already shattered its own edenic hopes, from the genocide of Native Americans to the enslavement of millions of Africans, to segregation, to the internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor, to the very fact of Roosevelt turning away Jewish refugees during World War II, and on and on. There is, in other words, no cynicism in Roth’s dystopic novel. There is instead a love letter to American potentiality tempered by the acute awareness of the underside of American hatred.9 This tension between a sharp critique of American potentiality for the worst racism and the schmaltzy promise of American greatness that Roth has his characters express can be explained in part by the fact that the narrator is an idealistic child and that it is actually a kitschy Nazi aesthetic that Roth exposes through his depiction of the Just Folks movement. But more than this, the corny depiction of American idealism serves ultimately in Roth’s oeuvre to deepen the sense of traumatic devastation virtually all of his major characters feel when the mask is inevitably torn away. Developed by the fictional Lindbergh regime, Just Folks was designed to relocate urban Jewish boys to rural settings where they would work as “field hands and day laborers with farm families hundreds of miles from their homes” (85). While the explicit aim of Just Folks was to assimilate Jewish difference and thus smooth out the American population into ever more sameness, Roth’s words here resonate with the experience of slaves who worked as “field hands” and were also relocated to distant spaces as children. Like the invocation of slavery in the scene in the Lincoln Memorial, slavery here functions as the repressed background to the myth of American freedom. To heighten this analog between the Jewish boys removed from their homes and the legacy of slavery, Sandy, after returning from his Just Folks experience in Kentucky with a rural Christian family, whispers to Philip, “We’d work with the hired hands, and there were some Negroes, day laborers” (99). Herman, of course, is not at all misty-eyed about Just Folks and, after refusing to let Sandy dine with Hitler’s minister of foreign affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop at the White House, he explains the underlying force of the “movement”: “The

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only purpose of this so-called Just Folks is to make Jewish children into a fifth column and turn them against their parents” (192). The wholesome and Lindbergh-adoring Sandy is sharply contrasted in the novel with Alvin, Philip’s cousin, who, seeing through it all from the beginning, gave up on America and fought with the Canadian army against the German army. The cost for his prescience was his left leg. Thus while Sandy returns in beefed-up, macho, shapely, tanned form from his American version of a Hitler Youth experience, Alvin returns disturbed and unheroically disabled—revolting to Philip, who declares, “No! Alvin can’t stay here— he has only one leg!” (109). Throughout the course of the novel Sandy and Alvin in effect change places along the spectrum of victim to perpetrator because Sandy’s initial adoration of Lindbergh (and thus association with the perpetrator of anti-Semitism) eventually gives way to a sensible rejection of his brand of American fascism and Alvin begins by fighting on the side of right against Lindbergh but then becomes disgruntled and disillusioned. The juxtaposition of Alvin and Sandy allows Roth to present, on the one hand, the naïve idealism encouraged by the simple optimism of Just Folks and the fact that Sandy refuses to see what is before him in increasingly anti-Semitic America, and, on the other, the portent of what it looks like to fight Hitler: to be disabled with a “colossal freakishness” (127), which Roth does not shy away from describing in detail. Indeed, an entire chapter is entitled “The Stump.” Said stump is at first concealed from Philip, but after he leaps out of bed from a nightmare, the stump is revealed to him: “What I saw extending down from his knee joint was something five or six inches long that resembled the elongated head of a featureless animal, something on which Sandy, with just a few well-placed strokes, could have crayoned eyes, a nose, a mouth, teeth, and ears, and turned it into the likeness of a rat” (136). It is no accident that Roth places Sandy here, in the intimate scene between Philip, who becomes Alvin’s valet, caretaker, and stump wrapper, and Alvin. And in this imagined role Sandy makes a mockery—a cartoon—out of Alvin’s stump. By representing the disjunction between these two boys, Roth complicates the bravery of the antifascist in opposing Alvin to the wholesomeness of the profascist Sandy. Sandy is portrayed throughout the novel as an excellent artist and it is Sandy’s well-executed but ideologically grotesque portraits of Lindbergh that Alvin discovers—even though Sandy had promised he had destroyed them. Yet another instance of the hidden grotesquery—the gracefully executed portrait of Lindbergh takes on Dorian Grayesque transformations in the minds of Alvin

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and Philip. Alvin, with his disability, represents the undoubled; he curses, he jerks off, he tells it like it is; and above all he hates Lindbergh. Sandy, in marked contrast, is a typically doubled Roth character whose façade is eventually exposed but whose front is so convincing as to be seductive to even the most cynical observers. (Sandy and Alvin are a little bit like the brothers Swede and Jerry in American Pastoral.) But despite his stubborn hatred of Lindbergh, Alvin, who had become something of a petty thief before going to Canada to fight Hitler, “blatantly repudiat[es] all the ideals that had made him a cripple” (163) by turning a blind eye to politics when he returns to the Roths to convalesce. Like Alvin, Walter Winchell tells it like it is. Winchell, the columnist and radio personality whose rants against the American fascist regime Herman, and most of America’s other Jewish people, listen to with great admiration, loses his position on a Hearst paper and decides to run for the presidency. On September 8, 1942, Winchell campaigns on the “Upper West Side, where he was welcomed as their savior by the Roosevelt Jews, and eventually north to Harlem, where, in the crowd of several hundred Negroes who gathered at dusk to hear him speak at the corner of Lenox Avenue and 125th Street, a few laughed and a handful applauded but most remained respectfully dissatisfied” (260–261). In Roth’s book-length muckrake of what a fascist America would look like, there is relatively little discussion of what the fascist presidency feels about the large black population of the country. In Germany, Italy, and Japan, for obvious reasons, the issue of black populations hardly came into the racist discussions, but in South Africa, especially after the forgers of apartheid had learned Aryan racial ideas from German universities, there was an intimate link between racist legislation and the myth of Aryan supremacy (see Kaplan, Landscapes). Soldiering on, Winchell takes his campaign north to Boston where “somebody brandishing a burning cross rushed toward the soapbox to set him aflame” (262). There is no mistaking, of course, the connection between the burning cross and the horrific racist exploits of the KKK, whose signature burning crosses besmirched the South for years. But then, “thugs with clubs surged forward screaming ‘Kill him!’ and, two weeks from its inception in New York’s five boroughs, the Winchell campaign, as Winchell had imagined it, was under way. He had at last brought the Lindbergh grotesquery to the surface, the underside of Lindbergh’s affable blandness, raw and undisguised” (262). In this moment Roth describes his own process of uncovering the “undersides” as he does here in The Plot Against America, The Human Stain, American Pastoral, and elsewhere. Winchell’s campaign is precisely to make the mask fall away

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and for Roth’s fictional 1940s America to bare its fascist, racist, anti-Semitic soul. As Winchell continues his campaign, walking with a cane because one of his legs had been set on fire by the burning cross, “American history had recorded its first large-scale pogrom, one clearly modeled on the ‘spontaneous demonstrations’ against Germany’s Jews known as Kristallnacht” (266). This series of pogroms had included “kerosene-soaked crosses … ignited on the lawns” of many Jewish residents (265). Winchell’s brief campaign for president ends abruptly with his assassination in Louisville, Kentucky, the same state to which Sandy went as one of the Just Folks adherents. After Winchell’s assassination a crowd of 30,000 mourners gathers in New York to view Winchell’s coffin. The mayor of New York, Fiorello H. La Guardia, a Republican, is “alone among the members of his party in displaying his contempt for Lindbergh and for the Nazi dogma of Aryan superiority that he (himself the son of an unobservant Jewish mother from Austrian Trieste and a freethinker Italian father who came to America as a ship’s musician) has identified as the precept at the heart of Lindbergh’s credo and of the huge American cult that worships the president” (303). In his speech, La Guardia describes Winchell as a “muckraker who hates everything hidden” (303). As was the case with the narrator’s description of the underside of American anti-Semitism—and, of course, let’s remember that the narrator’s name is “Philip Roth”—the muckraker who roots out the hidden applies equally well to the impulse in much of Roth’s work. La Guardia goes on to argue that, loud and not always decorous, not always as composed as the fascist Lindbergh, “Walter’s vulgarity is something great, and Lindbergh’s decorum is hideous” (305).10 Roth’s La Guardia, then, argues for uncovering the dangerous repression necessary for decorum to prevail. It would be too simple to place a loud Jewish muckraking sensibility against a quiet goyisch tendency toward decorum but that is exactly what erupts at other places in the novel. The tidy living room Bess Roth labored, scrimped, and saved to forge into the American dream house is covered in the blood of the warring Alvin and Herman when Alvin goes several steps too far and spits in the face of his uncle Herman just as he had, immediately before losing his leg, spit in the face of a dead German soldier during the war. La Guardia concludes his speech by echoing what many actual postwar American Jews have felt or uttered: “It can’t happen here? My friends, it is happening here— and where is Lindbergh?” (305). It can’t happen here (and Roth, of course, nods to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel of that name) is, of course, exactly what Roth challenges throughout the novel. Could it? Would it have with a few tweaks of

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the historical record? Could it in future? While many acts of anti-Semitism still plague America, what is, of course, more urgent is the institutionalized racism that segregates schools and populates prisons. This is another “underside” of American consciousness that Roth addresses most obviously in The Human Stain, but that also haunts The Plot Against America. It is significantly less scary to write about The Plot Against America during the Obama presidency than it was when Roth published it. Indeed, in the fall before the 2008 presidential election, I penned a late-night, fevered reflection on how prescient, how scary, Roth’s depiction had become in light of the prospect of hailing Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin as our (the “our” of America) vice president. As the New York Times columnist Frank Rich noted, Palin quoted Westbrook Pegler in her nomination acceptance speech; Pegler was nostalgic for the Third Reich and used distasteful antiSemitic language that I do not want to reprint here.11 On January 12, 2011, in response to the violent shooting of a Jewish congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Palin used the phrase “blood libel” to refer to critiques of her own violent rhetoric. Palin’s former running mate, former Republican presidential candidate John McCain, actively sought and received the endorsement of John Hagee, an evangelical leader who had argued that the “Nazis had operated on God’s behalf to chase the Jews from Europe” (see Stein). While a McCain–Palin ticket was unlikely to have the same inverse power ratio of the Bush–Cheney presidency or Roth’s fictional Lindbergh–Wheeler presidency, where it is the shadowy vice president who pulls the presidential puppet strings, Palin’s appearance on the national stage cannot fail to resonate, for those of us who have read, taught, thought about, worked on The Plot Against America, with the image of the populist Lindbergh in the White House. One could not fail to notice the shared naïve populism and bravado between the pilot and the former Alaskan governor. That said, as I write, President Obama resides in the White House, struggling to correct the severe economic downturn caused by years of deregulated Republican financial mayhem. The specter of a White House peopled by those who received at rallies shouts of “lynch him” in reference to their rival, Obama, has happily not become reality. A fictional text could well be written about what kinds of racism and anti-Semitism might have been allowed to flower had that ticket won more significant national support.

Conclusion: What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

I turn, in closing, to another example of the motion between victimization and perpetration in a recent work by another Jewish writer. Nathan Englander’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” (2012) tells the tale of two couples, one who lives in Florida, the other in Jerusalem. The Floridians, Deb and her husband, who narrates, have been together for twenty something years and have a suitably bedraggled teenage son, Trev. The story is inaugurated when Deb’s old friend Lauren and her husband Mark visit from Israel. Lauren and Mark have renamed themselves Shoshana and Yerucham, become ultra-Orthodox, made aliyah, and had ten kids. Deb, it turns out, is obsessed with the Holocaust; Mark is visiting Florida because his mother, who like his father is a Holocaust survivor, is very ill: “And Deb has what can only be called an unhealthy obsession with the idea of that generation being gone” (8). Where Mark’s parents live is “like a DP camp with a billiards room” (9), so much so that one day in the changing room of the gym Mark discovers that another elderly gentleman struggling to put on a second sock next to his father has not only a number tattooed on his arm but that number is only three digits distinct from his father’s. When Mark points this out to both men who survived “the unsurvivable” (11) neither is particularly moved, impressed, or interested. Deb, with her “obsessional” relationship to survivors and the Holocaust, is “crestfallen” because she had hoped for something “empowering” (11) to come from Mark’s story. But the narrator comments, “But me, I love that kind of story” (11). In other words, whereas Deb wants to find something moving in the proximity of these two tattoos for both the survivors themselves and for her more cynical husband, there is nothing empowering to be found. In Chapter 2 I discussed the film, Numbered, that describes several people who chose to tattoo themselves with the numbers of survivors as a kind of living memorial. Perhaps the difference between Deb and her mate’s reactions to this story of indifferent proximity resonates with those who want to construct more “little ashen tattoos” (11) to bring them closer to survivors and those who want to keep their distance.

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Deb’s husband tries to explain her obsession to Mark and Lauren: “It’s like she’s a survivor’s kid, my wife … Her grandparents were all born in the Bronx, but it’s like, I don’t know. It’s like here we are twenty minutes from downtown Miami, but really it’s 1937 and we live on the edge of Berlin” (12). Deb, in other words, identifies very much with the victims of the Holocaust and imagines what it would be like to be victimized. She imagines also, what it would be like to be Anne Frank and has constructed a little game about this. In the game, you have to figure out who would offer you safe haven, even if at great risk, were another Holocaust to happen in America. At the end of the story, high on smoke and vodka, the two couples play the game only to discover that, even though Deb and her husband have some secrets (she failed to tell him that she had discovered their son’s stash of pot), it is Lauren who, when tested, ultimately feels that she could not completely trust her husband, if he were gentile and in a position to help, to save her and their ten children. It is what Weissman terms a “fantasy of witnessing”—yet in this case not only witnessing but actually experiencing hiding. This short story is followed in Englander’s collection by another, entitled “Sister Hills,” in which the fantasy of becoming the perpetrator of anti-Arab violence plays out. So, as we have seen many times in Roth’s texts, Englander too constructs a world where characters imagine victimization and fear perpetration. In this case, Deb’s Anne Frank game leads to the chilling discovery that Mark could not necessarily be trusted to preserve his wife and ten daughters in the “event of an American Holocaust” (29). In other words, while he would structurally be positioned as a victim because he is a Hasidic Jew—and here with the descriptions of his traditional outfit and the mention of the overtones of the DP camp in the resort that his survivor parents retreated to, we have shades of “Eli, the Fanatic,”—by the end of the story his potential for perpetration (when envisioned as gentile) has been revealed. As was the case with Nathan’s imagination of an Anne Frank who survived, so here too, Frank herself becomes merely symbolic. Like Roth, Englander finds the Holocaust very present to Jewish-American characters who, even though their grandparents may be from New York, still identify across the Atlantic with European Jews and their stories of survival or victimization. Anne Frank becomes a readyto-hand icon of poetic victimhood; the tattoo becomes an emblem for the ineluctability of the traumatic past. ***

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On July 22, 2014, the Jewish-American comedian Jon Stewart, who is often critical of Israeli policies, performed a skit wherein every time he uttered the word “Israel” he was surrounded on all sides by Daily Show actors yelling at him. While the babble of critique remains firmly (intentionally) impossible to decipher, one critic’s voice rises above the others to scream “self-hating Jew!” at Stewart.1 “Look,” Stewart noted, “obviously there are many strong opinions on this. But just merely mentioning Israel or questioning in any way the effectiveness or humanity of Israel’s policies is not the same thing as being pro-Hamas.” Roth was often accused of being a self-hating Jew both because of the misperception that he exacerbated anti-Semitism by reproducing Jewish stereotypes in his fiction and also because he allowed a series of divergent arguments about Israel– Palestine to populate his texts. In Parting Ways Judith Butler tackles the knotty problems that recur vis-à-vis the claim of a Jewish identity that is not Zionist, that is perhaps post-Zionist or even anti-Zionist. She notes, “If Zionism continues to control the meaning of Jewishness, then there can be no Jewish critique of Israel and no acknowledgement of those of Jewish descent or formation who call into question the right of the State of Israel to speak for Jewish values or, indeed, the Jewish people” (3). As I write (July 2014) three Israeli teenagers have recently been murdered, four Palestinian children have been killed while playing on the beach, many other civilians are seeking refuge, hundreds of other lives have been lost, and revenge on all sides is rampant. Responding to this escalation of violence, the Israeli writer Etgar Keret argues that compromises are needed, instead of the never-to-be-attained-but-easy-to-sing-about “peace.” Keret concludes thus: “They must first agree to concessions, maybe even more—they must be willing to accept the assumption that beyond the just and absolute truth they believe in, another truth may exist. And in the racist and violent part of the world I live in, that’s nothing to scoff at.” Jonah Goldberg, taking (justified) exception to both the ceaseless comparisons between the Israeli government and Nazis as well as the use of the word “genocide” to describe Israeli attacks on Palestinians notes, “Of course, not being as bad as the Nazis is a very low bar. And the fact that Israel clears it like a pole-vaulter leaping over a brick is not the same as saying Israel is without fault. But Israel’s shortcomings stem largely from the fact it is trying to deal with ‘peace partners’ openly uninterested in lasting peace. Solving that problem is hard. So hard that some would rather shout ‘Nazi!’ at Jews.”

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The slinging of the word “Nazi” at Jews is often a short hand for arguing that, whereas it was Jewish victimization that garnered the necessary international energy to forge the State of Israel, the victims have switched places and become evil like perpetrators. By persistently seeing the nuanced relationship among these two poles Roth’s texts, although not usually unproblematically, demonstrate the facileness of these sorts of slings. This reading against the grain of Roth recuperates him, perhaps, a bit from all the frustration around gender; in other words, if I have successfully argued that there is a larger, if perhaps neither obvious nor intentional, thread throughout Roth’s works that can be used to explore and hopefully open up the often stagnant and bitter debates within various Jewish American communities and spaces about Israel–Palestine, then this perhaps gives me leave to forgive or at least recast some of the problematic gender stuff that happens in his work. If it is the case that Sabbath looks just as (if not more) ridiculous than the “mollycoddling” feminists Roth lambastes in Sabbath’s Theater, then this twists the legitimate critique of these negative portrayals of feminists around—men and women are equally satirized and what are Portnoy and Sabbath, in particular, if not jokes about masculinity? It is my hope that this book has opened up more questions than it has answered. The stakes of the argument I have made throughout this book go beyond Roth’s works. For if we understand Jewish anxiety as equally about fear of perpetration and victimization, then perhaps we can begin to unpack the complicated dynamics around the line between the Holocaust and Israel–Palestine.

Notes Introduction 1 2 3 4

5 6

Some of the scholarship on victimization and perpetration includes Cohen-Pfister et al.; McGlothlin; and Metz. For more on this, see Biale, Power. Lena Dunham on Mark Maron WTF Podcast March 17, 2014, Episode 479. I am grateful to Sasha Mobley for bringing this interview to my attention. Elaine Safer argues that the ranting in Operation Shylock is “in direct contrast” (164, Operation) to such Talmudic discussions but others, such as Debra Shostak, find a resonance between Talmudic dialog and Roth’s dialogic structures (see her Philip Roth—Counterlives, Countertexts). For readings of The Prague Orgy, see Benator; Russell Brown; Budick, “Guilt”; Ravvin; Shechner; Tintner; Versluys. Roth’s final protagonist, Bucky Cantor from Nemesis (2010), is probably a normalizing exception to this trend.

Chapter 1 1 2

3 4

I would like heartily to thank Curtis Perry for finding this quotation from Bananas. For other readings of “Goodbye, Columbus,” see Aarons, “Philip Roth’s Comic Realism”; Bankston; Budick, “Blacks and Jews”; Doyle; Esteve; Francis; Girgus, “Between”; Graham; Grobman; Gross; Israel; MacLeod; Nash; Nilsen; Jessica Rabin, “Still (Resonant, Relevant and) Crazy After All These Years: Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories,” in Parker, ed. New Perspectives, 9–23; Rudnytsky, “Goodbye”; Tindall; Waxman. For a discussion of Allen and Roth, see Steed. David Roediger teases out some of the complexities of the term and also more broadly of critical studies of whiteness in “Whiteness and Its Complications.” Interestingly, in the cheesy 1969 filmic version of Goodbye, Columbus (starring Ali MacGraw, Richard Benjamin, and Jack Klugman), the intervening ten years of the civil rights movement have softened our perception of Neil’s racism. As in the novella, he sympathizes with the boy in the library (who I discuss below), but the racism that accompanies this sympathy in the written text has been excised

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for the sake of cinematic attachment. The film criticizes the Patimkin family’s treatment of Carlota, rendering them demanding and rude to her, insisting always that she bring them more food. In the film, at the end of Neil’s first meal at the mansion he quietly says to Carlota, “it was a wonderful dinner,” thus appearing to be the only white character to utter a kind word to her. 5 See Waldroup for a fascinating take on the after life of some of Gauguin’s images as cruise ship ads, among others. 6 For a wonderful reading of Roth’s use of Newark, see Kimmage. 7 Chabon discusses his debt to Goodbye, Columbus in the “About the book” section of Mysteries, 10–13. 8 For other readings of “Eli,” see Aarons; Duban; Gittleman; Lee; Oster; Parrish, “A Comic Crisis”; and Simon. 9 For readings of Portnoy, see Biale; Bloom; Brauner, “Masturbation” and “Getting”; Eileen Cohen; Colson; Forrey; Girgus, “Portnoy”; Gross, “Sophie”; Nilsen; Schehr; Ivy Schweitzer; Strong; and Tenenbaum, “Race”. 10 For more on Kleinschmidt, see Avishai, 177–198. 11 For a reading of this scene that puts it into context wonderfully, see Ezrahi. 12 For a great reading of the liver scene, see Shostak, “Appetite.”

Chapter 2 1 2 3 4

5 6 7

See Fischer and Lucas for a taste of some of these arguments. Cited in Pierpont, 7. Roth describes this in the film Philip Roth: Unmasked. See also Steven Milowitz, who argues, “In The Ghost Writer Roth … employs a style that inverts the conditions of the Holocaust world. The world of anxiety, of choicelessness and fear, of ideology and judgement, of unambiguous language and definitive truth, is rewritten to become a world where choice is reborn, where ideology is indefensible, where language thrives in rich play of meaning, and where truth remains elusive” (52–53); see also Corwin. For Roth and James, see, among others, especially Gooblar, Major, 38–40; and Posnock, Rude, 114–116. See Hendley. In W.G. Sebald’s first novel, Vertigo (1990), while traveling in Italy the narrator, who, as in many of Roth’s novels carries the same name as the author, happens upon two young men on a bus who, he is certain, bear an uncanny resemblance to a young Kafka. The narrator requests permission from the doubles’ parents to obtain a photograph of the boys whereupon he is met with a stern rebuff. But without the

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photograph the narrator can have no assurance that anyone will believe him when he tries to explain that he found not one but two of Kafka’s doubles in Italy. The kids “bore the most uncanny resemblance imaginable to pictures of Franz Kafka” (88). But the narrator determines that the parents feared he was a pederast and then became “embarrassed to the utmost degree and consumed with an impotent rage at the fact that I would now have no evidence whatsoever to document this most improbable coincidence” (90).

Chapter 3 1

2

3 4

5

Paul Gilroy’s highly influential The Black Atlantic: Modernity and DoubleConsciousness (1992) engages Du Bois’s double-consciousness and uses it as an explanatory tool in understanding the “transnational formation” of the black Atlantic (ix). Gilroy argues, “The significance and functionality of racial terror thus becomes a central preoccupation of Du Bois’s indictments and affirmations of modernity” (118). Adell notes that Du Bois “posits a founding metaphor, that of the Veil, and a founding concept, double-consciousness, for an ontology of blackness upon which is grounded the Black American literary tradition” (11). Vilashini Cooppan credits Du Bois with recasting “blacks as the possessors of a uniquely double identity” (302). Jinx rather unnervingly tells us that she had “sex with my dead Jew” (335) because even though Pipik was dead his implant was still functional. These “counters” are foregrounded in Debra Shostak’s important book, Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives; see also Ellen Levy. Ada Savin rightly notes, “Si la réalité israélienne intéresse Philip Roth c’est précisément par l’émergence d’une contre-identité juive” (82). In describing “Man and His Doubles,” Foucault reads Velàzquez’s painting Las Meninas (1656), in which the gazes exchanged between painter and subject remain indeterminate, as a series of doubles who finally stop their “imperceptible dance” and immobilize into “one substantial figure.”

Man appears in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as a subject that knows: enslaved sovereign, observed spectator, he appears in the place belonging to the king, which was assigned to him in advance by Las Meninas, but from which his real presence has for so long been excluded. As if, in that vacant space towards which Velàzquez’s whole painting was directed, but which it was nevertheless reflecting only in the chance presence of a mirror, and as though by stealth, all the figures whose alternation,

170

Notes reciprocal exclusion, interweaving, and fluttering one imagined (the model, the painter, the king, the spectator) suddenly stopped their imperceptible dance, immobilized into one substantial figure, and demanded that the entire space of the representation should at last be related to one corporeal gaze. (312)

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16

17 18

Roth mentions Dostoyevsky in Operation Shylock in the following places (and perhaps in others as well!): 123, 179, 259; Melville: 111, 274 (Bartleby is not named but Rosenberg conjures him with “I preferred to write this particular version”); Conrad 295. For a detailed reading of Roth’s connection with Joyce, see Klein; Morely. On doubling, see Masschelein; Slethaug; Orace; Smock; Adell; Coates; Crook; Rosset; Lee, and no doubt zillions of others; this is a very incomplete list. On The Counterlife, see Royal, “Postmodern”; Finney; Posnock. See Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct. Morris Dickstein interestingly asserts, “The Counterlife and Operation Shylock are Roth’s most Jewish books” (71); among the scholarship on this novel, see Lyons. For more on this question of authenticity, see Grumberg; Sokoloff; Daleski. On the question of homelands in Roth, see Kaplan, “Contested”; Levy; Wilson; Rubin-Dorsky; Furman; Zakim; Lehmann. On critiques of Roth, see Fishman; Alter. Both the New York Times website and ProQuest tell me that this interview with Appelfeld was published in the New York Times on February 28, 1988; Roth tells me that this interview “appeared in the The New York Times on March 11, 1988” (Shylock 367), thus further confusing the line between fiction and fact. The interview was reprinted in Shop Talk (18–39). For the importance of Appelfeld’s work in understanding the ethics of Holocaust representation, see my Unwanted Beauty. Of the madness of the Jerusalem in the novel O’Donoghue notes, “The Jerusalem of Operation Shylock is certainly no less absurd and no less deadly than Lewis Carroll’s chessboard” (158). Roth uses the term “celebrity Jew” (150, 325) throughout Operation Shylock as part of his self-derisive put down (and “celebrity leftists” as well, 130–131). Eugene Goodheart notes, “Ever since he achieved celebrity (that is to say, virtually since the beginning of his career), Roth has been occupied with the matter of the relationship between his life and his work, his biographical self and his fictional surrogates” (440). For a detailed study of where fact and fiction merge/deviate, see Rudnytsky; also Gooblar. “Moishe Pipik” literally means Moses Bellybutton, as Roth explains (102–104) but it can have a variety of meanings. See “Moishe Pupik” by Philologos in The Jewish

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21 22

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Daily Forward, July 22, 2005: http://www.forward.com/articles/3872/. Rosten’s explanations for “pupik” include: “ ‘A shaynim donk in pupik’ … means ‘Thanks for nothing’ ” (294), which seems most apt for Roth’s “Pipik.” Delbo returns to this theme in La Mémoire et les jours. See my Unwanted Beauty for more on this. Safer contends that “one may also view [Roth’s] treatment of the absurd in relation to the serious approach of Kafka in The Metamorphosis and The Trial. Kafka claimed that his absurd fiction was funny, that he laughed whenever he read his books. Many of us, however, see his works as tragic or at least as deeply serious and uncomic” (Mocking, 36); see also Roth’s “ ‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka”; on Kafka in Roth see my “Anatole Broyard.” See Ewing and Cowell; for more on the trial in Operation Shylock, see McLoughlin and Dobozy. Christopher Browning’s highly influential Ordinary Men contains many examples of killers who tried to become split personalities, killing during the day and attempting to have normal lives in the evening. In one of its most chilling moments Browning describes a member of Reserve Police Battalion 101 who tried to close the gap in this split by bringing his bride, as part of the honeymoon (!) to witness a massacre in order to show her that “he was master over the life and death of Polish Jewry” (93). For an explication of contemporary Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, see Bunzl.

Chapter 4 1 2

3

4

In Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives, Debra Shostak explores the 1972 draft of a novel with a main character named “Milton Levov” (123–125). Similarly, at one point Christa accuses him of exploiting her, to which Sabbath replies, “I don’t think either of us [i.e. Sabbath and Drenka] exploited you any more than you exploited either of us” (419). Mickey’s name in conjunction with Nikki’s is probably yet another nod to Finnegans Wake, wherein “Mikkelraved, Nikelsaved” (97) Mike and Nickekellous figure (99). One of these, Everyman (2006), shares many echoes with Sabbath’s Theater not least because it begins with the unnamed main character’s disjointed families huddled around his grave. Just like Finnegans Wake, Everyman begins at the end. Similar to Roth’s Indignation, it is narrated in the third person from the perspective of the dead narrator, killed (like Morty) during a war. Very different in tone from the hysterical novels like Sabbath’s Theater or Operation Shylock, Everyman takes a

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8

Notes reflective, end-of-life-wish-I-hadn’t-screwed-everyone-over-so-much approach. Our hero, before he died on the operating table, was an advertising executive who always wanted to be a painter; three marriages, three children, at least two betrayals, he finds himself alone on the Jersey Shore finally seeking solitude for his painting but immensely unsure if this is what he really wants at all. His first wife, Cecilia, bore him two sons who never reconcile with him after his extramarital affair with Phoebe, who subsequently becomes his second wife and the mother of Nancy (now herself divorced and the mother of 4-year-old twins),who adores him despite his abandonment. Everyman leaves Phoebe to marry Merete, a much younger, insecure Danish model who ends up being completely unwilling to care for him as he proceeds through multiple illnesses and surgeries: “He had replaced the most helpful wife imaginable with a wife who went to pieces under the slightest pressure. But in the immediate aftermath, marrying her had seemed the simplest way to cover up the crime” (124). By using the word “crime” here Roth not only evokes Crime and Punishment but also situates his Everyman as a perpetrator—in this case of all the well-worn “crimes” of the middle-aged married man who seeks out mistresses close in age to his children. Indeed, while in Paris with Merete but still married to Phoebe, Everyman lies to his wife on the phone when she accurately portrays his affair (this one and the one before with the young secretary were known to Phoebe but Everyman did not know she knew). Plugging into the wellworn trope of the wife who is not in the least crazy but who is made to seem crazy when she accurately discovers obvious infidelity, Everyman tells her, “Phoebe, I don’t know what you are talking about. You’re not making any sense” (118). While narrating the scene in which Phoebe tells him goodbye because of this (second) affair the narrator interjects: “But these episodes [i.e. accurate accusation followed by claims that wives are crazy] are indeed well known and require no further elaboration” (123). “Under his eyes, Christa and Rosie developed complete gorilla personalities—two of them living in the gorilla dimension, embodying the height of gorilla soulfulness, enacting the highest act of gorilla rationality and love” (Sabbath’s Theater, 774). For a précis of these headlines go to http://www.holocaustandhumanity.org/ kristallnacht/local-and-national-responses/ Some of the editions of Sabbath’s Theater feature Dix’s painting, Sailor and Girl (1926), on the cover. I am grateful to Ira Nadel for confirming the title and date of the painting since Dix seems to have created several works with the same title. McGrath; for an analysis of the whole trilogy, see Abbott. For readings of American Pastoral, see Ivanova. In discussing the conflation of seemingly disjunctive moments of place and time that poses a perpetual question throughout American Pastoral, Michael Kimmage notes thus: “Vietnam and Old Rimrock are not incompatible at all. This description has a specificity of detail typical of the Newark

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trilogy, in which objects and names collect historical meaning over time, uniting one historical epoch with another” (107). Kimmage renames the American trilogy the Newark trilogy in order to underscore the importance of this particular place in these three novels. 9 On the pastoral in these novels, see Gordon. 10 Michael Moynihan wrote a screed in The Daily Beast (April 10, 2013) decrying against radicals who, after serving time, end up as college professors. Entitled “Tenured Radicals: How 1960s Radicals Ended up Teaching Your Kids,” the essay offers an angry listing of several radicals, their violent deeds, and their current places of employment. For more on terrorism in American Pastoral, see Scanlan. 11 This question reverberates throughout Roth’s texts and appears again in Roth’s text Deception (1990), which is a play without stage directions. Lovers talk. That’s it. And Roth weaves into the narrative an ending wherein the male character (whose name is Philip) is confronted by a wife furious at having discovered a notebook the contents of which are identical to the “novel” we have just read. But embedded within the lovers’ talk are a series of reflections on anti-Semitism that speak to the question of perpetration and victimization. When Philip’s father grows furious because one of his grandsons marries a Puerto Rican woman Philip tells him,

Your father, at the turn of the century, had three choices: One, he could have stayed in Jewish Galicia with Grandma. And had he stayed, what would have happened? … . ashes all of us. Number two. He could have gone to Palestine. You and Sandy would have fought the Arabs in 1948 and even if one or the other of you didn’t actually get killed, somebody would have lost a finger, an arm, a foot, for sure. … The third choice he had was to come to America. Which he did. And the worst thing that can happen in America? Your grandson marries a Puerto Rican. You live in Poland and take the consequences of being a Polish Jew, or you live in Israel and take the consequences of being an Israeli Jew, or you live in America and take the consequences of being an American Jew. (75–76) Deception, then, offers yet another example of musings on alternative realities that could have been. Sabbath’s Theater also contains a passage that echoes this: “Had his father gone off at dawn to peddle butter and eggs so that both boys should die before their time? Had his impoverished grandparents crossed from Europe in steerage so that a grandson of theirs who had escaped the Jewish miseries should throw away a single fun-filled moment of American life?” (532). 12 In 1971 Roth had published a political satire of Nixon entitled Our Gang. 13 I am grateful to Harriet Murav for reminding me of Demons, which I had the pleasure to read under the care and supervision of Nancy Ruttenberg, many years ago, at Berkeley.

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Chapter 5 1

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4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13

14

See also Wendy Steiner, who discusses the divergent views of the origins of political correctness in her chapter “Caliban in the Ivory Tower.” See also C. Levitt et al. Indeed, the canon wars find their way into The Human Stain when Coleman rants against the paucity of classical readings of the classical texts he teaches. In a perhaps provocative question as part of a discussion of the relationship between the neoconservative position about multiculturalism and the fact that many neoconservatives are Jewish, Mitchell Cohen asks, “is neoconservatism a Jewish way of being gentile?” (48). While the implication goes too far, it is interesting to note that the neoconservative view shared by many of Roth’s characters denies the importance of Jewishness as a mode of ethnic identity. In 2003 this novel was made into a film wherein Nicole Kidman played Faunia, Anthony Hopkins played the older Coleman, and Ed Harris played Les Farley. I will restrict my comments to the novel, for a comparison between the Hollywood version and Roth’s original would take me too far afield. For other reviews, see also: Bottum; Changnon; Gordon; Higgin; Lezard; Lyons; McGrath; Neuhoff; Turlin Williams. On Coetzee’s Disgrace, see my Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory. In “Moniker” Margorie Garber argues that Lewinsky’s Jewishness was remarked upon frequently abroad but almost not at all in America. For commentary on Morrison’s claim, see Micki McElya, who argues that Morrison mistakes race for class. http://clinton3.nara.gov/Initiatives/OneAmerica/release.html http://clinton6.nara.gov/1997/06/1997-06-14-press-briefing-by-advisoryboard-on-race-relations.html Phone conversation with Rob Seibert, January 28, 2003. Conference title “Constructing Race: The Built Environment, Minoritization and Racism in the U.S.” March 6, 2004. Michael Rothberg, response to Walter Benn Michaels’s paper, “Plots Against America: Neo-Liberalism and Anti-Racism,” delivered at the Transnational Citizenship and the Humanities conference at the University of Illinois on March 15, 2005. I should add here that this chapter is a revised amalgam of two articles on The Human Stain that were published long before Roth wrote his open letter and one of which was included in Wikepedia’s references. I model performing race on Judith Butler’s influential argument about performing gender in Gender Trouble; for interesting articles on passing, see Ginsberg; Sánchez and Schlossberg.

Notes 15 16 17 18

19 20 21

22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29

175

See also the introduction to Insider/Outsider. See Dawidowicz; D. Moore; Hollinger. See also M. Margaret. Biographical information on Broyard gleaned from: Contemporary Authors 53–54; Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives; Mitgang; and most importantly from Gates. The Broyards were married for twenty-nine years but together for thirty, hence the minor chronological discrepancy above. See also Broyard’s “Good Skates.” For an interesting review, see Wolcott; see also Broyard’s comments on Portnoy in “Bringing Back Father”; “Oedipus”; and his comments on Zuckerman Unbound in “Lending Books.” Information on Martinelli from Moore. Note that like Sheri, The Human Stain’s Iris is an abstract painter (12). Broyard returns to this image of transfiguration in Intoxicated by My Illness, where he tells his doctor that he wants to be “transfigured” 47. Note that Roth used the same metaphor in Human Stain, when Coleman finds that he would need to “bleach out the raging misery” in order to turn the screed of his manuscript, Spooks, into a viable book (19). For a history that treats the mythical origins of circumcision, see Bettelheim. See also Garza; Greenberg. Of course, one cannot exclude the possibility of the self-hating Jew, but in trying on different roles, Broyard takes on the personas of both Jews and anti-Semites. My colleague Bruce Rosenstock has pointed out that Delphine’s inadvertent yet desired broadcasting of her crush on Coleman uncannily resembles the ending of Euripides’s Hippolytus. Indeed, Coleman is a classics professor and classical references abound; one could write an entirely separate chapter about the use of classical references in The Human Stain. I am grateful to Bruce for many helpful conversations about this novel and Roth in general.

Chapter 6 1

I thank Glenda Abramson, editor of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, for allowing me to expand upon my inquiries into The Plot Against America that appeared in a review essay entitled “Contested, Constructed, Home(lands).” Many thanks are due to Anna Stenport for her extremely useful reading of a draft of this chapter. Deb Shostak brilliantly examined the doubling I discuss here via the idea of counterlives, demonstrating how Roth’s work can “sketch out a host of counterlives” (3).

176 2 3

4

5

6

7 8 9

Notes Weinreich defines goyim as “gentiles, non-Jewish populace.” Peter Allen notes that “Edward has often been compared with the American aviator Charles Lindbergh: both were youthful heroes to a generation of a troubled and unheroic time, and they both had exceptional opportunities to form erroneous judgements. Although both believed in the phoenix-like power and might of the new Germany, neither recognized that eventually this would have to be fought, if necessary to the death” (55). In a letter, Wallis Simpson compared the situation that she and Edward suffered vis-à-vis the press with that endured by the Lindberghs: “One’s countrymen ought to be loyal. I haven’t found them so and therefore like the Lindberghs prefer to live elsewhere” (Blogh 212). See, for example, J.M. Coetzee and Michael Wood; Elaine Safer notes that “Not since Portnoy’s Complaint has Roth created such a tumult” (160). For extremely interesting readings of The Plot Against America, see Benn-Michaels and Rothberg. Indeed, Roth’s readers and critics sometimes take this comparison to the Bush years rather seriously. In his reflections on The Plot Against America, for example, Myles Weber argues that it is time “for America to ignore conventional wisdom and consider implementing a foreign policy even more unilateralist than the one George W. Bush has pursued, but of an appeasing, noninterventionist nature” (210). This is, of course, a complicated and unresolved debate; for two texts that delve into the question of Roosevelt’s relationship to the Nazi genocide see Newton and Rosen. The “lavish scale” is from William Shirer, entry for August 16, 1936, Berlin Diary. Here Taylor refers to the murals at the Lincoln Memorial painted by Jules Guerin (see his article on the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial). Matthew S. Schweber, for example, finds it ironic that the frightened little Philip (character) became the famous, self-confident Philip Roth. Nick Hornby terms Roth’s project an “essay,” finding that “The Plot Against America is a brilliant, brilliantly-argued, and chilling thesis about America in the twentieth century, but I’m not sure it works as a novel, simply because one is constantly reminded that it is a novel” (83). T. Austin Graham offers an analysis of Roth’s novel as counterhistory, and Gavriel Rosenfeld, who includes a short section on The Plot Against America in his book, argues that “Alternate history is inherently presentist. It explores the past less for its own sake than to utilize it instrumentally to comment upon the state of the contemporary world” (10). William Lansing Brown, in considering The Plot Against America as alternative history, notes that Roth “gives us a vision of America contorted into something unthinkable, yet somehow hovering on the threshold of recognition” (108).

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10 I am again reminded in this contrast between Winchell and Lindbergh of Jerry and the Swede—the former always crass but honestly telling it like it is and the latter always decorous but hiding or being chased by traumatic memories. 11 Google Westbrook Pegler and it is easy to find; in “Story” Roth mentions Pegler in a long list of anti-Semites, and he appears briefly in the novel, 327; see Rich.

Conclusion 1

See Dónzis.

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Index Against Race 143 Albee, Edward 101 Allen, Woody 1, 7, 13, 33 Alter, Robert 55 American Pastoral 5, 37, 56, 73, 86, 88–102, 104, 107, 109, 111, 120, 145, 155, 157, 160 The Anatomy Lesson 5, 6, 8 Annie Hall 13 Another Country 103 Appelfeld, Aharon 64, 67–71 Appiah, K. Anthony 112–13, 131, 138 Appleseed, Johnny (John Chapman) 89, 100 Archive Fever 35 Aristophanes 117 Auschwitz et Après 67 Auster, Paul 56 Avishai, Bernard 28, 80 Baal Shem Tov (Israel ben Eliezer) 84 Baldwin, James 14–15, 103 Bananas 13 Barkan, Elazar 112 Barthes, Roland 114 Baudelaire, Charles 123–5, 134 Baumgarten, Murray 5, 70 Berg, Scott 148, 151, 153 Bernstein, Michael André 139 Biale, David 2–3, 28 “Billy Budd” 57 “A Bit of Jewish Mischief ” 65 Black Like Me 116 Black Skin, White Masks 13 Black, White, and Jewish 143–4 “Bontsha the Silent” 101–2 Boudin, Kathy 94 Boyarin, Daniel 33 Brauner, David 5, 89, 104 The Breast 5, 10, 68, 80 Brodkin, Karen 14, 117 Broyard, Anatole 113–34, 137–8, 140–1, 149

Broyard, Bliss 114–15, 119–20 Broyard, Sandy 115, 118–20, 135 Broyard, Todd 119–20 Bukowski, Charles 126 Bush, George W. 149, 162 Butler, Judith 116, 141, 165 Butler, Octavia 51, 60–2 Caldwell, Gail 113 Calle, Sophie 56 Chabon, Michael 22, 51 Chamberlain, Wilt 46 Cheney, Dick 149, 162 Christo 140 Clinton, Bill 105–6, 109–12, 139–40, 142 Coates, Paul 56 Coetzee, J. M. 109 Condit, Gary 140 Conrad, Joseph 19, 26, 43–4, 54–8, 68–9 “The Conversion of the Jews” 103 Cooper, Alan 65, 155 The Counterlife 5, 45, 47, 49, 51–64, 66, 68, 70 Critical Insights 6 “Cultivating his Hysteria” 123, 134 The Daily Show 165 Davis, Angela 93–4, 98 “Death of the Author” 114 Deception 5 “Defender of the Faith” 23 Delbo, Charlotte 52, 61, 67 Demjanjuk, John 65, 67, 70–1 Demons 102 Derrida, Jacques 4, 35 The Diary of Anne Frank 38, 96–7 Dick, Philip K. 51, 69 Didion, Joan 112 Disgrace 109 Dix, Otto 86 Dollimore, Jonathan 96 Doron, Dana 35

Index Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 56, 57, 102 Double Game 56 Douglas, Mary 30 Drew, Charles 141–3 Du Bois, W. E. B. 51–4, 69 Dunham, Lena 7 The Dying Animal 5, 10–11, 16, 47, 56, 123 Edward VII, Prince of Wales (Duke of Windsor) 146–8 Eggers, Dave 7 Ehrlichman, John 100 Einstein, Albert 45 “Eli, the Fanatic” 19, 22–7, 29, 83–4, 164 Ellison, Ralph 14–15 Ellmann, Richard 47 Englander, Nathan 163–4 Everyman 49 Exit Ghost 5, 9, 36, 40–4, 49, 82 Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven 63 The Facts 3, 5, 8, 30, 154 Fanon, Frantz 13 Farrow, Mia 7 Feldstein, Richard 105 Finnegan’s Wake 48–9, 77 Finsi, Maurice 36 Flaubert, Gustave 47 Franco, Dean 14–15, 31, 59 Frank, Anne 35, 37, 39–40, 42, 45, 47, 49, 67, 96–7, 164 Frank, Leo 150 Frank, Otto 40, 96 Franklin, John Hope 111 Franzen, Jonathan 7 Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners 94 Freud, Sigmund 3–4, 28, 34, 35, 44, 74, 82–3, 91 Gaddis, William 121 Gates, Jr., Henry Louis 116, 118–23, 129, 138, 144 Gauguin, Paul 18–20 The Ghost Writer 5, 9, 36–40, 41, 44, 45, 47, 49, 67, 97, 121 Giffords, Gabrielle 162 Gilroy, Paul 52, 143

201

Gingrich, Newt 111 Ginsberg, Alan 126 Girls 7 Goebbels, Joseph 39 Goldberg, Jonah 165 Goldstein, Ralph 149 Gollaher, David 135 Goodbye, Columbus 4, 7, 14–22, 46, 85 Goodman, Amy 94 Goren, Arthur 136 Göring, Hermann 147, 153 The Great American Novel 48 Greenblatt, Stephen 127 Greenham, David 79, 84 Griffin, John Howard 116 Grubman, Lizzie 140 Guattari, Félix 48 Hagee, John 162 Halberstam, Judith 104 Haldeman, H. R. 100 Halio, Jay 107 Hall, Stuart 85 Harris, Warren 97 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 41–2 Hayden, Tom 96 Heart of Darkness 54, 68–9 Hedin, Benjamin 155 Hendrix, Jimi 46 Hepburn, Audrey 96–8 Hitchens, Christopher 44 Hitler, Adolf 10, 30, 59, 62, 105, 151–4, 157–60 Hobhouse, Janet 81 The Holocaust in American Life 64 How Jews Became White Folks 117 Howe, Irving 5 Hughes, Richard 93 The Human Stain 2, 5, 8, 15, 76, 81, 86, 88, 103–45, 149, 155, 160, 162 The Humbling 6, 49 Hungerford, Amy 116 Hussein, Saddam 109 ‘“I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka” 49–50, 106, 122 I Married a Communist 88, 107

202

Index

Indignation 49 Intoxicated by my Illness 117, 123, 131, 138 It Can’t Happen Here 100, 145, 161 James, Henry 41–3, 73, 86, 90 Jones, LeRoi 46 Joyce, James 39, 47–9, 77 Kafka, Franz 37, 49–50, 68, 105–6, 125, 128, 131, 134, 139 Kafka was the Rage 118, 125–9, 132 Kalmbach, Herbert 100 Kean, Thomas 111 Kemp, Peter 107 Keret, Etgar 165 Kershaw, Ian 151 Kimmage, Michael 46 Kindred 51, 60–1 Kleinschmidt, Hans 28 La Guardia, Fiorello H. 161 Larsen, Nella 116 Lawrence, D. H. 128 Leonard, John 113, 139 Letting Go 20–2, 49 Levi, Primo 57, 67 Leviathan 56 Levy, Richard 151 Lewinsky, Monica 109–12, 139–40, 142 Lewis, Sinclair 100, 145, 161 Lin, Maya 141 Lindbergh, Anne Morrow 148, 153 Lindbergh, Charles 145–53, 156–62 Lipsitz, George 112 Lodge, David 107 Loomba, Ania 30 Lucas, W. F. 129 Mackenzie, Michael 151–2 Mahaffey, Vicki 41, 47–8, 77 Mailer, Norman 120 Malamud, Bernard 121 Mamet, David 107 The Man in the High Castle 51, 69 Mann, Thomas 128 Maron, Marc 7 Martinelli, Sheri 126 Masiero, Pia 5

Mays, Willie 19–20 McCain, John 162 McCarthy, Joseph 88 McGrath, Charles 88 Melville, Herman 42, 56, 57 Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes 128 “The Metamorphosis” 68 Miller, Michael 138 Milowitz, Steven 29 Milton, John 74, 102, 157 “Minxing marrage” 41, 48 Moby Dick 57 The Monkey’s Wrench 57 Moore, Lorrie 107 Morrison, Toni 57, 111 Murison, Justine 3 Mussolini, Benito 77, 80, 87 My Father, Dancing 119 My Life as a Man 4–5, 36, 47, 122, 125, 134 The Mysteries of Pittsburgh 22 Nabokov, Vladimir 56, 57 Nemesis 23, 49 Nin, Anaïs 122, 126, 128 Nixon, Richard 100 Novick, Peter 63–4 Numbered 35–6, 39, 163 Obama, Barack 112, 162 “This Obsessive Reinvention of the Real ” 55 Oestreich, James 97 Oleanna 107 One Drop 119 Operation Shylock 5, 45, 49, 51–9, 63–71 Othello 76 Palin, Sarah 162 Paradise Lost 74, 88 Parini, Jay 107 Parker, Charlie 126 Parks, Rosa 130 Parting Ways 165 Passing 116, 141 Patrimony 5 Patterson, Orlando 61 Pegler, Westbrook 162 Peretz, I. L. 101

Index Philip Roth 65 Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives 69, 97 Philip Roth: Unmasked 28, 48, 88 Picasso, Pablo 78 Pierpont, Claudia Roth 3, 28, 80 Pinsker, Sanford 106 The Plot Against America 5, 17, 51, 60, 62, 69–70, 145–62 Podhoretz, Norman 136–7 Portnoy’s Complaint 4, 5, 8, 16, 17, 20, 22, 27–34, 37, 38, 44, 45, 46, 48, 80, 103, 104, 124, 125 Portrait of a Lady 42, 73 Posnock, Ross 139, 143 Pound, Ezra 126 Pozorski, Aimee 6, 44 The Prague Orgy 9 In Praise of Messy Lives 6 “President’s Initiative on Race” 105–6, 111 The Problem of Anxiety 3 The Professor of Desire 5, 80 Proust, Marcel 28, 46 Pynchon, Thomas 57 “Queering Philip Roth” 104 Rabinovitz, Hanna 36 Race, Rights, & Recognition 30 Reading Myself and Others 14, 49–50, 122, 125 The Recognitions 121 Remondino, Peter 135 “Resisting Allegory” 24 Rich, Frank 140, 162 Robinson, Douglas 95 Rogers, Will 153 Roiphe, Katie 6–7 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 150, 156, 158, 160 “Roth and the Holocaust” 40 Roth and Trauma 44 Rothberg, Michael 40, 53, 112 Rudd, Mark 94–6 Sabbath’s Theater 8, 9, 16, 17, 48, 49, 51, 56, 73–88, 104, 166 Safer, Elaine 65–6, 107, 113

Sampson, Steven 42, 55, 73 Scholem, Gershom 56 Schreier, Benjamin 46 Schulz, Bruno 9, 67 The Secret Sharer 19, 26, 54 Seibert, Rob 111 Semprun, Jorge 61–2 The Shadow Line 43–4 Shakespeare, William 76 Shechner, Mark 65 Shostak, Debra 6, 49, 55, 69, 85, 97 Simpson, Wallis 146–7 Sinai, Uriel 35–6 “Sister Hills” 164 Slethaug, Gordon 56 The Souls of Black Folks 51 Spargo, Cliff 39–40 Stalin, Joseph 105 Standby 118 Staples, Brent 121 Stein, Sam 162 Stevens, Wallace 128 Stevenson, Robert Louis 54, 57 Stewart, Jon 165 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 54 Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America 39, 106 Strawson, Galen 107 Streicher, Julius 39 “Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn” 129–33, 137 Sundquist, Eric 23, 39, 106 Survival in Auschwitz 57 Sutcliffe, William 107 The Tempest 81 Thomas, Michael Tilson 97 Tierney, William 107, 113 The Trial 131 Tumin, Melvin 81, 113–15, 122, 143 Ulysses 48 “The Uncanny” 74, 82–3 Underground 95 Unheroic Conduct 33 Updike, John 7 “The Uses of Anti-Semitism” 144

203

204 Velàzquez, Diego 42 von Braun, Wernher 10 von Ribbentrop, Joachim 158 Walker, Rebecca 143 Wallace, David Foster 7 Wallace, George 15 Weissman, Gary 35, 164 “What the Cystoscope Said” 114, 117, 137 “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” 163–4 “White Like Me” 116

Index Whitmore, James 116 Winchell, Walter 160–1 Wirth-Nesher, Hana 24 Wolfe, Thomas 47 “Writing about Jews” 15, 18 Writing and Difference 4 Yeats, William Butler 92 The Yiddish Policeman’s Union 22, 51 Zinn, Howard 141–2 Zuckerman Unbound 5, 40, 44–7