In History's Grip: Philip Roth's Newark Trilogy 9780804783675

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In History’s Grip

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture E d i t e d by

Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

In History’s Grip Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy Michael Kimmage

stanford u n i ve rs i t y p res s stan f o rd, ca l i f o rn ia

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of the School of Arts and Sciences and the Office of the Dean of Graduate Studies at the Catholic University of America as well as with the assistance of the Ludwig-Maximilian University’s Center for Advanced Studies. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kimmage, Michael, author. In history’s grip : Philip Roth’s Newark trilogy / Michael Kimmage. pages cm. — (Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-8182-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Roth, Philip—Criticism and interpretation. 2. American fiction—20th century— History and criticism. 3. Newark (N.J.)—In literature. 4. History in literature. 5. Jews in literature. I. Title. II. Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and ­culture. ps3568.o855z696 2012 813’.54—dc23 2012004362 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Galliard

to Alma knower, teller, lover of stories

As I’ll explain later, the books I read in Lubyanka made one of the greatest experiences of my life. Not because they allowed me an escape but because, to a certain extent, they transformed me and shaped me greatly. It was the way I read those books; I came at them from a completely new angle. And from then on I had a completely new understanding, not only of literature, but of everything. Literature is insight and synthesis, which means that poetry, ultimately, is heroic. Naked, weak, hungry, trembling, endangered by all the elements, all the beasts and demons, the cave men performed that act of heroism for consolation, in the deepest sense of the word. And at that time there in Lubyanka this seemed to me the essence of literature and the source of its legitimacy in the world. Consolation for a weak, naked cave man.

Aleksander Wat, My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

xi 1

1. Newark

29

2. Leaving

63

3. At History’s Mercy

97

Conclusion; or, Kafka in Newark

133

Notes Index

171 195

Acknowledgments

Without a book in mind, I began thinking about the triangle of Roth, Newark, and history in the fall of 2005. This was at the Amerika Institut of the Ludwig-Maximilian University (LMU) in Munich. Over the past seven years my LMU colleagues, old and new, have contributed immeasurably to my life in scholarship: Klaus Benesch, Michael Hochgeschwender, Ariane Leendertz, Charlotte Lerg, Karl Murr, Anke Ortlepp, Berndt Ostendorf, Sascha Pöhlmann, Ursula Prutsch, Maren Roth, and Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson. Christof Mauch, another historian with a soft spot for literature, encouraged this project in many, many ways. The Humboldt Foundation has been consistently generous in building up my ties to German academia. Over many months the LMU’s Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) provided ideal working conditions, among other things, giving time and inspiration as I wrote this book. There, in addition to CAS’s extraordinary staff, I would like to single out Annette Meyer and Sonja Asal, an avid Roth reader, for thanks. I have another set of colleagues across the Atlantic. At Catholic University, I have never been made to feel that writing about literature is a deviation from the serious study of history, and the university has lent expansive support to this book. Dean Larry Poos furnished financial assistance, cheerfully administered by Peter Gribbin. Dean James Greene was also instrumental in offering his financial help. Jerry Muller, a wonderful colleague and interlocutor, is erudite in matters Rothian. Tom Cohen, similarly erudite, went through my manuscript with a finetooth comb, to its immense benefit. My other history department colleagues create a scholarly environment from which we all profit. Ernie Suarez is a friend and literary friend across campus. I am indebted to

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the students in our graduate seminar on Jews and Southerners for their illuminating discussion of Portnoy’s Complaint. I have many other friends to thank for good and relevant conversation in the course of my work: Casey Blake, George Cotkin, Paul Jaskunas, Gary Shteyngart, Nancy Sinkoff, Abe Socher, John Stauffer, and Rajesh Vedanthan. Michael Gordin and Michael Kazin read early drafts of the manuscript, as did Ruth Wisse, a teacher and friend with whom this book is in obvious dialogue. Atina Norich provided a brilliant reader’s report, as precise and true as it was useful. Jeremy Dauber gave me the chance to speak on Roth to a lively audience at Columbia. The staff of the Adam Miskiewicz library maintains an elegant working space in the Vilnius city center; I am always glad to work there, as I often did while writing this book. While discussing this book, Neal Kozodoy made his usual wise editorial suggestions, which led me to Steve Zipperstein, who shepherded my manuscript toward publication with speed and graciousness. At Stanford University Press, Norris Pope has been exemplary in his lucidity, good humor, and professionalism. I would like to thank Sarah Crane Newman, Carolyn Brown, and the staff of Stanford University Press for their help as well. Cynthia Lindlof did a superb job of copyediting. My parents stand tall among my best teachers of literature, with sharp eyes for the historical nuance of novels and for the ways in which history, our understanding of history, cries out for great literature. Amid pressing obligations, my mother wrote out detailed and invaluable commentary on the manuscript to this book. My wife, Alma, to whom In History’s Grip is dedicated, is one of its sponsors, and her kitchen table in Vilnius the place where most of this book was written. In her love of storytelling, she is also a part of its argument. This is a love our daughter, Ema, who played with the rough drafts of this book, will surely inherit.

In History’s Grip



Introduction The man who decides to forge a distinct historical identity, who sets out to spring the historical lock, and who does so, brilliantly succeeds at altering his personal lot, only to be ensnared by the history he hadn’t quite counted on: the history that isn’t yet history, the history that the clock is now ticking off, the history proliferating as I write, accruing a minute at a time and grasped better by the future than it will ever be by us. The we that is inescapable: the present moment, the common lot, the current mood, the mind of one’s country, the stranglehold of history that is one’s own time. Blindsided by the terrifyingly provisional nature of everything. Philip Roth, The Human Stain

The East Coast is the deepest repository of American history, and the city of Newark, New Jersey, is embedded in the East Coast, next to New York City, close to Philadelphia, not far from Boston and Washington, DC. Colonial history has left its sediments in New Jersey, one of the original thirteen colonies. The American Revolution and early republic were intimately connected to the New Jersey territory between Philadelphia, city of the Constitutional Convention, and New York, which was briefly the new nation’s capital. Newark worried its way through the War of 1812 and suffered through the Civil War. As the ­nation under­ went the dramas of industrialization, mass immigration, and the black migration from South to North, so did Newark, an industrial city with few traces of its preindustrial past. In the late 1960s, Newark’s name was added to the list of cities devastated by rioting and unrest, a small chapter in the chronicle of national discontent. On September 11, 2001, one of the four hijacked planes left from Newark airport, traveling out from New Jersey to wreak its world-historical havoc. Yet Newark is not an obviously historical place. It is too small to elicit the fascination of a major city. It is too poor to sponsor urban magnificence on par with “the hubbub across the Hudson,” resplendent Manhattan, there to reduce all around it to diminutive and depressing proportions.1 Even by

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Introduction

the standards of America’s postindustrial declining cities, its Clevelands and its Buffaloes, Newark is a sad place, with a meager skyline and a vast expanse of crumbling buildings, streets, and neighborhoods. As observed from the train or the highway, Newark is entirely unwelcoming. From the outside looking in, its aura is sinister, and to those who must not stop—to live or do business there—it seems better to leave, to move south or north or west of this small metropolis without beauty and without history. If Manhattan is an archetypal destination and a place to stay (if you can), Newark is an archetypal place to leave and a city that bears visual evidence of mass departure. Its departed middle class fled in many directions, to outlying suburbs, to the Southwest, to retirement in Florida, fleeing to where the middle class is more safely and comfortably at home. Of those who stayed, many lived with the intent of leaving: circa 1974 some 28 percent of Newark’s whites and 36 percent of the city’s black residents “wished to move out of the city,” Brad Tuttle writes.2 A city shaped by immigration and migration was impermanent to begin with, a rest stop on the American highway—testament to a mobility that is not necessarily progress—though today’s city is an inhabited ruin. Newark still exists. It still has hundreds of thousands of residents, and it still has a civic and political life, which is to say that it is still making history. Yet if Newark undergoes an urban renaissance, which it may, it will have escaped from its own despairing history and fled to some brighter future.3 It will have left its late ­twentieth-century self behind and joined its new self to more optimistic, future-oriented American energies. History can certainly be left behind. Not all history needs to be meticulously preserved, memorialized, and perpetuated. Not all history is material for historical epic. Leslie Fiedler, a literary critic who grew up in Newark, analyzed the city’s historical emptiness in a 1959 essay. His was an essay on Goodbye, Columbus, which a twenty-six-year-old Philip Roth published in 1959 and which prompted a flight of autobiographical reflection in Fiedler. Newark and the literary-historical sensibility are incompatible, Fiedler writes: It was at once depressing to live in a place which we came slowly to realize did not exist at all for the imagination. That Newark was nowhere, no one of us could doubt, though it was all most of us knew. What history the city possessed had been played out before our parents

Introduction

or grandparents were a part of it, and we did not even trouble to tell ourselves that we disbelieved it.4

The parents and grandparents do not themselves have a history. They melt into the posthistorical industrial city, while their children grow into a historical abyss: “Even as kids we felt how undefined, even characterless our native place was. . . . We did not know its characterlessness, perhaps, but we lived it just as we lived its ugliness. Later we would know, when it was time.” The abyss of history mandates an abyss of literature, all of which amounts to civic emptiness. With Newark of the 1940s and 1950s in mind, Fiedler points out that “Newark had no writer, and hence no myth to outlive its unambitious public buildings, its mean frame houses.” Nor does Goodbye, Columbus, which Fiedler read with appreciative astonishment, bring the city to life. Roth’s novella signals the decline, perhaps even the death, of Newark: “Even as the legendary city which Roth creates is looked back to at its moment of dying, so is the love which is proper to it [at its moment of dying].”5 In its arc of decline, Newark is as good a setting as any for modern literature, which thrives on unfortunate places. Contemporary writers may be more at home in the slum than in the elegant suburb or gentrifying neighborhood. With its postindustrial gloom, Newark is a natural metaphor for difficulty, bad luck, and existential misery. It is exquisite backdrop for a brooding antihero. It could be the basis of political polemic in a literary medium: bare description of the city’s downtown is a form of social criticism and an invitation to muckraking. Charles Bukowsky could have lived well in Newark and written lovingly about it, mirroring the despair of a troubled protagonist in the image of a city so resolutely broken. It is unremarkable, then, that Philip Roth, who grew up in Newark and who writes fiction firmly grounded in sociological fact, would write about his hometown, choosing it again and again as the setting for his novels. That he would write novels steeped in Newark history and steeped in the notion (contra Fiedler) that Newark is a historical city par excellence—more a city in history than a metaphor for modern society or the deteriorating modern soul—is entirely remarkable. In three novels, sometimes called the American trilogy—American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000)—Roth has produced what might more accurately

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be called the Newark trilogy. Through these three novels Roth has approached Newark’s history with maximum care. Newark is Roth’s vehicle for exploring American character in conjunction with American history, the intersection of character and history on a national scale, running from the 1930s to the 1990s. The city of Newark and the raw details of its unspectacular history are anything but incidental to the novels’ inner rhythms and central themes.6 ❊ The Newark trilogy does the unexpected. It re-creates the history of Newark on a grand scale, sometimes through direct narration and sometimes through the extended recollection of elderly characters, whose Newark stories are pieces in Roth’s elaborate historical mosaic. It is a literary venture in urbanism that retraces the textured localism of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. In an essay on Saul Bellow, Roth emphasizes the parallel literary relationships between author and place: Chicago, “that tangible, engrossing American place that was his [Bellow’s] to claim. . . . It’s with comparable tentativeness or wariness that Faulkner (the other of America’s two greatest twentieth-century novelist-realists) came to imaginative ownership of Lafayette County, Mississippi.” His wariness overcome, Faulkner “found—as did Bellow after taking his first impromptu geographical steps—the location to engender those human struggles which, in turn, could fire up his intensity and provoke that impassioned response to a place and its history which at times propels Faulkner’s sentences to the brink of unintelligibility and beyond.”7 For Roth, what one novel begins, another continues, as if Newark were a map that can never be fully drawn. Within this literary triptych, Newark details form a canopy of American history, in which the local is the national. Few of Roth’s readers can have firsthand knowledge of Newark’s streets and neighborhoods, which only makes Roth’s choice of setting more emphatic in its singularity. The Newark trilogy is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, an established figure in Roth’s fiction and the literary Columbus of Newark, New Jersey. Zuckerman is a native son of Newark, though not a writer inevitably attached to his hometown. Seemingly rootless and cosmopolitan, Zuckerman is an alert novelist sensitive to the captivating story, and the stories that happen to captivate him are those that take him

Introduction

back to Newark.8 Newark discovers him: Zuckerman returns, for example, to Newark for a high school reunion, meets a childhood acquaintance, hears the shocking story of another childhood acquaintance, and then he begins to write. The novel he writes—a novel within a novel, situated in the actual novel, American Pastoral—has the city of Newark as one of its protagonists, merging novel and city into one another. The city has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Its history, lovingly handled by Zuckerman/Roth, is alive with precise, dense, significant detail—visual detail, architectural detail, sociological detail, and “ethnic detail,” the details of race, ethnicity, and religion around which this American city coheres. Greil Marcus notes the “perfect, loving, furious detail” peculiar to the Newark trilogy.9 (Hermione Lee had observed “a charmed devotion to local [Newark] minutiae” in Goodbye, Columbus, Roth’s 1959 novella.)10 In I Married a Communist, Zuckerman returns to Newark, detailing a different family but the same territory, the same streets, the same milieu. In The Human Stain, Zuckerman lingers in New England for a deceptively long stretch of literary time, only to return yet again, not to the Jewish world of the previous two novels but to the world of an African American family living in East Orange, just outside Newark. Newark is the point from which all history radiates, the point of origin, the point to be escaped because it is the point of origin, and the point that marks the path from beginning to end, framing the enigma of the journey. History is what begins in New Jersey. In the Newark trilogy, history is not a benevolent force. It is violent, vindictive, unforgiving, and very strong. These novels were published in the placid Clinton years. Yet Roth, in his literary-historical vision, did not try to capture his immediate present. He did not write from its mood. Or his mood was European, and more Eastern European than Western. Ross Posnock argues that the “antiutopian skepticism [of Vaclav Havel and Milan Kundera] helped inspire his [Roth’s] own rejection of American pastoralism in the conclusion of The Counterlife in 1986 and has oriented his major novels ever since.”11 In the Newark trilogy, Roth wrote from Newark’s mood, which deviated from the benign national self-stereotype of the 1990s. Either the Clinton years as such failed to interest Roth, with the exception of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, or they failed to serve his literary purposes. The history that appealed to Roth was almost the opposite of local or national

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Introduction

history: it was twentieth-century history broadly construed, even if the Newark trilogy trades mostly in American facts. This “twentiethcentury paradigm” could have imposed an even harsher vision upon Roth. With the Newark trilogy, it was not the strenuous wisdom of Primo Levi, Czeslaw Milosz, Aharon Appelfeld, Bruno Schultz, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that Roth sought to transpose into American terms. Roth’s twentieth-century history stops short of gulag and Holo­ caust. Even The Plot against America, a post-Newark trilogy novel, stops short of gulag and Holocaust, although built upon the conceit of an America yielded up to anti-Semitic authoritarianism. Roth leaves Ausch­witz and Siberia to historians and to other writers. Or he sees the Holocaust and related cataclysms as impossible to address in words and therefore in literature. He has described the ­Holocaust as “a crime to which there is no adequate response, no grief, no compassion, no vengeance that is sufficient.”12 If true, then writers eager to capture the twentieth century in their literature face certain inherent limitations. Whatever these limitations are, the Newark trilogy outlines a thesis derived from twentieth-century European history. We are less the authors of history than history—in its Tolstoyan waves of chaos—is the author of our fate, the capricious master of our destiny, able to destroy and scatter and disperse, to cause suffering when it wishes and to leave injustice as mere injustice, unredeemed. American Pastoral evokes Milton and the Old Testament God, human destiny bound to chaos, to Jehovah’s wrath. I Married a Communist evokes the Shakespearean intimacy with historical upheaval and human mayhem. The Human Stain evokes Greek tragedy and the gods of Greek mythology, willing to upend human order for their own purposes and pleasure. Regardless of our literary taste and our philosophy of history, we are all in history’s grip, “the stranglehold of history that is one’s own time,” a stranglehold that can easily be murderous. History’s grip can also be subtle and brutally generous, bestowing illusions of stability and permanence on those who wish to believe in them. In I Married a Communist, two young people, Ramón Noguera and his fiancée, Rosalind, imbue a New York dinner party with the joy of their upcoming marriage. It is 1949 and they plan to live in Cuba. “The Nogueras were tobacco growers,” the narrative voice of Nathan Zuckerman informs us, “Ramón’s father having inherited from Ramón’s grandfather thousands of farm acres in a

Introduction

region called the Partido, land that would be inherited by Ramón, and in time by the children of Ramón and Rosalind.”13 Generational entitlement rolls calmly toward a disruption that will come, as narrator and reader know, when Batista’s Cuba is replaced by Castro’s Cuba. Yet even the narrative voice is convinced by the self-assurance of the young couple, warmly cradled in history’s good graces, planning for the future according to the logic of 1949. The narrative voice implies the naturalness of their optimism, of their unspoken faith in history’s smooth machinery and benevolence toward the ruling class. In America, illusions of stability and permanence, wrested from the historical whirlwind, can be especially enticing. America can cast “the spell of the dream of the unhaunted life,” in a phrase from Operation Shylock (1993).14 The American twentieth century was not the same as the twentieth century in Europe and Russia, the battlefields of world war and its countless atrocities as well as the domain of Roth’s ancestry and (non-American) literary purview. Even a unified, prosperous, democratic Berlin—to take one of many European examples—cannot hide the fact of its division and, behind this fact, the reality that Berlin was the city in which multiple tyrannies collided. In America, historically induced trauma was less spectacular, not something to divide and conquer the capital city. Twentieth-century American trauma played itself out on local and international planes, in Little Rock, Arkansas, and in Vietnam. Because of America’s atypical political continuity, because no wars were fought on American soil in the twentieth century, many Americans can pretend that history is charitable or simply absent. Or they can pretend that history is theirs to manipulate, since it is powerless to manipulate them. Roth is fascinated by this American possibility. Although there is much hard evidence for the American conviction that identity is plastic, a manipulable identity leads to the fallacy that history, too, is plastic. If one can become someone else, surely one can throw off unwanted history: the two actions are equivalent. Jay Gatz struggles to become Jay Gatsby; he succeeds in becoming Gatsby; the America of the 1920s offers good camouflage for such chameleons; and the Great Gatsby is not thwarted by history; he is thwarted by human smallness and snobbishness, including his own smallness and snobbishness. F. Scott Fitzgerald did not align history and individual destiny in The Great Gatsby, attuned as he was to the movement of both. Roth,

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who is more inclined to make this alignment, marvels at the space between history and destiny in the American imagination. In the Newark trilogy, the American imagination is embodied in particular characters and especially in the novels’ three heroes: Seymour “the Swede” Levov, Ira Ringold, and Coleman Silk. Each believes that history can be rearranged, and, on American soil, each conducts an experiment in the invisibility of history: visible man, invisible history. In the Newark trilogy, history and the city of Newark are interchangeable. Thus, the will to rearrange history is associated with the desire to leave Newark, almost as if, by leaving, one were emigrating from the Old World of Newark to the New World of another America, not completing but perpetuating the epic journey of immigrant grandparents. Each of the three heroes leaves Newark and is defined by the terms of his departure: their collective self-invention is made possible by leaving Newark. The Swede is so called because he looks Scandinavian, although he is Jewish. He leaves Newark for an affluent rural area of New Jersey, where he can sincerely be the Swede and where he must not be Newark’s Seymour Levov. Ira Ringold makes his way to Manhattan, where he works in radio and does Abraham Lincoln impersonations, a small-scale celebrity and a communist (in private), no less a masked man in splendid isolation from Newark than the Swede. Coleman Silk manages the greatest disappearing act of all. Born into a black family living outside Newark, he leaves behind everything, exploiting the magic of American culture, the presumed lightness or plasticity of American history, and emerges a white (Jewish) professor of classics at a New England college. Long before history starts to enact its revenge on these defectors from it, Roth is suggesting the folly of their ways. The folly of leaving has a certain grandeur to it, as in the greatness of the Great Gatsby, whose folly is Fitzgerald’s subject. Roth’s three heroes leave because Newark is the place of cardinal things, the place of fathers and mothers, of childhood and family background, the place that gives meaning to labels and imposes them upon those who might resist being labeled. The heaviness of Newark’s presence in these novels, the weight of urban detail woven into the narrative, the unavoidability of its many-layered past, is itself a statement about history. Cardinal things cannot be ignored or easily rearranged, and there is no recipe for extracting lightness from heaviness.

Introduction

History, an inanimate actor, takes on various guises when it closes even the ahistorical in its grip. In American Pastoral, history amounts to the 1960s, the decade’s radical movements that enter into a family’s life and detach father, mother, and daughter from a normalcy that they both cherish and hate. The breakup of a single family is reflected in Newark’s descent from a Golden Age of postwar immigrant striving to the rioting of the late 1960s and the city’s subsequent decline. History is unkind to family and city alike, forcing them to contend with the principle of disaster written in to some historical moments. In I Married a Communist, history comes in the form of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA). A change in the political atmosphere leads to the professional and personal crack-up of a once successful man. His defeat is a victory for others: it is history ignited, not by radical passions but by malice and low opportunism, galvanized by various political ideologies. In The Human Stain, history is more modest and not dominated by the left-wing extremes of the 1960s or the right-wing extremes of the 1950s. It is prosaic, almost farcically so, yet no less formidable in effect. An aging college professor tries to ignore the fad of political correctness and misreads the ethical codes of his college and his colleagues. He loses his job and social standing and is sent, like the other two heroes, from the heights of success to the margins of failure. Coleman is assaulted by external forces, “killed” by history and killed, literally, by a man who has lost his sanity in the Vietnam War. History, with its frightening inscrutable logic, punishes these three heroes by forcing great suffering upon them. Newark’s collapse, in the Newark trilogy, recalls the first city in European literature, Homer’s Troy, which is attacked and attacked until it is leveled. Simone Weil’s literary-historical essay on Homer, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” published in 1940, sheds light on Roth’s Newark trilogy, which opens in Newark circa 1940. What Weil observes about Homer’s Troy obtains for Roth’s Newark: “The whole of the Iliad lies under the shadow of the greatest calamity the human race can experience—the destruction of a city.” In his essay on Newark and Philip Roth, Leslie Fiedler had analogized Newark to Troy. The two cities are prone to destruction and accessible, through excavation, to literature. ­Literature—Homer’s or Roth’s—can unmake destruction. Fiedler wrote, in 1959, as if in anticipation of the Newark trilogy: “At best,

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our Newark would be in the long life of the city, multiple and squalid as Troy’s, the Newark before the Newark that had become a fact of literature; archaeologists would give us the proper number.”15 Were an American writer to take Los Angeles or New York and to picture its destruction, the result would be fantasy or science fiction. Herman Melville had to put Americans on the Pequod for the white whale to splinter their ship of state into wood chips. Roth has only to write about his hometown to achieve a similar effect. By writing about Newark, Roth could let the Iliad’s long, illustrative shadow fall on native ground, and by writing about Newark, he could bring the Pequod to shore. In the Newark trilogy, calamity is less mythic than historical. Roth renders moral change in precise detail, mirroring it in the biography of a young French professor, Delphine Roux, in The Human Stain. The workings of HCUA are sketched through distinct personalities in I Married a Communist, some of whom are actual historical figures. The radicalism of the 1960s is given a social context in American Pastoral, both within the mind of a radical girl and within the nation at large, deranged by a never-ending war. History’s medium, in the Newark trilogy, is vivid, carefully constructed detail rather than some shapeless, entirely unfathomable pressure. Abstract argument may suffice for historians, the author appears to say, but for those living in historical time there are only the unruly specificities, “the history that isn’t yet history,” data gradually being filtered out into historical patterns.16 The novelist can work with unruly specificities in ways that the historian, bound to existing evidence and to the analysis of evidence, cannot. The novelist has a larger range of narrative, imaginative, and lyrical options and less of a need to sort evidence into (causal) theories and paradigms. The historically minded novelist purchases this freedom with a scrupulous fidelity to fact, and difficult as it would be to speak of Roth as a realist writer, there is an implied verisimilitude in his novels, a possible realism via the imagination and an invented America conjured from the material of “actual” American history.17 The inspiration for The Plot against America was Roth’s reading of a historian’s memoir, of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950. Both the Swede and Coleman have real-life precedents.18 In a historical study based in Newark and in northern New Jersey, Lizabeth Cohen has written that “the departure of Jews from Newark gave Roth

Introduction

a transcendent subject for a lifetime of writing, and he, in turn, has brought an extraordinary literary incisiveness to Newark’s ethnic, class, and racial dispersal.”19 In the Newark trilogy, Roth’s history-through-literature has a generational impetus, and each of the three novels pivots along a crucial divide, between those who stay in Newark, the fathers and the siblings, and those who leave, some of the sons. Jay Gatz had to leave the Midwest in order to become Gatsby; the narrator of Moby-Dick must leave the island of Manhattan to become Ishmael, a named wanderer; Huckle­berry Finn first runs away from his father before traveling the great river and executing his final act of leaving, his decision to “light out for the Territory.”20 So, too, must these sons of Newark—the Swede, Ira, and Coleman—leave a city that cannot properly house their ambition. They have common ambitions, for money and power and the most desirable women, though for them these ambitions are too slight. Their most ferocious ambition is to live outside history, away from its confines, with which Newark is so thickly associated. To live in Newark is to live within the limits of Newark and according to the limiting dictates of the city’s social structure. For the two Jewish characters, the Swede and Ira, transcending history (leaving Newark) is desirable because it means transcending the circumstance of their Jewishness. The Swede’s nickname reflects a passion for assimilation, projected onto him by fellow Newark Jews. The American pastoral of his adulthood is sharply postethnic, defined not by blood and tradition but by wealth and a liberal ethos, achievement and tolerance reinforcing each other. Ira has a different fantasy, the urban pastoral of radical politics, which compels him to reject nationalism and religion as vestiges of a reactionary past, as the chauvinism and in-group madness that communism will eradicate. Ira’s wife, the actress Eve Frame, is a Jew living as a non-Jew, not out of communist conviction but because all is possible in Hollywood and Manhattan. Ostensibly a white man, Coleman cannot ever go back to Newark: doing so might expose the fraudulent premises of his new life. To leave Newark, he must reject his own family and deny his patrimony and heritage, a radicalization of the process at work with Ira and the Swede. Werner Sollors terms stories of passing, which is certainly Coleman’s story, “allegories of modernization that may speak to people who move toward new identifications

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and may experience anxieties about giving up old localities, homes, families, and belief systems.”21 In the Newark trilogy, these anxieties circle back to the city of Newark, where the old localities, homes, families, and belief systems are apparent and often burdensome. Each of the three protagonists, not just Coleman, participates in these allegories of modernization. The anxieties begin in a desire to leave old localities behind, and each installment of the Newark trilogy is a story of passing. All three protagonists are powerful men—physically, intellectually, personally—handsome men, men of the world, men who can command success in the fields of business, entertainment, and academia. The small step of leaving Newark is preliminary to their natural upward trajectory. Those who stay in Newark live differently. Their lives are less dramatic and less successful, smaller. The older generation, the fathers’ generation, cannot leave. Their challenge is less to remake an ordained identity, though they engage in some such remaking, than to do their best within the parameters that Newark has set for them. On the Jewish side, the fathers are the children of immigrants. The Swede’s father, Lou Levov, turns an immigrant’s job, his father’s job as a tanner, into Newark Maid, a successful glove company. Ira’s father leaves his sons the cautionary example of professional failure. Lou Levov is the most prominent father in the Newark trilogy, and it is not accidental that he, of all the characters, is the most closely connected to Newark, a lover of Newark, a knower of Newark, a historian of Newark, and, ultimately, a bereft native son, lamenting the loss of what had been. Because Coleman’s father is black, he is banned from owning Newark as Lou does. The patriarchal authority of Coleman’s father is grounded in education and racial pride; he takes his children to family reunions and assumes that his sons will attend Howard University. He is a follower of W. E. B. DuBois, an inhabitant of the talented tenth and not an enthusiastic citizen of Newark. Though the Silk and the Levov family histories are hardly identical, the similarity between their two patriarchs lies in their attachment to history. These fathers choose to live in history’s embrace: they don’t have any other choice. Of the next generation, two brothers and one sister remain in Newark. Ira’s brother, Murray, is the de facto narrator of I Married a Communist, his stability and virtue enhanced by his decision not to leave Newark, not to pursue a better future elsewhere, even in retire-

Introduction

ment, although his wife is killed in Newark in a random mugging. Coleman’s brother, Walter, becomes a high school superintendent in Newark, proponent of racial pride and a paragon of the community, as his father would have hoped. Their sister, Ernestine, narrates the last portion of The Human Stain, speaking out the evasive truth of Coleman’s life. Murray and Ernestine are historians, experts in family and city history, of the history that their brothers labor heroically to overcome and then to forget. The Swede, Ira, and Coleman are all punished by history. They are not punished more than others, more than those who do not leave historic Newark. Misfortune cuts a democratic figure in these novels, and staying in Newark is certainly no safer than leaving. The three heroes make their suffering worse, however, by their Gatsbyesque experiments in American identity. The Swede is not Swedish and not fully a resident of the wealthy area—Old Rimrock, New Jersey—or of the ­Revolutionary-era house where he settles his family, as far from Newark as he can get. Ira is genuinely a communist, but he pretends not to be, a faux proletarian living in a Greenwich Village townhouse. His marriage is based on dangerous identity games, as are the Swede’s and Coleman’s. Coleman must endure the circuitous irony that a “racist” comment he makes—a misconstrued question, for which he is vigorously persecuted—is pronounced by a black man deceiving his colleagues and friends as to who he is. All this aggregate dishonesty is a source of weakness, and when the crises come, as they must, an earned weakness grows more visible and hurtful. It is a weakness with a literary dimension. In remaking themselves, these high-flying protagonists have lost two things: a comfortable relationship to the truth and the power that comes from stories—childhood stories, family stories, neighborhood stories, city stories, stories that are the raw material of history and of a historical sensibility. An ethnic/racial dishonesty is debilitating for the Swede and Coleman, who have children and whose children are not Jewish and black, respectively, but post-Jewish or halfJewish, in the case of Merry Levov, and unaware of their inherited blackness in the case of the Silk children. The exodus from Newark exacts a literary cost, measured in the currency of imagination and feeling, the deepest source of perseverance. The baggage left in Newark was full of treasure, full of stories, which can do nothing to keep historical upheaval at bay. Stories can merely teach us to live with history,

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even to live in its grip, education that the Swede, Ira, and Coleman dismissed when they rushed out of Newark and into America, hungry for stories that would be entirely their own. ❊ As with Homer’s Odysseus, the Swede, Ira, and Coleman live through an era of devastation, but they lack one of Odysseus’s crucial powers. Odysseus can tell his story, and in the Odyssey he does so at length. He can also grieve openly about the story that most consumes him, the story of his comrades fallen at Troy. The elusive Odysseus must confront this story in countless forms before he can arrive back safely at the origin of his odyssey, his trauma undone. He is a hero who possesses a rare double skill, the ability to dissemble and assume disguises—“the man of twists and turns”—coupled with a capacity to speak honestly and eloquently about himself and his past. While a guest of Alcinous, king of the Phaecians, Odysseus chooses to confront his story by asking the bard Demodocus to sing it, telling him: “I respect you, Demo­ docus, more than any man alive. . . . How true to life, all too true . . . you sing the Achaeans’ fate / all they did and suffered, all they soldiered through.”22 When Demodocus sings the song of Troy, Odysseus weeps. His tears unfold an image of utter vulnerability:                tears, running down from his eyes to wet his cheeks . . . as a woman weeps, her arms flung round her darling husband, a man who fell in battle, fighting for town and townsmen, trying to beat the day of doom from home and children. Seeing the man go down, dying, gasping for breath, She clings for dear life, screams and shrills— but the victors, just behind her, digging spear-butts into her back and shoulders, drag her off in bondage, yoked to hard labor, pain, and the most heartbreaking torment wastes her cheeks. So from Odysseus’ eyes ran tears of heartbreak now.23

Odysseus’s heroic tears contain within them the full horror of war, associated with a woman’s suffering amid military carnage. The tears, the story, and the poet’s image are assimilated by a protagonist of the bard’s story. Alcinous, as he listens to Demodocus, cannot understand Odys-

Introduction

seus’s tears (he does not know who Odysseus is), and he tries to comfort Odysseus. His argument runs from grief to art, as if the Trojan War had been fought for the stories it will foster: “Tell me, / why do you weep and grieve so sorely when you hear / the fate of the Argives, hear the fall of Troy? / That is the gods’ work, spinning threads of death / through the lives of mortal men / and all to make a song for those to come. . . .” Both The Iliad and The Odyssey begin with a command to sing, starting the story by emphasizing or honoring the imperative of storytelling.24 Roth has written of his father as a Newark bard: “He’s the bard of Newark. That really rich Newark stuff isn’t my story—it’s his.”25 As a master storyteller, a twentieth-century Demodocus, the Swede’s father, Lou, has a strength that his son—a star athlete and, later, a respected businessman—does not have. Lou is a difficult man, a bit of a bully, lacking the intellectual’s sensitivity and moral imagination. He is authoritarian where his son is liberal, flexible, empathetic, and nowhere does Zuckerman/Roth seem to side with Lou’s authoritarianism and strictness. Yet Lou is the Newark trilogy’s most formidable character, a storyteller comparable to Murray Ringold, with a strength of character that follows from his storied life. The father’s stories haunt the son, coming to him at a moment of climactic grief. Shortly after having been reunited with his destitute, crazy daughter, the Swede recalls his father telling him and his brother “unbelievable stories about the Mulberry Street ‘tong wars’ of old.” The Swede’s recollection releases a cataract of Odysseus-like emotion, a reckoning with the loss, among other things, of stories. “Stories of old,” the Swede’s stream of consciousness continues. “There were no longer stories of old. There was nothing. There was a mattress, discolored and waterlogged, like a cartoon-strip drunk slumped against a pole. The pole still held up a sign telling you what corner you were on. And that’s all there was.”26 The Swede’s sign-less disorientation is literary or narrative as well as existential. It evolves from stories or, more precisely, from stories denied, repressed, forgotten, and untold. In an inversion of this motif, Coleman admits his true identity to his lover (Faunia Farley) after she has intuited it, and she is uninterested in his extraordinary story, in his hidden blackness. A man without anyone to listen to his stories, Coleman gives fragments of his story to Nathan Zuckerman for a posthumous telling of it. Ira ends his life in a hospital, unable to pass his story on until his brother, Murray,

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recounts it to Nathan in meticulous, agonizing detail, long after Ira has died. As with Lou Levov, ninety-year-old Murray’s stories are the source of his resilience. Lou Levov is not a fictionalized version of Roth’s own father, but Lou does have the strength-through-stories that Roth’s father cultivated, according to Roth’s 1991 memoir, Patrimony. Patrimony is a skeleton key to the Newark trilogy, especially in the connection it establishes between the Newark-bound father and the storyteller, a connection fundamental to the storytelling son. For Roth’s father, Newark stories were scripture, “his Deuteronomy, the history of his Israel . . . his sacred text.” The father, who worked in the insurance business, is clearly father to the writer Philip Roth and, in some indirect way, the voice behind the Newark trilogy. Because of his father’s storytelling Roth has described “mealtime being Scheherazade-time in our kitchen.”27 Recently diagnosed with a brain tumor, Roth’s father finds solace in the life-giving power of Newark stories: It was not a scene [of Newark] conducive to alleviating the gloom of three people on their way to consult with a brain surgeon, and yet the rest of the way to the hospital, my father forgot the encounter awaiting him there and, instead, reminisced in his random fashion about who had lived and worked where when he was a boy before the First World War and on these streets immigrant Jews and their families were doing what they could to survive and flourish.28

Immersion in history can battle against trauma or at least tame its power to terrify. The right command of history encourages perseverance. Roth describes his father’s “mind, in its habitual way, working to detach him from the agonizing isolation of a man at the edge of oblivion and to connect his brain tumor to a larger history, to place his suffering in a context where he was no longer someone alone with an affliction peculiarly and horribly his own but a member of a clan whose trials he knew and accepted and had no choice but to share.”29 Life, for Roth’s father, has two poles, of which one is history and the other isolation. Such history is not philosophical or academic, not an analytical understanding of how change works or a command of the great books written about the past. History is a collection of stories, larger than the individual but still highly personal in nature and tone, and history

Introduction

is inseparable from voice, from the storyteller’s captivating, idiomatic, artistic and local voice. Living close to history can rein in isolation, and this can mean living close to Newark. For Roth’s father, the rudiments of soul and self lie in the Newark streets, in impoverished, devastated Newark no less than in the better-off Newark of his younger years. In Patrimony, Roth recounts a phone conversation about his father: “I had to drive him across poor, poor, poor old Newark. He knows every street corner. Where the buildings are destroyed, he remembers the buildings that were there. You mustn’t forget anything—that’s the inscription on his coat of arms. To be alive, to him, is to be made of memory—to him if a man’s not made of memory, he’s made of nothing.” Alan Cooper calls the injunction to remember “the covenant, the patrimony [that] Roth derives from a century of Jewish-American history.”30 The Newark father has what the son, who left Newark as a teenager, does not have, a context for his suffering that begins and ends in Newark history. “I was not so lucky,” Roth writes of himself, as he watches his father’s illness advance. “I couldn’t find any context to diminish my forebodings.” Yet the father’s voice, the narrative fervor behind his Deuteronomy, is passed on from father to son. It is small consolation for the son who must watch his father die and an invaluable gift to the novelist who can invent his own corpus of Newark stories, which Roth had been doing long before his father’s illness. From the same phone conversation in Patrimony: “He [my father] taught me [Philip Roth] the vernacular. He was the vernacular, unpoetic and expressive and point-blank, with all the vernacular’s glaring limitations and all its durable force.”31 Much of  the Newark trilogy, and not only the dialogue, is written in this vernacular, taught to the literary son by his literate, Newark-educated father. Newark stories and Deuteronomy are harmoniously paired. Voice and story—history given voice in literature—are divinely paired. In the last few elegiac paragraphs of I Married a Communist, Zuckerman/Roth rhapsodizes about the union of voice and ear, achieved through story: “voices from the void controlling everything within, the convolutions of a story floating on air and into the ear so that the drama is perceived well behind the eyes, the cup that is the cranium a cup transformed into a limitless globe of a stage, containing fellow creatures whole.”32 The stories themselves are anything but divine, a circumstance that in-

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forms Roth’s preferred notion of literature, his belief that storytelling can be divine, while the stories traveling from voice to ear are obscenely human. Few writers are closer to the profane and vulgar tendencies of literary art than Roth. Stories are profane and vulgar because life is profane and vulgar, Roth implies, while storytelling itself participates in “the godlikeness of having an ear! Is it not at least a semidivine phenomenon to be hurled into the innermost wrongness of a human existence by virtue of nothing more than sitting in the dark, listening to what is said?”33 In Roth’s 1974 novel, My Life as a Man, layers of storytelling are peeled back to reveal mirrored glimpses of the storyteller, not Roth but the fictional character Peter Tarnopol. Tarnopol has created two semi­ fictionalized versions of his own marital crisis, one in the comic vein and another that is sober and grim. Just when separate stories start to multiply into incoherence, when one unreliable narrator seems to be the product of another narrator, equally unreliable, with all the applicable postmodern implications, Tarnopol circles back to the brute urgency of storytelling, as if to remind himself, a professional novelist, what literature truly is. His simple (and almost sexually) repetitive diction underscores the urgency he feels: “All I can do with my story is tell it. And tell it. And tell it. And that’s the truth.” The obsessive characters in Roth’s fiction—Tarnopol and Portnoy, for example—are obsessive storytellers. The more balanced characters—Nathan Zuckerman, E. I. Lonoff, or the Philip Roth of Operation Shylock—tell and listen. As the Philip Roth of Operation Shylock notes, “I sit and listen as if to do so is my fate. In the face of a story, any story, I sit captivated. Either I am listening to them or I am telling them. Everything originates there.”34 If Roth is polemicizing against anything in the Newark trilogy, it is against a widening inattention to language and to stories, the decline of the well-told story in American life, which contributes to civic decline. Or perhaps it is the function of civic decline, of a distracted polity’s lack of interest in stories and/or in literature. “Once the human tragedy has been completed,” notes Murray Ringold, a high school English teacher, “it gets turned over to the journalists to banalize into entertainment.” Ernestine Silk laments that “here in America, as far as I can see, it’s getting more foolish by the hour.” And Nathan Zuckerman refers—in 1998—to “what is far and away the dumbest generation in American history.”35 Our divine receptivity to stories, to the cosmic mysteries of “what is

Introduction

said,” is to be fiercely defended. The dramatization of storytelling, at least in the Newark trilogy, is not a postmodern game, as it may be in The Counterlife or Operation Shylock. The Newark trilogy is not an exploration of epistemology or a meditation on the perplexities of reading. It carries no philosophical message about the impossibilities of authorship and the futility of rational knowing. The Newark trilogy is motivated by something much more basic. It sanctifies the rite of storytelling in order to rescue the human tragedy from media-driven stupidity and from “the creeping trivialization of everything,” in Roth’s own nonfiction words, aimed at American culture and not at the Newark trilogy.36 It sanctifies the rite of storytelling for literary, not philosophical, reasons. The significance of storytelling is emphasized in the Newark trilogy by the personified storyteller, the novelist within the novels, Nathan Zuckerman. He is at the center of four novellas and one novel prior to the Newark trilogy: The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), The Prague Orgy (1985), and The Counterlife (1986). He is the product of novelist Peter Tarnopol’s imagination in My Life as a Man (1974); he is invited to comment on Roth’s autobiography, The Facts (1988); and Zuckerman bids farewell to author and readers in a final novella, Exit Ghost (2007). Zuckerman grows up in Newark and achieves celebrity with a novel titled ­Carnofsky, which makes him rich and enables him to live well in Manhattan. His writing life began with the first of his reports on life in New Jersey. “In 1666 Governor Carteret provided an interpreter for Robert Treat to meet with a representative of Oraton, the aged chief of the Hackensacks. Robert Treat wanted Oraton to know that the white settlers wished only peace.” Began at ten with Newark’s Robert Treat and the euphonious elegance of interpreter and representative, ended with Newark’s Gilbert Carnofsky and the blunt monosyllables cock and cunt. Such was the Hackensack up which the writer had paddled.37

This journey, from childhood respectability to adult vulgarity and from Newark to New York, is also a journey toward literary crisis. ­Carnofsky makes Zuckerman famous, and its reception makes him miserable, a writer without a real audience and, increasingly, a writer without a subject. What Zuckerman gradually loses is the city of Newark. The second

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section of The Anatomy Lesson is titled “Gone.” Jewish Newark has become African American Newark, Newark “occupied now by an alien tribe,” as Zuckerman sees it in the mid-1970s. After Zuckerman’s parents have died, and after the Jews have left Newark, Zuckerman is “without a father and a mother and a homeland.” This means that “he was no longer a novelist.”38 In The Prague Orgy and The Counterlife, Zuckerman compensates for the loss of Newark by traveling in search of stories to Eastern Europe, to Israel, and to England; but it is only with his rigorous return to Newark, in the domain of fiction, that Zuckerman is restored to his full creativity and energy, to the fullest creativity and energy of his fitful novelistic career.39 The personified author of the Newark trilogy lives far from Newark. Like the trilogy’s three heroes, Nathan lives outside history, though not in the heroic mode, without any drama and without any dishonesty. He lives in western Massachusetts, surrounded by the mute testimony of the natural world. After decades of self-absorption, he no longer tells stories about himself: he knows he is a slight character, facing up to the oncoming debilities of old age, committed to art and removed from people. In the meta-scenarios of these three novels, Nathan must first listen, then imagine, then create. He must hear the story of Newark, of Newark left, and, finally, of a Newark son caught in history’s grip. With the Swede, the listening is very quick. The Swede’s brother tells Nathan of a family tragedy in a few terse sentences. These are the foundation of the novel. Coleman’s sister, Ernestine, supplies a somewhat longer narrative of Coleman’s childhood and of his awesome decision to live as a white man; the rest is imagined by Nathan. In I Married a Communist, Ira’s brother, Murray, sits with Nathan for several evenings, recounting the past to this impressionable novelist, who then dutifully retains Murray’s voice, word for word, in a literary enterprise with two narrators. Nathan’s work is an extended effort to undo the solitary despair of the Swede, Ira, and Coleman and to reunite individual destiny with “stories of old.” Greil Marcus notes Zuckerman’s “obligation to connect the personal drama to the nation’s drama, so that the story becomes at once specific and shared, perverse and common, the outcast and insider.”40 One could say of Nathan Zuckerman what one can say of Lou Levov or of Roth’s own father. The power of Zuckerman’s narrative voice emanates from the city of Newark and its infinity of stories.

Introduction

❊ In the Newark trilogy, the proximity of city to nation, and of story to history, could imply that Roth is a political novelist, but he is not, at least not in the grand tradition of political novelists—of Dickens, Zola, Dostoevsky, Orwell, Ayn Rand, Richard Wright, Aleksandr ­Solzhenitsyn, Nadine Gordimer, or Günter Grass. Roth makes no proposals, there is nothing of the petition in his fiction, his characters are rarely obsessed with political questions, and his heroes and villains can appear in many places on the political spectrum. “I am not out to make fiction into a political statement,” Roth said plainly in a 2007 interview.41 It is comparably tempting to say that Roth is a writer of the private self, pre­occupied with the small worlds of erotic and family life, and in a 1972 essay the literary critic Irving Howe attacked Roth for the narrowness of his social and historical vision. The subject of Howe’s polemic was Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth’s 1969 succès de scandale, a novel set in Newark, New York City, and Israel. At its center is the Patimkin family, vehicles for the author’s “passing of adverse judgment,” Howe writes, “but their [the Patimkins’] history is not allowed to emerge so as to make them understandable as human beings. Their vulgarity is put on blazing display but little or nothing that might complicate that vulgarity is shown: little of the weight of their past, whether sustaining or sentimental . . . nothing of that fearful self-consciousness which the events of the mid-twentieth-century thrust upon the Patimkins of this world.”42 The novelist who was without a political purpose would likely be blind to history, and vice versa. Had Roth cared more about politics, Howe seemed to be saying, he would not have missed “the events of the mid-twentieth-century” that were felt in Newark, New Jersey, as they were everywhere else. Author of Politics and the Novel, a study of political zeal in modern literature, Howe saw Roth as a harbinger of literary self-indulgence, the other side of political indifference. In Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth might be finishing off the oppressive bourgeois 1950s with an invitation to the swinging 1960s, bypassing political-historical seriousness from start to finish.43 Howe’s fears were misguided. The “weight of the past” came to bear more deeply on Roth’s imagination as he grew older, or this weight became more tangible. Roth captured the transition in My Life as a Man, a novel of revolving erotic and psychological complication

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that makes way, at the very end, for historical consciousness. It is a partial and parallel consciousness, not an evocation of history’s grip but an acknowledgment of history’s presence. Tarnopol writes of a new obligation circa 1963: As I begin to approach the conclusion of my story, I should point out that all the while Maureen and I were locked in this bruising, painful combat . . . the newspapers and nightly television news began to depict an increasingly chaotic America and to bring news of bitter struggles for freedom and power which made my personal difficulties with alimony payments and inflexible divorce laws appear by comparison to be inconsequential.

In this novel, history suddenly grows stronger. It can thrust itself into consciousness, but it is still weaker than Tarnopol’s acrimonious divorce. “I watched the footage from Selma and Saigon and Santo Domingo,” he writes; “I told myself that that was awful, suffering that could not be borne . . . all of which changed nothing between my wife and me.”44 The emphasis here is on watching, on spectacle, on news­papers and television as conduits of history. Selma is far from New York; Saigon and Santo Domingo are farther still. Precisely because history is observed, rather than experienced directly, it cannot really compare with marital strife. Nevertheless, a corner is being turned with My Life as a Man. Roth is en route to the Newark trilogy and its exacting norms of historical experience. Like Roth, the younger Zuckerman could be seen by others as resistant to history. In The Counterlife, Zuckerman is confronted by his brother, Henry, who has left America for Israel: “All you see is escaping Momma, escaping Poppa—why don’t you see what I’ve escaped into? Everybody escapes—our grandparents came to America, were they escaping their mother and fathers? They were escaping history! Here [in Israel] they’re making history! There’s a world outside the Oedipal swamp, Nathan.” In The Anatomy Lesson, Zuckerman, undone as a writer by the banality of American culture, fantasizes about a “literature on which the fate of a culture hinges, writing at the very heart of the upheaval.”45 He has Eastern Europe, not America, in mind. A hint of Irving Howe’s voice, circa 1972, can be heard in Roth’s ­Indignation (2008). The novel has a Jewish family in Newark at its core,

Introduction

each of its members afraid of historical crisis, as if by genetic predisposition. The novel itself starts with a reference to the Korean War, in which its protagonist (Marcus Mesner) will die and with “the war news, which I [Marcus] read obsessively from the moment I understood what might befall me if the conflict continued seesawing back and forth with neither side able to claim victory.” Marcus studies at Winesburg College, in Sherwood Anderson’s peaceful Midwest, and the domain of Brenda Patimkin’s basketball-loving brother in Goodbye, Columbus. A snowstorm and panty raid issue in unexpected violence, and this leads the college president to a diatribe on history, a variation upon the theme of history’s insatiable grip: Beyond your dormitories, a world is on fire and you are kindled by underwear. Beyond your fraternities, history unfolds daily—warfare, bombings, wholesale slaughter, and you are oblivious of it all. Well, you won’t be for long! You can be as stupid as you like, you can give every sign, as you did here on Friday night, of passionately wanting to be stupid, but history will catch you in the end. Because history is not the background—history is the stage! And you are on the stage!46

The president inveighs against his students and their “barbaric pursuit of thoughtless fun.” In context, it is the thoughtless fun of the 1950s, but it could just as well be the thoughtless fun associated with the mythic 1960s and with its poorly matched icon, the author of Portnoy’s Complaint, which Irving Howe had read as a literary panty raid. The concluding historical note, in Indignation, illustrates Winesburg’s own lack of immunity to history, a provocatively midwestern lack of immunity: “In 1971 the social upheaval and transformations and protests of the turbulent decade of 1960s reached even hidebound apolitical Winesburg.”47 Thus, a historicizing line extends from My Life as a Man to the Newark trilogy and beyond. A gradually intensifying engagement with the past drew Roth toward politics without making him a political writer. Instead, it solidified his status as a civic novelist, a writer with a strong sense of community and an interrelated reluctance to write partisan literature.48 His community had grown from the Weequahic neighborhood to Newark to America’s Jewish community to the nation at large. Roth has written, in retrospect, about the Jewish community’s instructive outrage with his early writing. If he disagreed with the commu-

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nity’s arguments, he benefited from its communal response: “It yanked me, screaming, out of the classroom; all of one’s readers, it turned out, weren’t New Critics sitting on their cans at Kenyon. Some people out there took what one wrote to heart . . . and wasn’t that as it should be?”49 Roth has since acquired a national and international community of readers, though Newark has remained his focus, the civic center of his literary imagination and the pivot point between the Jewish community and a national readership. “Ever since Goodbye, Columbus,” he observed in a 2001 interview, I’ve been drawn to depicting the impact of place on American lives. Portnoy’s Complaint is very much the raw response to a way of life that was specific to his American place during his childhood in the 1930s and 1940s. The link between the individual and his historic moment may be more focused in the recent [Newark] trilogy, but the interest was there from the start.50

Goodbye, Columbus, a novella set in Newark—whose author was already off in Chicago studying Henry James—was only a tentative first step. “I had thrown Newark away, really, in Goodbye, Columbus,” Roth later admitted. “I simply didn’t appreciate what it was I had there, and in fact I had blurred the edges rather deliberately. But 10 years later [in 1969], these real places I had known so well as a boy—the city, the high school, the neighborhood—struck me suddenly as a gift bestowed by the muse (who doesn’t bestow that many gifts).”51 Roth is civic in his commitment to national history and to writing novels that conform to the curve of national history, chronicling “the mind of one’s country” and the “we that is inescapable.”52 Lodged in Newark, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain are genuinely an American trilogy, even “a patriotic literary project,” as Greil Marcus has put it.53 They are a tapestry of twentieth-­ century US history, in which the Great Depression, the Second World War, McCarthyism, 1960s radicalism, and the late twentieth-century pageant are threaded into the smaller stories of fictional characters. These novels are all the more civic for not being overtly political. The advocacy of the engagé novelist would disrupt the civic ambitions Roth holds for his fiction, the civic ambitions he used to compose the ­Newark trilogy. The civic novelist writes to the nation, for the nation, of the na-

Introduction

tion—and not for a single party or movement within the nation. In an essay on political symbolism in Moby-Dick, Alan Heimert has written that its “narrative sequences . . . follow closely a pattern conformable to the reigning symbolism of politics.”54 Substitute ­twentieth-century history for the word “politics” in this statement and the Newark trilogy suddenly resembles Moby-Dick, as in so many ways it does. The Newark trilogy hews closely to an existing historical pattern, and as Lyndon Johnson noted in 1966, the year of Newark’s three hundredth anniversary, “the story of America is Newark’s story.”55 Johnson’s thesis has helped Roth operate as a civic novelist. Roth’s commitment to the civic function of literature appears (in negative) in his literary criticism, in his Irving Howe–like impatience with the solipsism of contemporary writers. A drawback of modern literature, Roth contends, is “the writer’s loss of community—of what is outside himself—as subject,” when “to a writer the community is, properly, both subject and audience.” Roth’s community is both American and Jewish, and, in his view, he has only benefited from belonging to both groups: “I find myself in the historic predicament of being Jewish. Who could ask for more?” In a 1991 New York Times interview titled “To Newark, with Love, Philip Roth,” Roth is quoted describing his childhood Newark community as a set of connections ordering his fiction: “‘It was great,’ he says, ‘It was fun. That was the way it was. You had these circles of allegiance: the house, the street, the school, the neighborhood, the city, the state, the country. They were multiple allegiances, and they were all felt.’”56 The word “civic” can refer to a nation or a city. As a novelist of Newark, Roth is a civic novelist twice-over, Newark being the point at which nation and city meet. In a 2004 interview, Roth explained that Newark “has come to represent for me, I suppose, modern times in America, and the fate of Newark has been the fate of many other cities . . . tremendously productive industrial towns, had a hardworking, fully employed working class . . . the city worked, these cities worked. And the people worked in a different sense. And all that’s been destroyed.” Newark’s destruction kept Roth’s eyes focused on his hometown. From the same interview: “The riots of the late sixties in Newark just ended the real life of the city. . . . And I went—over the years I began to go back to visit by myself, walk around. When it became too dangerous to walk by myself

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I’d go with somebody, and I was—as I say, I was mesmerized by the destruction. . . . I’m mesmerized by the change in my own lifetime and trying to depict it; I’m just trying to resurrect it in different stages.” The next sentence is the apogee of these civic sentiments: “I think there may be something of some interest there [in the literary resurrection of Newark] for other Americans,” not American readers but Americans as such.57 The Newark writer is, at heart, a citizen among citizens, and American citizens are invited to read Roth in this literary-political context. Roth had already tied these themes together—books, the destruction of a city, citizenship and civic destiny—in a 1969 essay for the New York Times, written on behalf of the Newark Public Library. It was in this building that Roth had become a reader of books, first encountering the public purposes of reading and, one step removed, of writing. In the Newark Public Library, a book was not merely a book but “a book with a local lineage of its own, a family tree of readers to which one’s name had now been added.” Roth’s working-class family did not own many books, so “it was good to know that solely by virtue of my municipal citizenship I had access to any book I wanted from that grandly austere building downtown on Washington Street . . . no less satisfying was the idea of communal ownership, property held in common for the common good.” The Newark Public Library is also a notable location in Goodbye, Columbus, Neil Klugman’s place of work and the sanctuary of learning where a poor black boy is able to study art. Writing this op-ed in the wake of the Newark riots, Roth emphasizes the civic value of the public library: “There is, in fact, probably little that could be more essential to the development and sanity of the thoughtful and ambitious young than access to these books.” To shut down the public library would be to capitulate to an act of violence akin to the riots themselves. Therefore, Newark must “calculate the frustration, cynicism, and rage that this insult [shutting down the library] must inevitably generate, and . . . imagine what shutting down its libraries may cost the community in the end.”58 Roth the American citizen is open to cosmopolitan—essentially European—influences, but his literature begins and ends in America, a highly self-conscious reality. “Most writers I know live far from where they began,” Roth has said in a 1983 interview, “deliberately mind you— but when you consider Bellow or Faulkner, you wonder if there isn’t a

Introduction

good case to be made for staying put.” In addition to the solipsism of contemporary fiction, its cosmopolitanism can be a liability. In a 1981 interview with the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, and ­titled “The Ghosts of Philip Roth,” Roth located Newark in the grid of American history, a city “like any number of American industrial cities that had been heavily settled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by waves of immigration from Germany, Ireland, Italy, Eastern Europe, and Russia.” Newark may be generically American, but it is not a generic city in Roth’s fiction, because Roth’s fiction is national in its sources and audience and because Roth is an American writer. In the same interview, Roth declared that “America has the only literary audience that I can ever imagine taking any sustained pleasure in my fiction. America is the place I know best in the world. It’s the only place I know in the world. My consciousness and my language were shaped by America.” Consciousness and language create the writer, whose vocation, according to Roth, is more innately national than many ­others: “I’m an American writer in ways that a plumber isn’t an American plumber or a miner an American miner or a cardiologist an American cardiologist. Rather, what the heart is to the cardiologist, the coal to the miner, the kitchen sink to the plumber, America is to me.”59 In the Newark trilogy, American history is Roth’s subject and object. In and of itself, history has no logic in Roth’s reckoning with it. Like the white whale in Moby-Dick, history can be described, but it cannot be understood. It is the stories told about history that matter, the words found to narrate our living in history. What nature is to Melville, history is to Roth, the twentieth century proof enough that history will mock our efforts to master it, to evade its grip, or to apply our keys to its locks. The creativity of history’s grip is greater even than the creativity of novelists. “The much-praised transfigurations concocted by Franz Kafka pale beside the unthinkable metamorphoses perpetrated by the Third Reich,” Roth writes in Operation Shylock. History’s transformations and murderous storms come and go, whether they are national storms, international storms, or the small clouds of historically charged turbulence that pass over or through the lives of individuals. There is no way to stop these storms, the obvious axiom of a century, the twentieth, “that had virtually reversed human destiny,” words from Operation Shylock.60 Newark’s crises, thus, are real without being unrepresentative,

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neither blandly mainstream nor un-American. The story of Newark is America’s story: “Newark’s saga,” Brad Tuttle writes, “reflects the rollercoaster ride of Everycity, U.S.A., only with a steeper rise, sharper turns, and a much more chaotic plunge.”61 Newark is not a legendary site of twentieth-century catastrophe, and its self-destruction is modest by comparison with the twentieth century’s worst. Newark has even survived its bleakest period. Still, its history does not belong to a fortunate continent, isolated from suffering and chaos by its long-standing liberalism or by some stroke of geographic good luck. Newark participates in history—American history, world history—and history has shown its libido for destruction in Newark, claiming, when it wishes, the lives of those who live there and of those who try to leave.

O n e

Newark And so to the king himself all Ithaca looked strange . . . the winding beaten paths, the coves where ships can ride, the steep rock face of the cliffs and the tall leafy trees. He sprang to his feet and, scanning his own native country, groaned, slapped his thighs with his flat palms and Odysseus cried in anguish: “Man of misery, whose land have I lit on now? What are they here—violent, savage, lawless? or friendly to strangers, god-fearing men? Where can I take this heap of treasure now? and where in the world do I wander off myself?” The Odyssey, Book 13

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. In the trilogy’s grammar, Newark is the subject of the sentence, and the trilogy’s protagonists—the Swede, Ira, and Coleman—are its direct objects, set in motion by a moving city. For those intent on leaving Newark, as these three heroes are, it is an easy enough place to leave, more Sherwood Anderson’s or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Midwest, which can be left, than Faulkner’s Mississippi or Hawthorne’s New England, which cannot. Those who stay in Newark must contend with the demise of their city and live in an Atlantis not fully sunk beneath the water. Newark disappears and its presence is ubiquitous. In keeping with its riddle, the city reappears (often uninvited) in the psychic landscape of its many children, far away from New Jersey as they may be. Newark is the unchanging terrain of childhood, and it resembles the Old World topography that marked immigrants as immigrants, telling them and others who they were, leaving imprinted upon them the quirks of speech and manner, the communal memory, the moral and religious passions that made them Irish American or Jewish American or Italian American. Newark’s power is strongest in those

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areas of life where memory matters most, but the remembered city is at odds with the city one can visit, youth and adulthood separated by an abyss of urban change. The remembered city is the lost city, and the lost city is the spur to memory in the novels, if not for all the characters in them. By virtue of its impermanence, Newark is an elusive hometown and all the more unforgettable for being so elusive. Founded in 1666, Newark is among America’s oldest cities. Its original name entails the usual obscurity: it may refer to Newark-on-Trent, a small English town, or it may signify “New Ark” or “New Work,” since the city was founded by Puritans from Connecticut who were seeking a new beginning on new soil.1 It is a city bound up with newness of some kind. If little of great note happened in Newark, it was never isolated from colonial or from national history.2 In the seventeenth century, the city was a site of conflict when the Puritan founders were unable to guarantee religious homogeneity and rival factions fought with one another. During the Revolutionary War, Newark was home to Loyalists and Revolutionaries and to the tensions among them. In the War of 1812, residents of Newark feared British conquest, which came to New York in the North and to Washington, DC, in the South. In 1815, Seth Boyden arrived in Newark, an entrepreneur who began the city’s leap into the twentieth century. His leather-making business, a business associated with the city of Newark and central to American Pastoral, foreshadowed later industrial developments. An overall expansion of commerce transformed Newark from a provincial town, between Philadelphia and New York, into a modern metropolis. An anonymous early nineteenth-­century letter to a Newark newspaper described the changing city; the letter writer had left Newark in 1819 and returned in 1834. “The numerous streets, spires and wharves, proclaim that the population and commerce have spread further and wider, and the hum of business declares that the march of improvements has not yet ceased,” observed the letter’s author. This is nineteenth-century boilerplate interrupted by a sudden note of sadness: “With all these [changes] I do not feel so much gratified as if I had found it in the same condition as I left. . . . I cannot realize it as my home . . . every face I meet is a stranger.”3 Participation characterizes Newark’s nineteenth-century history. Newarkers “were heavily represented” in the settlement of the West; some two hundred Newarkers joined in the gold rush of 1848–1849;

Newark

Newark did its bit in the Civil War; the financial panics of 1857 and 1873 wreaked havoc in Newark. Most of all, Newark participated in the industrial age, connected to points west by the Morris Canal, to the larger world by central railroad lines and by direct access to the Atlantic Ocean, not to mention its proximity to New York City. “Arguably no other U.S. city was so closely associated with industry and manufacturing,” Brad Tuttle writes.4 The growth of industry invited immigrants, Germans and Irish first, followed by Italians, Jews, and blacks, who migrated to Newark from the South. By 1917, approximately thirty thousand blacks were living in Newark, mostly from Georgia and Alabama. “It seems impossible that a Negro is left in Dothan, Alabama,” a Newark social worker observed in the 1960s. Between 1880 and 1910, roughly two hundred thousand immigrants arrived in Newark from Europe.5 In the words of Philip Roth: As soon as they [recently arrived immigrants in Newark and in other industrial American cities] could climb out of the slums where most of them began in America, more or less penniless, the immigrants formed neighborhoods within the cities where they could have the comfort and security of the familiar while undergoing the arduous transformations of a new way of life. These neighborhoods became rivalrous, competing, somewhat xenophobic subcultures within the city.6

For European immigrants the general trajectory was toward assimilation, “the arduous transformations of a new way of life.” For Newark’s black residents, the barriers of exclusion were radically higher; transformation was more impossible than arduous. If anything, multicultural Newark—in one of the few Northern states that voted against Abraham Lincoln in 1860—harbored a virulent brand of racism. Newark was no ethereal Concord, Massachusetts. “Hard-working, coarse-grained, bribe-ridden, semi-xenophobic Irish-Italian-German-Slavic-Jewish-­ Negro Newark”—a phrase from Roth’s novel Indignation—participated in a fuller and less beautiful image of American nationhood.7 Newark’s twentieth-century rise and fall were vertiginous. The first four decades were scarred by the Great Depression and the Second World War, but they also witnessed monumental industrial and economic efforts, the construction of an Irish-Italian-German-Slavic-­ Jewish-Negro metropolis. If “Newark was the great American enthu-

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siast of the Industrial Revolution,” in Brad Tuttle’s words, the fruits of this revolution were there to be enjoyed in the 1910s and 1920s, even in the 1930s, which was not Newark’s worst decade. The origins of Newark’s decline are not transparent. In the 1920s, “rich Newark families had begun fleeing the city in droves,” Tuttle writes. Civic corruption jeopardized the city’s manufacturing base before World War II, and “about a hundred thousand Newarkers—more than one quarter of the population—left the city in the 1950s,” Tuttle continues. Suburbanization, sped up by racial tension and by racism, drained the city center of its tax base, leaving downtown Newark poor, black, and dramatically untended by government services. On July 12, 1967, terrible riots erupted in Newark, and every negative trend that had caused the riots intensified in their wake, as the city became nationally synonymous with white flight and black poverty. In the 1970s and 1980s, Newark was “the epitome of a ghetto,” Tuttle concludes.8 The city’s heritage of corruption had not diminished, nor would it until the election of Corey Booker in 2006, after which a new chapter in Newark history began. Yet the horrific images were the indelible ones. A 1975 Harper’s article about Newark was titled “The Worst American City,” a lasting honorific. ❊ Kaleidoscopically presented in the Newark trilogy, Newark’s twentiethcentury history divides into four eras: the 1920s and 1930s; the 1940s and 1950s; the 1960s; and the late twentieth century. The first is hazy prehistory, Newark’s Paleolithic era. The odd detail from this time surfaces now and then in the Newark trilogy but without much context or coherence. In The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman describes “our own largely Americanized clan, moneyless immigrant shopkeepers to begin with, who’d carried on a shtetl life ten minutes’ walk from the pillared banks and gargoyled insurance cathedrals of downtown Newark . . . our pious, unknown ancestors, whose Galician tribulations had been only a little less foreign to me, while growing up securely in New Jersey, than Abraham’s in the land of Canaan.”9 If these ancestors populate a Newark Book of Genesis, Europe is unknown and the adjective “Americanized” is merely a prelude to what Newark, with its neoclassical pillars and pseudogothic towers, will do to the Zuckerman family, obliterating the shtetl and putting America firmly in its place. This early era is a time

Newark

when the various families—Levov, Ringold, and Silk—are still arriving in the city. It is the time, dominated by the Great Depression, when the fathers were becoming fathers, leaving their parents to found families of their own, and for the sons born in the 1930s it is inevitably a mythic period. It is comparable to history without a documentary record. The second era is awash in detail, in meaning, in the intensity of sensual cognition that only children possess. Here Roth draws upon his own Newark childhood and turns it into the stuff of literature. Newark of the 1930s and 1940s, buzzing with a child’s vitality of perception, is a city dominated by family and then by neighborhood, a mosaic of American variety. The mosaic dictates that black and Jewish narratives have little in common with each other. The black narrative, the Silk narrative in The Human Stain, shows the extent of American racism in these years, pushed against by a talented, enterprising black family. The Jewish narrative has the aura of a Golden Age, anti-Semitism falling away, opportunity knocking amid the national trial of World War II. When Zuckerman describes World War II–era Newark in an undelivered high school reunion speech, in American Pastoral, he recalls that “our class started high school six months after the unconditional surrender of the Japanese, during the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history. And the upsurge of energy was contagious . . . the clock of history reset and a whole people’s aims limited no longer by the past.” The clock of history is reset in the minds of jubilant Americans, an imagined circumstance and no statement of generic twentiethcentury fact. As Nathan continues, “There was the neighborhood, the communal determination that we, the children, should escape poverty, ignorance, disease, social injury and intimidation—escape, above all, insignificance.” Appropriate to a Golden Age, Newark’s midcentury is imbued with a certain conservatism, “the pervasive rectitude of the era, whose taboos we’d taken between our teeth at birth.”10 Golden Age Newark materializes at the end of Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth’s putative satire of the Jewish American family. This complicated novel is no heartrending tribute to Newark. As far as the manic voice of Alexander Portnoy is concerned, Newark is the hated locus of family, neurosis, and repression. The New Jersey inferno must be left for New York City, where Newark remains perilously near at hand, giving the parents easy access to their son, the Manhattanite, and to his tortured

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psyche. Portnoy lives in a metaphysical Newark, the city a metaphor for the inhibitions drummed into him by his Jewish American family. These inhibitions unman him. “Doctor,” he says to his psychotherapist, “I can’t stand any more being frightened over nothing! Bless me with manhood! Make me brave! Make me strong! Make me whole!” Portnoy’s rebellion, the lurid behavior that would give Portnoy’s Complaint its genuinely scandalous effect, only leads him further and further back to Newark, scene of all the Freudian crimes. The Manhattan libertine victimizes himself with a self-control that he cannot escape: “To be bad, mother, that is the real struggle: to be bad—and to enjoy it.” Portnoy can be bad, but because he is from Newark and his parents’ son, he cannot enjoy being bad. Newark history is tantamount to his hectoring superego: “My right mind is simply that inheritance of terror that I bring with me out of my ridiculous past!”11 Alexander Portnoy was often regarded as a sign of the times in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as a Trotsky of the sexual revolution, but Portnoy, unlike Trotsky, betrays his own revolution. Manhattan hedonism—a bungled, inept hedonism—is more the surface than the heart of Portnoy’s Complaint. At the heart of this novel is a lyrical picture of Golden Age Newark. The picture comes to Portnoy en route to Israel, as he begins to weep for the Diaspora. He weeps for the Newark manhood that he could never claim, much as he lived in its ambience as a child: “I look down from two thousand feet in the air upon the land of Israel, where the Jewish people first came into being, and am impaled upon a memory of Sunday morning softball games in Newark.” In a novel that goes from burlesque to burlesque, Alexander Portnoy raging against the petit-bourgeois chains into which he has been born, the burlesque abruptly disappears, in this passage, and in its place comes an image of joy. The image is of Jewish men at ease with themselves and with their bodies, giving themselves over to sport and laughter. They are playing softball, comfortably insulated from the Gentile world by Sunday morning—not Zionist soldiers but American citizen-athletes. Young Alexander is struck as much by their voices as by their effortless physical strength: “Nobody has to tell them to stop mumbling and to speak up, never! And the outrageous things they say! The chatter in the infield isn’t chatter, it’s kibbitzing and (to this small boy, just beginning to learn the art of ridicule) hilarious!”12 The image is a wondrous composite: health, strength, joy, and humor.

Newark

This scene, placed where it is in Portnoy’s Complaint, becomes an essay on the road not taken, the home base at which Jewishness and America converge, indicating a fulfillment possible only in Newark. This is the Newark, wholly emptied of Jewish alienation, that must never be left: I sit in the wooden stands alongside first base, inhaling the sour springtime bouquet in the pocket of my fielder’s mitt—sweat, leather, vaseline—and laughing my head off. I cannot imagine living out my life any other place but here. Why leave, why go, when there is everything here I will ever want? The ridiculing, the joking, the acting-up, the pretending—everything for a laugh! I love it!13

America is the new Zion or, rather, Newark is: “How I am going to love growing up to be a Jewish man!” Portnoy thinks. “Living forever in the Weequahic section, and playing softball on Chancellor Avenue from nine to one on Sundays, a perfect joining of clown and competitor, kibbitzing wise guy and dangerous long-ball hitter.”14 Yet this is Zion discovered in a dystopian novel, one that marks the harrowing distance traveled from the Chancellor Avenue playground. Alexander Portnoy’s eventual self-hatred as a Jewish man, his failure to become one of these exuberant long-ball hitters and kibbitzers, approaches tragedy, since behind it lies the prosaic, approachable chance for another adulthood and for another Jewish American life. Newark in the Golden Age is Newark lost. Even in Roth’s novella, Goodbye, Columbus, written before the Golden Age had been officially terminated, Newark is a gateway out from itself: The neighborhood had changed: the old Jews like my grand­parents had struggled and died, and their offspring had struggled and prospered, and moved further and further west, towards the edge of Newark, then out of it, and up the slope of the Orange Mountains, until they had reached the crest and started down the other side, pouring into Gentile territory as the Scotch-Irish had poured through the Cumberland Gap. Now, in fact, the Negroes were making the same migration, following the steps of the Jews, and those who remained in the Third Ward lived the most squalid of lives and dreamed in their fetid mattresses of the piney smell of Georgia nights.15

Whether in squalid tenements or prosperous suburbs, the Newark constant is migration, the migration to and from the city. The Golden

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Age, to which Goodbye, Columbus is satirically consecrated, could also be strangely morbid (as Leslie Fiedler had pointed out in his contemporary review of Goodbye, Columbus). Perhaps migration would leave Newark bereft and empty, a feat of the imagination in 1959, yet still a fore­seeable future in Goodbye, Columbus: “Who would come after the Negroes? Who was left? No one, I [Neil Klugman] thought, and someday these streets, where my grandmother drank hot tea from an old jahr­zeit glass, would be empty and we would all of us have moved to  the crest of the Orange Mountains, and wouldn’t the dead stop kicking the slats of their coffins then?”16 That departure is an American activity—and not some quirk of ethnic Newark—is made clear by the reference to the “Scotch-Irish,” to the pioneer motion away from the immigrant East Coast and through the Cumberland Gap to a self-made, ancestor-free future. The goal, there from the beginning, was to leave the ancestors and the dead behind. In Operation Shylock, the Palestinian intellectual George Ziad delivers a brilliant, hilarious analysis of Goodbye, Columbus, paraphrasing the Golden Age of Jewish achievement in America. This is a tirade about Brenda Patimkin’s Newark: The age of the nose job, the name change, the ebbing of the quota system, and the exaltations of suburban life, the dawn of the era of big corporate promotions, whopping Ivy League admissions, hedonistic holidays, and all manner of dwindling prohibitions—and of the emergence of a corps of surprisingly goylike children, dopey and confident and happy in ways that previous generations of anxious Jewish parents had never dared to imagine possible for their own. The pastoralization of the ghetto . . . The Jewish success story in its heyday, all new and thrilling and funny and fun. Liberated new Jews, normalized Jews, ridiculous and wonderful. The triumph of the untragic. Brenda Patimkin dethrones Anne Frank. Hot sex, fresh fruit, and Big Ten basketball— who could imagine a happier ending for the Jewish people?17

Ziad’s overheated phrases anticipate the Newark trilogy and its historical patterns. “The triumph of the untragic” is a condition that must be historically impermanent, a perfect perceptual point of departure for historical tragedies: the phrase itself comes from a man obsessed by the historical tragedy of his own people. “The pastoralization of the ghetto” is one way to describe suburbanization, but Ziad’s wording is

Newark

ambiguous. Is it the ghetto itself that has been pastoralized, which is to say perpetuated into the suburbs? Or has the ghetto simply vanished into the American pastoral? “Brenda Patimkin dethrones Anne Frank” is a clue to the coruscating historical tensions underneath the Newark trilogy: an icon of Jewish suffering has given way to an icon of Jewish pleasure and Jewish comfort. The sex is hotter, the fruit fresher, and the sport more fun for the unspoken proximity of Anne Frank’s recent suffering. (On Anne Frank and Newark, more later.) What follows Newark’s Golden Age is an era of collapse, even as ­Ziad’s delirious Jewish American success story proceeds apace nationally. The third era of Newark history takes shape with the July 1967 riots. The cause of the riots does not manifest itself in the Newark trilogy, but the riots’ effects are everywhere, showing the city’s terrible decline, its falling into anarchy and violence, after which most who are able to abandon the city abandon it. The riots are described in American Pastoral, raging around the Newark Maid glove factory that the Levov family has built and part of which they had already moved out of Newark, to Puerto Rico, in 1958. City and factory decline together: “After the sniper fire ended and the flames were extinguished and twenty-one Newarkers were counted dead by gunfire and the National Guard was withdrawn . . . the quality of the Newark Maid line began to fall off because of negligence and indifference.”18 The riots make the slow departure from Newark irreversible. Many had already left for war in the 1940s and the luckier ones for college in the late 1940s or early 1950s.19 For those who took one or several steps outside Newark, there was no reason, after 1967, to take a step back, especially toward Newark’s forsaken downtown. The two words used to describe a deteriorating work ethic at the Newark Maid factory—“negligence” and “indifference”— capture the mood of the city after the riots, among those who had rioted and those who lamented the riots. The riots gained no radical change for the city’s poor, no end to its racist legacy, and they divorced the city from its middle class. It was no longer their city, no longer a milestone on their road to American progress, so the threatened middle class chose an attitude of indifference and neglect toward Newark, widening the vicious circle. If Newark was to be a ruin, then let it be a ruin. The fourth and final phase of twentieth-century Newark history is the longue durée of a city unraveling. For those who grew up in the Golden

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Age, Newark has a shocking barrenness, a void that has arisen in the center of their city. For those born after the Golden Age, the city’s barren downtown is simply what Newark is—or what it signifies. Railroad Avenue is “as ominous now as any street in any ruined city in America,” Zuckerman observes in American Pastoral. Having been squeezed in history’s grip, Newark has turned itself around and started to move backward, as if eager to unbuild itself. The best model for this Newark is ancient Egypt, since “the nineteenth-century factories that churned up people and churned out goods . . . now were unpierceable, airtight tombs. It was Newark that was entombed there, a city that was not going to stir again. The pyramids of Newark: as huge and dark and hideously impermeable as a great dynasty’s burial edifice has every historical right to be.” Or in the irate words of Lou Levov, “I come from the late city of Newark. . . . Manufacturing is finished in Newark. Newark is finished.”20 Its native sons and daughters can only look upon the ruin of Newark and ponder the riddle of destruction. Lou’s words are spoken at the height of the Watergate scandal and are apocalyptic only as far as Newark is concerned. The history of Newark and the history of the United States— neither at its apex in 1974—are not contiguous or parallel. Newark’s downward spiral is a national trend among other national trends. Superficially, the motion of the Newark trilogy is away from Newark, away from its past, away from its regressive history, and away from the physical city for the Swede, Ira, and Coleman. (The motion of the narrative runs in the opposite direction, an incessant return to Newark through memory and stories and the literary contemplation of cause and effect.) These three characters want nothing more than to leave Newark, and it is essential, for them and for the overall spirit of the trilogy, that they choose to leave. In addition, they are urged to leave, often in ways that are quiet and obscure. They are the sons of fathers who, in two out of three cases, have themselves left a great deal of their childhood world behind them. The fathers are so large in the Newark trilogy because the communities and city around them are so unstable, so recent, so fleeting. What to children seem God-given communities are in fact transitory, recently gathered together in dynamic Newark, ready to leave for other destinations if there is good reason to go. Newarkbred children stand in a river of endless assimilation, with their parents behind them and their children in front of them.21 There is the

Newark

upward motion, however difficult, of the black middle class, contrasted with a midcentury assimilation of American Jews, strangely ennobled by World War II. American Pastoral begins with the distant trauma of World War II, seen through the eyes of Jewish American kids and felt by the worried Jewish parents of Newark, but World War II is mostly experienced as an opportunity to claim fuller American citizenship and then to plunge into the generous postwar boom, freed from anti-­ Semitism. World War II opens Newark to the outside world, making an escape from Newark possible for the first time. Before Newark has even encountered the tumultuous 1960s, which make the city’s past and present strangers to one another, it has shaped its native children with the force of its impermanence. As early as 1958, almost forty years before the Newark trilogy was completed, Roth had noted Newark’s impermanence as a city. Leaving Newark and leaving itself were twinned themes in his literature, as they would remain well into the twenty-first century. In an interview with the Newark News, Roth described his subject as “the geographical dispersion of the Jews, what happens when they move from Prince Street to West Orange—it really is the story of immigrant to ‘nouveau riche.’”22 A set-piece example of this spatial dispersion appears in the form of a prolonged anecdote, recounted by Murray Ringold in I Married a Communist. Murray tells the tale of a canary funeral, replete with procession and music, in Newark’s “old First Ward,” a story based upon historical fact that beautifully illustrates Newark’s status as chronological riddle. The city has vanished into the past and is surreally vivid at the same time. The canary’s name was Jimmy, and its grieving owner Emidio Russomanno. The year is 1920. The procession, sublimely ridiculous, passes by shops that are named—in Murray’s telling of this anecdote—with such precision that they evoke a small cosmos, the gift of literature realized in a feat of memory and by the art of good storytelling. The procession winds past “Del Guercio’s grocery store, where they had clams outside in bushel baskets and an American flag in the window, past Melillo’s fruit and vegetable stand, past Giordano’s bakery . . . [past] Nicodemi’s Café on Seventh Avenue and Café Roma on Seventh Avenue and D’Auria’s bank on Seventh Avenue. That was the bank where, before the second war broke out, they extended credit to Mussolini. When Mussolini took Ethiopia, the priest rang the church

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bell for half an hour. Here in America, in Newark’s first ward.” Each name, each street, each building—and their common web of associations—glows with significance, like the Vittorio Castle “on the corner of Eighth and Summer. Show-business people used to travel from New York to dine at the Castle. . . . The Castle is where Joe DiMaggio ate when he came to Newark. The Castle is where DiMaggio and his girlfriend held their engagement party.”23 This is the Newark of blessed memory, one half of the city’s historic stature. The other half is not blessed at all. Shortly after the Newark riots Nathan Zuckerman meets Alvin Pepler, a fellow Newarker, in a New York deli—in Zuckerman Unbound. After forming a bond on the basis of Newark sentiment, Pepler berates Zuckerman for the self-indulgent ignorance of his writing about Newark. “What do you know about Newark, Mama’s Boy!” Pepler shouts at Zuckerman. He then offers his own assessment: “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 bankruptcy! Newark is ashes! Newark is rubble and filth! Own a car in Newark and then you’ll find out what Newark’s all about! Then you can write ten books about Newark!”24 The human devastation behind the ruin speaks through Pepler’s voice, through its racial epithets and its inventive hatred. Pepler’s blunt string of outraged sentences is almost a poem about Newark, with touches of inverted Amiri Baraka audible in it, a guerrilla poem on the city’s collapse—sickeningly incompatible with Murray’s line of warmly remembered details. Pepler’s violent words also collapse Newark history into an unbearable present tense. Newark is . . . Newark is . . . with no allowance made for what Newark was or could be, and this is Pepler’s recipe for Newark narrative and for Newark literature, for no less than ten Newark novels. In Murray’s telling, Newark’s destruction and loss do not eliminate memory. They color memory; they demand memory. “Gone now for forty years,” Murray laments in the middle of his canary-funeral anecdote. “City knocked down that whole Italian neighborhood in ’53 to make way for low-rent high-rise housing. In ’94 they blew the highrises up on national TV. By then nobody’s been living in them for about twenty years. Uninhabitable. Now there’s nothing there at all. St Lucy’s and that’s it. That’s all that’s standing. The parish church, but no parish

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and no parishioners.”25 A long list of negatives—nothings converging with nobodies in an uninhabitable place—that is the telos of this Newark history, a Hegelian progression toward terminal self-effacement. Such is the home city of the three heroes. What it is not is crucial: it is not a proper object of nostalgia, if anything is. Nathan Zuckerman toys with nostalgia, with a Newark rhapsody, asking whether he is “completely mistaken to think that living as well-born children in Renaissance Florence could not have held a candle to growing up within aromatic range of Tabachnik’s pickle barrels [in Newark]? . . . Has any place since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? The detail, the immensity of the detail, the force of the detail, the weight of the detail—the rich endlessness of detail surrounding you in your young life like the six feet of dirt that’ll be packed on your grave when you’re dead.”26 Zuckerman’s expansive rhetoric—and even at this exuberant moment Newark’s life inspires a simile of death—is from a high school reunion speech that Nathan writes and does not deliver. Newark nostalgia is not entirely suited even to a nostalgic, sentimental occasion. Geographically, Newark lies between nostalgia’s warmth and nihilism’s chill, between meaning and nonmeaning, not a Garden of Eden with exile at its gates but a problem from the beginning—at first a city being lovingly created by immigrants and almost simultaneously a city that is being abandoned by them and their children. In The Human Stain, East Orange has Newark’s quality of being there and being gone. The narrative consciousness and voice belong to Ernestine Silk, and here the emotional line starts in decline and ends in life, a life displaced but also celebrated against decline: The nice houses along Oraton Parkway, Elmwood, Maple Avenue, the state just bought them up and they disappeared overnight. I used to be able to do all my Christmas shopping on Main Street. Well, Main Street and Central Avenue. Central Avenue was called the Fifth Avenue of the Oranges then. You know what we’ve got today? We’ve got a ShopRite. And we’ve got a Dunkin’ Donuts. And there was a Domino’s Pizza, but they closed. Now they’ve got another food place. And there’s a cleaners. But you can’t compare quality. It’s not the same. In all honesty, I drive up the hill to West Orange to shop. But I didn’t then. There was no reason to. Every night when we went out to walk the dog, I’d go with my husband, unless the weather was real bad—walk

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to Central Avenue, which is two blocks, then down Central Avenue for four blocks, cross over, then window-shop back, and home. There was a B. ­Altman. A Russek’s. There was a Black, Starr, and Gorham. There was a Bachrach, the photographer. A very nice men’s store¸ Minks, that was Jewish, that was over on Main Street. Two theaters. There was the Holly­wood Theater on Central Avenue. There was the Palace Theater on Main Street. All of life was there in little East Orange. 27

The detail is compulsive, a string of memory that follows from street names, from the names of shops and from their implied sociology, a known universe that has given way to the unknowable—though universally known—chain stores. The nihilism of what is there now exaggerates the teeming life, all of life, that had been there before. Civic memory is the power at work in such feats of describing, and the transitions are clearly national, a point underscored here by the similarities between “black” and “Jewish” memory where East Orange and Newark are concerned. Exactly the same narrative device appears at the end of Operation Shylock. Newark is realized in long lists of detail, because the remembered city is no longer there. The scene is a Manhattan deli, a fictionalized version of an existing deli (Barney Greengrass on Amsterdam Avenue). The novel’s Philip Roth character sits at its tables and is transported to Newark and, via Newark, through sediments of Jewish history: In Newark, back in the forties, we used to buy, for our household’s special Sunday breakfasts, silky slices of precious lox, shining fat little chubs, chunks of pale, meaty carp and paprikaed sable, all double-wrapped in heavy wax paper, at a family-run store around the corner that looked and smelled pretty much as this one did—the tiled floor sprinkled with sawdust, the shelves stacked with fish canned in sauces and oils, up by the cash register a prodigious loaf of halvah soon to be sawed into crumbly slabs, and, wafting up from behind the showcase running the length of the serving counter, the bitter fragrance of vinegar, of onions, of whitefish and red herring, of everything pickled, peppered, salted, smoked, soaked, stewed, marinated, and dried, smells with a lineage that, like these stores themselves, more than likely led straight back through the shtetl to the medieval ghetto and the nutrients of those who lived frugally and could not afford to dine à la mode, the diet of sailors and common folk, for whom the flavor of the ancient preservatives was life.28

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The mind moves from Newark to the saline preservatives of life itself. The onslaught of nouns and adjectives is not bewildering or tedious; it is not even stream of consciousness but analytical and lyrical, almost ecstatic. The perceiving eye is much like the eye of a child, naïvely registering the world that is there, while an adult historical intelligence links past and present. The Newark store initiates this long sentence. Yet not only has the Newark store vanished, but the Manhattan deli in which Philip Roth sits is ahistorical or historicist, an anachronistic luxury, a culinary museum: “By now, of course, what was once the ordinary fare of the Jewish masses had become an exotic stimulant for Upper West Siders two and three generations removed from the great immigration and just getting by as professionals in Manhattan on annual salaries that, a century earlier, would have provided daily banquets all year long for every last Jew in Galicia.”29 Unlike the Newark impermanence Murray Ringold and Ernestine Silk have endured, a function of urban impoverishment, the antiquarian Manhattan deli is made possible by great wealth. Poor Newark cannot afford to keep its losses at bay. ❊ In order to be inherited by the sons, impermanent Newark must first be confronted by the fathers. Mr. Silk and Lou Levov are the two “existing” fathers in the Newark trilogy. Ira’s father dies when Ira is a boy, and the extreme vacillations in Ira’s biography—between poverty and wealth, success and failure, communist outrage and patriotic fervor—may have something to do with the missing father, the absence of a father against whom the son’s self can be fashioned. Ira has a freedom that neither the Swede nor Coleman has. They rebel against their fathers in a similar way: the Swede by marrying a non-Jewish woman and living among WASPs, and Coleman by marrying a white woman and pretending himself to be white. Ira is a professional impersonator, doing radio voices and dressing up as Abraham Lincoln, taking his profession with him into his private life. Ira’s mother dies when he is seven, and his connection to the city, as to his parents, is slight and edged with melancholy. Ira “had been born in Newark . . . in 1913, a poor boy from a hard neighborhood—and from a cruel family—who briefly attended Bennigan High, where he failed every subject but gym.”30 Newark educates him less than it does the Swede or Coleman. Ira lives with civic and family

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vacancy and with the secret of his violent nature. He commits a murder in Newark, works in the zinc mines in Sussex, New Jersey, early history that must be meticulously erased. The problem of Newark, for Ira, is in part the problem of Newark parents who were not there to raise him. The other two fathers, powerfully present in the lives of their sons, confront Newark with their ambition. The Levov family arrived in America in the 1890s, European parents with their American-born son, Lou, who must live in Newark as pioneers. Old World history, Old World language, Old World Judaism leave few traces in Lou’s northern New Jersey, and Newark is not yet a historical place, not a subject of stories when Lou Levov is a young man and Europe is rapidly being forgotten. It is all heady present with an even headier future in the works. Newark is more vehicle than city while the Levov family is flying “the flight of the immigrant rocket, the upward, broken immigrant trajectory from the slave-driven great-grandfather to the self-driven grandfather to self-confident accomplished, independent father to the highest flyer of them all, the fourth-generation child for whom America was to be heaven itself.”31 This is America in all its mythic allure, ushering in immigrants, giving them space and property and dignity, letting them escape from the forest of premodern, predemocratic history. Compulsion falls away in America, as does the authority of the tsar, the police, the censor, the anti-Semite. Slave becomes self and self-confident citizen, and the progression of American time is a continuous elevation, an ethereal journey from labor to joy. Through effort, the rocket will go ever upward. By contrast, Mr. Silk is from the American state of Georgia, not Poland or Russia. He faces barriers that Lou does not, but he responds similarly to the problem of how to live in Newark—more precisely East Orange, New Jersey—as someone who has moved there. Effort and achievement are the keys as well as the bond between father and son: “For as long as Coleman could remember, his father had been determined to send him . . . to a historically black college, along with the privileged children of the black professional elite.”32 The fathers are of Newark, if not born there, and their ambition will move their sons away from Newark. Next to the riddle of Newark is the riddle of these Newark families, who are constantly building without ever building something that can last. Lou Levov is fuel for the immigrant rocket, a force not for order or the conservation of order but

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for social combustion. Lou’s energy leads as much to loss as it does to gain: the energy he and fathers like him expend on their families and on their city transforms family and city alike, with nothing left intact. Lou unwittingly undermines the edifice of family, work, and city that matters to him more than anything else, and Lou, in all his individuality, is historically generic, “one of those slum-reared Jewish fathers whose rough-hewn, undereducated perspective goaded a whole generation of striving, college-educated Jewish sons.” The sons harness the fathers’ ambitions to become other than their fathers, which is what their fathers had tacitly been asking them to do all along; and then, having done it, the sons cannot be free of their fathers: “a father for whom everything is an unshakeable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems.” The sons inherit movement and energy—their patrimony—the impetus behind their own striving and something hard to hold on to: “Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.” The first-person plural matters here: Zuckerman belongs to his subject. By telling the story of the Swede and other such Newark sons, Nathan is telling his own story or telling the collective story that most moves him as a novelist. As Nathan already knew about himself as a forty-year-old writer, in The Anatomy Lesson, “a first-generation American father possessed by the Jewish demons, a second-generation American son possessed with their exorcism: that was his [Zuckerman’s] whole story.”33 Newark is the center of a generational drama, which each generation barely fathoms, a riddle composed of pre-American heritage, Newark possibilities, and American temptations. This drama of Jewish American generations, implicit to the Newark trilogy, is outlined with precision in Operation Shylock, a phantasmagoric novel of identity games. Trans­ national mysteries lead back to Newark, to Hebrew school, and to the astonishing novelty of American-Jewish history. An irreligious generation had forced its progeny to attend Hebrew school, “a part of the deal that our parents had cut with their parents . . . who wanted the grandchildren to be Jews the way that they were Jews.” Hebrew school is also

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“the leash to restrain the breakaway young, who had it in their heads to be Jews in a way no one had ever dared to be a Jew in our three-thousand-year history: speaking and thinking American English, only American English, with all the apostasy that was bound to beget.” By speaking and thinking in American English, Lou’s generation had already left its parents’ generation behind. There is no point of permanence between those to whom America is home and those to whom Europe is home, those whose language is English and those whose language is Yiddish: “Our put-upon parents were simply middlemen in the classic American squeeze, negotiating between the shtetl-born and the Newark-born and taking blows from either side, telling the old ones, ‘Listen, it’s a new world—the kids have to make their way here,’ while sternly rebuking the younger ones, ‘You must, you have to, you cannot turn your back on everything!’”34 Newark is merely the place where fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, must find their way, modest backdrop to a cultural revolution. For the middlemen or for their children, Newark is not a guide to anything, and it offers no relief from the classic American squeeze. A Jewish father in the 1930s and 1940s, Lou Levov gives his sons a security that would have been unthinkable in Europe. Lou’s hunger for security is an obvious response to Jewish history, and the Newark of these decades, at least for the Jewish families beginning to prosper there, was genuinely an American pastoral. In a time of overseas sadism and unreason, America is an Enlightenment dream, land of rights and liberties. Lou’s was the first generation of Eastern European Jews to experience this miracle fully, the miracle of Newark, New Jersey, circa 1939, and to experience it in English. Midcentury Newark describes a moment “when the [Levov] family endured by a truth in no way grounded in abetting destruction but rather in eluding and outlasting destruction, overcoming its mysterious inroads by creating the utopia of a rational existence.” Security is not the same as stability, though, and the good fortune of evading Hitler’s Europe—destruction’s mysterious inroads—is purchased at the price of lost family history. The rapid assimilation of the Levov family is gently symbolized by Lou’s decision to move away from the Newark neighborhood where he grew up and into more middle-class American terrain, a generic move: “The first postimmigrant generation of Newark’s Jews had regrouped into a community that took its inspiration more from the mainstream of

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American life than from the Polish shtetl their Yiddish-speaking parents had re-created around Prince Street in the impoverished Third Ward.”35 Lou moves from one part of Newark to another in tandem with a community, which is very much a Jewish community. His son, the Swede, will slightly alter the pattern, moving out of Newark altogether and doing so as an individual, leaving much behind—though still recognizably his father’s son. In non-fiction Patrimony, Roth writes instructively of “all the stuff that produced the poignant abyss between our fathers and us and that they themselves broke their back to give us.”36 Mr. Silk’s New Jersey is a more forbidding place. Newark may be a portal to a new America for an ambitious black man from Georgia, seeking to ensconce his family in the black professional elite; but Newark, with its dearth of options for black professionals, imposes an unwelcome immobility on Mr. Silk. In the same way that Lou aspires to own his own glove-making business, Mr. Silk opens an optician’s store in the 1920s. History intrudes in the form of the Great Depression, depriving Mr. Silk of his business and consigning him to the demeaning work of a train porter. Also bankrupted by the Great Depression, Lou Levov experiences the Depression as only a brief interruption. “Mr. Silk’s life in business for himself had come to a bitter end with the closing of the banks,” Zuckerman’s narrative voice tells us in The Human Stain. “It had taken him quite a time to get over the losing of the optician’s store up in Orange, if he ever did.” Scarred as it is by racism, East Orange has the same beguiling density of life, which elicits the same profundity of childhood wonder, that Newark has for the Swede and Ira, the profusion of lifelike memory that is father to the man. An entire universe lives in New Jersey, accessible through story and narrative, re-created in the story of the canary funeral and, once again, in a description of Coleman’s boyhood cosmos, “a full-to-the-brimming ready-made East ­Orange world, four square miles rich in the most clinging creaturely detail, the solid, lyrical bedrock of a successful boyhood, all the safeguards, all the allegiances, the battles, the legitimacy simply taken for granted, nothing theoretical about it, nothing specious or illusory about it.”37 This New Jersey bedrock is, in the eyes of Mr. Silk, a launching pad for Coleman. The son pays homage to the father by not confining himself to the four wondrous square miles of East Orange, a family riddle that neither father nor son fully comprehends.

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Coleman, who will go on to become a professor of classics, is a New Jersey Odysseus, agile and wily, a bit of a warrior and an Odysseus who uses his wiles to fashion a route out and away from his Ithaca. (Later, Coleman has no desire to return to Ithaca and no Telemachus or ­Penelope there to whom he might return.) Coleman’s case study is his father, an example of intelligence and strength but an example, which Coleman does not accept, that intelligence and strength cannot vanquish historical forces on par with racial prejudice. If it is the Great Depression that destroys Mr. Silk’s optician’s store, it is racism that prevents his recovery from this disaster.38 It is racism that forces Mr. Silk to work beneath his talents, to be called “boy” when working on the train, something no single warrior can fight. Coleman’s own boyhood, lived in the enormous shadow of his father, is insulated from the racism that Mr. Silk faces daily. Mr. Silk’s very strength distorts the world of his son, hiding from him the real New Jersey and the real America that has bestowed second-class citizenship on the Silk family. No boy could appreciate “the enormous barrier against the great American menace his [Coleman’s] father had been for him.” As paternal protector, Mr. Silk is providing a selective education for his son. Perhaps the great American menace of racism is not so immutable, the son might conclude, not so stark or not as bad as it had been in Mr. Silk’s youth. Perhaps it was a regrettable vestige of nineteenth-century America. When Coleman sees “all that his father had been condemned to accept,” the language of his realization is contingent: the son may or may not be condemned to accept the same things. Coleman, a brilliant student and star athlete, has not been condemned by nature. His character is Olympian, as it will remain until the end. He has physical, intellectual, and inner strength. “All the other kids were always blabbing about themselves,” Coleman thinks to himself as a boy. “But that wasn’t where the power was or the pleasure either. The power and the pleasure were to be found in the opposite, in being counterconfessional in the same way you were a counterpuncher.”39 Coleman is Olympian in his calm, in his refusal of outrage, because he perceives his world to be open. His father, who knows his world is closed, has a measure of rage behind his rhetorical calm. In his effortless calm, Coleman differs from his brother, Walt, who has Coleman’s energy and intelligence and an anger all his own. Walt “was always a

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little angrier about everything,” an anger that has less to do with ­racial limitations than with a self that is attuned to outside limits. Walt’s power stems from self-knowledge and self-assurance; Coleman’s power stems from his talent for manipulation, manipulating himself most of all, changing by dint of effort the boy he is and the man he will become, and manipulating others along the way with his charisma and will. The difference between the two brothers is essential: “Walt was Walt, vigorously Walt, and Coleman was vigorously not.”40 Coleman is light skinned enough to pass as white, another reason he need not vigorously be himself. Coleman’s middle name is Brutus, given to him by his Shakespeare-obsessed father and linking Coleman to “the most educational study of treason ever written,” to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Coleman’s first act of treason is to deceive his father about his boxing lessons, and it is boxing that seems to offer the first road out of Newark. His coach, Doc Chizner, is Jewish, and Doc acquiesces in Coleman’s experiments with boxing as a white man, which leads Coleman to contemplate a boxing scholarship at the University of Pittsburgh, applied for as a white man. When Mr. Silk finds out about his son’s illicit boxing, but not about his flirtation with passing, he senses that Coleman has left the family circle, rejecting both his father and the local family dreams held in store for Coleman. When they confront each other, Mr. Silk asks him a resonant hypothetical question, “You know, if I were your father, Coleman, you know what I would tell you?”41 Coleman has made his father disappear, Mr. Silk is saying, and he might do the same to his city, his race, and his historic self. Consumed with the project of leaving East Orange, Coleman first considers escape through passing, but under his father’s watchful eye he leaves New Jersey for Washington, DC, and for Howard University. He leaves physically, without leaving in the way he had dreamt of as an aspiring boxer, who did not necessarily look black. He does not leave behind the barriers of racial prejudice. If anything, he sees them for the first time, a student at a historically black university situated in a Southern city. What he had known slightly in East Orange he begins to know well in the District of Columbia: “Of course, even in East Orange he had not escaped the minimally less malevolent forms of exclusion that socially separated his family and the small colored community from the rest of East Orange.” The more malevolent forms of exclusion are loud

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and unavoidable. Coleman is called a nigger. He is outraged, not just by the application of the word to him, but by the ocean of meaning behind it, all of which Coleman is trying to reject. “In the segregated South,” he comes to realize, “there were no separate identities, not even for him and his roommate. No such subtleties were allowed, and the impact was devastating. Nigger—and it had meant him.” Coleman’s energy and talent do not move him through Washington. They can only move against this city, making Coleman an Odysseus condemned to sit still. So, “he [Coleman] hated Howard from the day he arrived, within the week he hated Washington.”42 Washington and Howard University would return Coleman to a city like Newark. Washington was a larger, less tolerant version of Newark: American history itself had decreed this unjust truth. When Coleman’s father dies, East Orange dies with him or East Orange’s power over Coleman dies, lifting the overbearing weight of America’s racial history from Coleman’s strong shoulders. Coleman is powerless to redraw America’s racial map, but after his father’s death he can change his position on this map. Coleman is liberated to become himself, which, in Coleman’s case, means becoming someone other than the self his father wanted him to be, someone other than the self he was born to be. Coleman can take his father’s teaching and use it to invert his father’s teaching. Mr. Silk was “the mammoth, secretly suffering father who talked so easily, so sweepingly, who with just his powers of speech had inadvertently taught Coleman to want to be stupendous.” Stupendous means white, and claiming the robe of whiteness is stupendous for Coleman, a stupendous (Emersonian) assertion of the individual will. “Down to the day he arrived in Washington and entered Howard, it was, like it or not, his father who had been making up Coleman’s story for him.” After his father’s death, Coleman was able “to make it [his story] up himself, and the prospect was terrifying, two terrible weeks, until, out of nowhere, it was exhilarating.” Coleman’s liberation carries overtones of power and citizenship with it, as if he becomes more American, more the citizen, by choosing to be seen as white. The choice turns Coleman into a pioneer, “the greatest of the great pioneers of the I,” and an enemy of collective destiny. If destiny calls for submission, defying destiny gives power to those who are brave enough for defiance. Defiant Coleman wins his “singularity. The passionate struggle for singularity. The singular animal. The sliding

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relationship with everything. Not static but sliding. Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?”43 Without the father to enforce Coleman’s allegiance to the “we,” Coleman’s singular “I” is free to embark on its stupendous journey. Coleman bears a loose resemblance to Anatole Broyard, an intellectual who was born to a black family in New Orleans in 1920, more or less the time his literary alter ego, Coleman Silk, was born near Newark. Like Coleman, Broyard passed for white. He wanted the personal, intellectual, and erotic freedom to remake the relationship between “I” and “we.” In the words of Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Society had decreed race to be a matter of natural law, but he [Broyard] wanted race to be an elective affinity.” Broyard’s family had moved from New Orleans to Brooklyn in the 1920s, making his job easier. His father would pass at work, not because he wanted to be white but because it was professionally advantageous. Anatole Broyard may have passed in the army, like Coleman, and when he did decide to pass, he had only limited contact with his family (Coleman would have none at all). Broyard lived in Greenwich Village, like Coleman in his youth, but it was not stupendous enough to pass in bohemian Greenwich Village, where the racial calculus was at its most forgiving. A book reviewer for the New York Times, Broyard moved from New York to Connecticut, living in rural New England with his blonde wife and white child, just as Coleman lives in Massachusetts with his white family: “It was as if, wedded to an ideal of American self-fashioning, he [Broyard] sought to put himself to the ultimate test,” writes Gates. The only real difference between Anatole Broyard and Coleman Silk is that Coleman does not long for home. In his essay on Broyard, Gates quotes from Broyard himself: “Am I an embarrassment to them [Broyard’s children], or an accepted part of the human comedy? . . . Do they understand that, after all those years of running away from home, I am still trying to get back?” Coleman never tries to get back to Newark. It is the perpetual running away that thrills him.44 The Swede makes a journey similar to Coleman Silk’s, but his journey is carried out alongside his father, with Lou Levov as the eternal reference point, the reason for the Swede’s success and the benchmark of this success. Eventually, the Swede’s greatest success is to be unlike his father, to take over his father’s company, using all that his father

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has taught him, pursuing success deeper and deeper into America and defining success as the quality of being more American than his father. Coleman must choose a created whiteness, taking incredible risks, because otherwise he would be black and fettered to a racial predicament he abhors. The Swede never faces any such choice, though close proximity to an active, opinionated, involved father also limits the Swede’s options. Lou Levov is of Newark and delighted to be of Newark. If Coleman is to slide out of Newark, it must be a complete slide, with no gradations. The Swede enjoys a graduated progression from Jewish Newark to the American republic, from a Newark Jew to an American citizen who happens to be born in Newark. It is Newark itself that starts the Swede on his way, investing great pride in his American singularity and relatively little pride in the markers of his communal, historical self. As a nickname, “the Swede” is casually given, but it will acquire monumental significance for the Jew asked to carry it. The first sentence of American Pastoral cogently states the trilogy’s master theme: “The Swede.” The first sentence of the Newark trilogy recalls the first sentence of Moby-Dick in its emphasis on an assumed name, on a mask: “Call me Ishmael.” (This is a sentence Roth had already parodied in the first sentence of his 1976 novel, The Great American Novel: “Call me Smitty.”) The last word of the Newark trilogy, the last word of The Human Stain, is “America,” as if, in the epic work of these three novels, the mask has been peeled back and the country beneath the mask—the country that, often enough, is the mask—exposed to the literary light of day.45 The Swede was “this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov,” and the tribe, infatuated with the Swede’s athletic prowess, pays him the high compliment of banishing him and joining him to another tribe, covering him in the glory of the non-Jewish mainstream.46 It is Newark that changes Seymour Irving Levov into the Swede, opening the city gates to him and giving him, not the key to the city, but the key to escaping the city. Unlike Coleman, the Swede never has to pick the lock. Metamorphosis from Seymour to the Swede, and the push away from the tribe that frames this metamorphosis, is inadvertent. The Jewish community around the Swede, to which his family proudly belongs, lionizes the Swede for “historical” reasons—not for the sake of Jewish history but because of a world crisis coincidental with the

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Swede’s adolescence. Jewish Newark is bashful about the Aryan stamp it places on young Seymour, since the Jewish stamp was provoking unspeakable aggression on the other side of the Atlantic. As Nathan Zuckerman speculates, “The elevation of the Swede into the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews can best be explained, I think, by the war against the Germans and the Japanese and the fears it fostered.” If Europe is setting the terms of aggression, it is Europe (and its gods) that sets the terms of response, the Swede a household Apollo rather than the neighborhood Macabee. Jewish fears are dealt with by skirting Jewish facts, and, for reasons unclear to all at the time, the Swede allows fellow Newark Jews to “forget the war.” Frightening history compels historical amnesia and an emigration from Jewish to Scandinavian nomenclature for the Levov boy, an unwitting instrument of history. “He was fettered to history, an instrument of history, esteemed with a passion that might never have been if he’d broken the Weequahic basketball record . . . on a day other than the sad, sad day in 1943 when fifty-eight Flying Fortresses were shot down by Luftwaffe fighter planes.”47 Whatever confusion the Swede brings upon himself as a man, as to who he is and what his family is, begins at this moment, in Jewish anxieties about the Second World War. He thinks he is loved for his basketball game, but he is loved for the invisible fetters that enslave him to history, fetters that can only be seen at dusk, when the owl of Minerva (or the novelist) can scrutinize and understand. If a Jewish teenager in Europe circa 1943 would have seen these fetters more clearly than a Jewish basketball star in New Jersey, the fetters at issue are the same, as is history’s formidable power to instrumentalize its subjects. While Coleman throws off the fetters of history in a single daring act, Jewish Newark, grouped around the Weequahic neighborhood where the Swede grows up, dreams that it can free the Swede from the fetters of its own history, thereby freeing itself. If the Swede can assimilate into America, with his blue eyes and blond hair, perhaps these fetters are far less absolute than Hitler’s Europe would suggest; perhaps the border between Aryan and non-Aryan does not really exist and can therefore be erased; perhaps Newark can be transformed from a city of immigrants, each carrying the weight of recent and ancient history, into a city on a hill, built upon hard work, tolerance, affluence, and civic virtue—the promise that inspires the Levov family. For the Swede, this

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coerced assimilation is an education in paradox. “We” and “I” are hopelessly confused in the Swede’s World War II–era Newark, not merged into one another but strangely—almost dishonestly—constituting one another. Seymour Levov was “our very own Swede, a boy as close to a goy as we were going to get,” and we were deciding what it was that the Swede would not be. “The Swede” is created by a distinctly Jewish passion for assimilation, his American “I” the product of the Jewish “we” around him. Like Coleman, the Swede is a pioneer but with an army of like-minded pioneers behind him. The Swede was designated “the boy we were all going to follow into America, our point man into the next immersion, at home here the way the Wasps were at home here.”48 True pioneers, their home stands firmly in the future, the Swede an assimilated “I” working as a surrogate for a less assimilated “we.” Secretly fettered to history, Jewish and otherwise, Newark takes more from the Swede than it gives. At the heart of a pioneering assimilation, bred into the Swede in his Newark boyhood, is a core of emptiness. The Swede does not have his own voice, his own history, even his own name, only a stoic servitude to others. His spiritual blandness is inferior to his father’s tenacious, Newark-honed self, full of history, full of vitality, and full of an aggression that is both ugly and protective, protecting his family from the menace of life without a place in history. The Swede is glad to serve others and to serve his country, as he does toward the end of the Second World War, to do what is expected of him, because he does not have much of a self to serve. In an unsettling equation, selfishness is hard for him and selflessness easy. The Swede’s self-effacement begins not in some psychic quirk or Freudian family tangle but in historical contingency: “It all began—this heroically idealistic maneuver, this strategic, strange spiritual desire to be a bulwark of duty and ethical obligation—because of the war. . . . It all began for the Swede—as what doesn’t—in a circumstantial absurdity.” The Swede’s very kindness, his heroic kindness, mirrors a vacancy in him that begins in Newark. “As usual,” Zuckerman notes, “the Swede’s default reaction to not being able to fathom cause and effect (as opposed to his father’s reflexive suspiciousness) was to fall back on a lifelong strategy and become tolerant and charitable.”49 Having deprived the Swede of a potent self, Newark cannot give him what it gave his father, a salutary suspiciousness that reflects Lou Levov’s clarity of vision and strength of voice. Even the war

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does not teach the Swede the price of servitude to others: he becomes a marine but does not see active combat. History strikes him first with its tolerance and charity, and he tries to return the favor. The Swede embodies a Newark-inflected paradox that is both individual and collective. The effort to assimilate, symbolized and put into practice by the Swede, is glorious, giving the Jewish neighborhoods of Newark their energy and purpose and health, the goal that shines above the everyday work of making a living and raising a family, shining all the more brightly for the darkness that had engulfed European Jewry in these terrible years. Newark is a stunning exception to Jewish history in the 1940s, to Jewish history in general, but tolerant Newark is charged with the disruptive potentialities of assimilation. The Swede’s assimilation, hurried along by family and community, is debilitating: heroism and grandeur are being invested in loss. As Zuckerman describes this paradox, “In our idolizing the Swede and his unconscious oneness with America, I suppose there was a tinge of shame and self-rejection.” The Swede’s loss of a Jewish self is itself a Jewish condition, as “conflicting Jewish desires awakened by the sight of him were simultaneously becalmed by him; the contradiction in Jews who want to fit in and want to stand out, who insist they are different and insist they are no different, resolved itself in the triumphant spectacle of this Swede who was actually another of our neighborhood Seymours and Sauls who would themselves beget Stephens who would in turn beget Shawns.” The cadence of Old Testament genealogy can only be ironic in context, as can the question that immediately follows this genealogy of assimilation, “Where was the Jew in him?”50 The Jew in him had been eliminated by a nickname, which would remain the marker of the grown man. One might just as well ask, where was the Swede in him? What was there in his Newark to produce a Swede? And what in his Newark was there to produce an American? America completes Newark, although Newark stands in tension with America. The Newark that produced the Swede, Ira, and Coleman, the Newark of their youth, the Newark of the 1930s and 1940s, is a city of localities, to which ethnic or racial background is fundamental. The unbounded appetite to transcend local, racial, and ethnic limitations— prevalent in the city at large and emphatically shared by the Swede, Ira, and Coleman—derives its force from the awesomeness of these limita-

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tions and their fierce resistance to elimination. In the parent generation, Newark’s Jewish and Irish and Italian residents were all Americans, but they were American by virtue of being Jewish or Irish or Italian. To be black in East Orange, New Jersey, was still to be black, with greater educational opportunities perhaps than in the South but with all the consequences of being black anywhere in America. For the immigrants recently arrived in Newark, the prejudice against them was thin enough to wear away as a serious variable in their lives. Anti-Semitism is not among the real problems of Ira or the Swede. Prejudice against black Americans is far older by comparison, running far deeper in the American psyche. Coleman has only one option in avoiding Newark’s racial fury, and this is to become a white American. Geography favors the local for the heroes of the Newark trilogy; chronology favors the national. The Second World War was opening the country up, moving its population around, offering and promoting the allurements of national belonging. As the city balanced American with non-American, black with white, Old World with New, the nation was drawing in Newark’s native children, saving them from the isolation and grimness of Depressionera poverty, inviting them to love and defend a capacious national community. Against America Newark had very modest powers of attraction. America, gladdened by a war that had truly been won, tends toward a future of big possibilities, while Newark harkens back to the smallness of a delimited ethnic or racial past. America validates a longing for assimilation far more than Newark ever could. The dream of assimilation would not be fulfilled as long as one stayed in Newark, staying with labels as monumental as “black” and “Jewish,” reinforced by Newark’s unglamorous working-class aura. “I was a Jewish child,” Nathan Zuckerman recalls in I Married a Communist, “no two ways about that, but I didn’t care to partake of the Jewish character. I didn’t even know, clearly, what it was. I didn’t much want to. I wanted to partake of the national character. Nothing had seemed to come more naturally to my American-born parents, nothing came more naturally to me.” The national character evident in Newark, however natural the hunger for it among Jews and among others, was character subordinated to Newark locality. During the Second World War, local, balkanized, segregated Newark had to contend with a revolution in national sensibility, a harmonization of citizen and nation that could not have

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happened as quickly in peacetime, a gift to those hungering for assimilation. Nathan states that “the revolution fought and won by America’s working class was, in fact, World War II, the something large that we were all, however small, a part of, the revolution that confirmed the reality of the myth of a national character partaken of by all.” The myth of national character, accessible and honorable, threatened the city’s hold on its citizens, revealing the highways and vistas of a very big country. Because of World War II, “history had been scaled down and personalized, America had been scaled down and personalized. . . . You flood into history and history floods into you. You flood into America and America floods into you. And all by virtue of being alive in New Jersey and twelve years old and sitting by the radio in 1945.”51 History, in the form of World War II, was making Newark smaller and less permanent and less gripping than it had been. The radio was a window to the world beyond New Jersey, and Newark itself was zealously acquiescing in this flood of Americanization. ❊ Newark’s grip may have lightened with the war, but Newark’s grip is not as trifling as its children would like to believe, especially Coleman, for whom being black and being from East Orange, New Jersey, are almost visibly his or visible in who he is. The chains of Newark continuity run through family and are tested by the decision to marry. Like Ira and the Swede, Coleman aspires to marry “outside” Newark, to a marriage that will take him away from Newark forever, rendering Newark roots less overbearing for the children to come. Like Ira and the Swede, Coleman serves in the military during World War II. Unlike these two men, Coleman cannot disappear into the military, though not for lack of trying. He had boxed as a white man without getting discovered. After his father dies, Coleman leaves Howard University for the navy, signing in as a white man—without getting discovered. Yet discovery is always possible. One night he visits a brothel for whites and is thrown out for not being white. He ends up in a black bar, gets drunk, and survives the evening with a tattoo that is also a warning to him, something like the human stain of the novel’s title, a sign that cannot be erased. After the war, he goes to graduate school in New York as a white man, but when he does some professional boxing as a graduate student, he

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is once again called a nigger. He dates a black woman who knows that he is black, and she knows as well that he longs to be white. To marry a black woman would be to affirm his connection to family, to northern New Jersey, to his own blackness. It is not suitable to this American Platonist; “the whole thing lacks the ambition—it fails to feed that conception of himself that’s been driving him all his life.”52 Newark is harder to leave than Coleman knows, its grip more persistent. In 1948, when Coleman is twenty-two, he meets Steena, a white woman from the Midwest. She does not know that he is black or does not fully know. Even for credulous Steena, “not everything he [Coleman] had eradicated from himself had vanished into thin air.” Their erotic attraction is rooted, without their ever saying so, in America’s sexual-racial archetypes, making their union both passionate and, when it comes to marriage, impossible. History has a curious power over them; “the mysterious forces that made their sexual ardor inexhaustible . . . would one day work to dissolve his story of himself right before her eyes.” His story of himself, the implication that he is white, is of course a collection of lies, founded upon a spectacular racial lie. Coleman is honest enough, however, to bring Steena back to East Orange, to show her the truth of his family. When Coleman was growing up, the family home was a solitary black home on a white street, gently suggestive of the illusion that white and black are flexible entities in American life, exactly the illusion that must have motivated Coleman’s visit to East ­Orange with Steena: “The Silks had been in their one-family house since 1925, the year before Coleman was born. When they got there, the rest of the street was white, and the small frame house was sold to them by a couple who were mad at the people next door and so were determined to sell it to colored to spite them.”53 This is urban history as metaphor. Coleman is a solitary black man among whites, surrounded by an aggression that has nothing to do with him personally and everything to do with the color of his skin. Steena’s visit to East Orange teaches Coleman a bitter lesson. He has not left East Orange and cannot ever leave East Orange. Steena and Coleman arrive at the Silk house with their good intentions. They are met with politeness and hospitality, with seeming normalcy, though Coleman’s mother and sister had not been told to expect a white woman. Steena, too, is polite, but common politeness cannot mask

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the impossibility of the arrangement. Their interracial New Jersey pastoral is a hoax, “externally a Sunday like every nice family’s dream of total Sunday happiness and, consequently, strikingly in contrast with life, which, as experience had already taught even the youngest of these four, could not for half a minute running be purged of its inherent instability, let alone be beaten down into a predictable essence.” 54 That evening, when Coleman and Steena return to New York, Steena leaves him. Coleman can continue his experiments in whiteness in New York. He has behind him a workable history of passing, as a boxer, as a soldier, and as a graduate student. He is studying classics, the “whitest” of academic disciplines, placing him at the center of Western culture, further equipment for the hard work of passing. He can teach Ovid’s Metamorphoses and reflect firsthand on the excitement of his own metamorphosis. Black in some way, he is perceived as white; he can be with white women; only he cannot integrate the white future before him with the black past that his family embodies. East Orange had made him want to leave, yet the family, with their house purchased in 1925, has a history that makes Steena leave him, a history that she, a white woman, does not want her children to share. The only continuity Coleman can manage is a dishonest one. Coleman’s high-minded father had planted a bizarre high-mindedness in his son, which leads him to desire a fraudulent continuity, an eternal departure from Newark, from its past as much as its present. Steena’s trip to New Jersey is a variation upon the theme of Newark riddles. In its amalgam of Newark riddles, the Sunday at the Silks resembles Thanksgiving with the Levov family. The Thanksgiving is celebrated by a Jewish family intermarried with an Irish-Catholic family. The granddaughter, Merry, will go out from this family, become a terrorist, and end whatever family harmony had been achieved beforehand. Neither family is happy with the decision, the Swede’s decision, to join IrishCatholic with Jewish. Yet they find some shared cultural principle together on Thanksgiving, as if to celebrate the fantasy that Newark is a wonderful city, at the heart of a wonderful nation, consisting only of wonderful families. In this fantasy, Newark is the basis of a tradition that unites, overcoming grievance and suspicion, putting history to rest or ratifying the belief that history’s grip is benevolent. The benevolence of Newark in this family picture is another aspect of the city’s riddle,

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though Newark, wellspring of memory, can also foster division. The two grandmothers, Levov and Dwyer, regard each other warily. The Dwyers came from Elizabeth, New Jersey, and are infatuated with its Catholic past. Dorothy Dwyer pays no less attention to detail than Nathan Zuckerman or Philip Roth, telling Sylvia Levov that “the Germans started St. Michael’s parish and the Polish had St. Adalbert’s, at Third Street and East Jersey Street, and St. Patrick’s is right behind Jackson Park, around the corner. St. Mary’s is up in south Elizabeth, in the West End section, and that’s where my parents started.” Dorothy Dwyer speaks “as though this were the Middle Ages and beyond the fields tilled by the peasants the only points of demarcation were the spires of the parish churches on the horizon.” Time is porous in the realm of memory, and Sylvia Levov must sit and listen, “too polite to do anything other than nod and smile but her face as white as a sheet.”55 On the map Newark and Elizabeth may be close to one another, but for Sylvia Levov and Dorothy Dwyer they are as far apart as Rome and Jerusalem. The grandmothers speak past each other, but the Thanksgiving itself could be worse. The description of the Dwyer-Levov Thanksgiving culminates in a masterpiece of irony, a tribute to America, to New Jersey, to Newark and their aggregate power to subdue history. The family meets “on the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff— no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey for two hundred fifty million people—one colossal turkey feeds all.” The turkey liberates America’s countless minorities from their past, contributing to a “moratorium on funny foods and funny ways and religious exclusivity, a moratorium on the three-thousand-year-old nostalgia of the Jews, a moratorium on Christ and the cross and the crucifixion for the Christians, when everyone in New Jersey and elsewhere can be more passive about their irrationalities than they are the rest of the year.” (Even in this postethnic paradise, the irrationalities are merely passive.) The bitter herbs commemorate the bitterness of Jewish exile; and the crucifixion, the bitterness of Christ’s murder. The turkey is simply to be enjoyed, its enjoyment sanctioning a “moratorium on all the grievances and resentments, and not only for the Dwyers and the Levovs but for everyone in America who is suspicious of everyone else. It is the American pastoral par excellence,” Nathan Zuckerman explains, with gentle comic timing,

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“and it lasts twenty-four hours.”56 The ironies here are delightful. (Roth had anticipated them in Portnoy’s Complaint, in “the historical Thanksgiving meal prepared by my mother, that freckled and red-headed descendant of Polish Jews!”)57 Each sentence of the description, in American Pastoral, suggests the impossibility of the endeavor, the impossibility of an American pastoral, of forgetting Jewish nostalgia and the Christian cross, and each sentence points up the success of this particular American Thanksgiving, though a success limited to a single calendar day, after which all the old irrationalities are sure to come rushing back. The irony of Thanksgiving’s success—the power of Thanksgiving, to cite a section title from Roth’s 1961 novel Letting Go—is heightened by the behavior of the two grandfathers, Jim Dwyer and Lou Levov. They had both wanted their children to marry within the faith. The marriage between Dawn and the Swede was traumatic from the beginning, and is traumatic still for the two grandmothers. At Thanksgiving dinner, though, “to everyone’s surprise . . . Lou Levov and Jim Dwyer would wind up spending the whole time swapping stories about what life had been like when they were boys. Two great memories meet, and it is futile to try to contain them. They are on to something even more serious than Judaism and Catholicism—they are on to Newark and Elizabeth— and all day long nobody can tear them apart.”58 Northern New Jersey is the immediate house of memory, larger somehow than its Jewish or Christian competitors. The connection between Jim Dwyer and Lou Levov is stronger, possibly, than the connection each father has with his children and grandchildren: the Swede and Dawn have left Elizabeth and Newark for Old Rimrock and the affluent western part of the state. Memory can unite Jim and Lou, just as it divides the generations. The majesty of Newark stories will die with the grandparents. With them, memory reaches a natural limit, for the Swede and Dawn are not creatures of memory. They are the products of their decision to marry outside their respective communities of memory, to leave behind their social class, true believers in the American pastoral and skeptics when it comes to memories of Jewish exile and Christian martyrdom. They are skeptics even about Newark and Elizabeth stories, as if they cannot tell these stories firsthand, despite having grown up there. The density of Newark memory is hypnotic, poetic in its rhythms, Homeric in its implication that an entire civilization can be captured in

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a few geographic details, names, and images—Achilles’s shield, made in New Jersey. Thanksgiving may last a few short hours, but memory, of the kind burnished by “two great memories,” is a permanent possession: “‘All immigrants down at the port.’ Jim Dwyer always began with the port. ‘Worked at Singer’s. That was the big one down there. There was the shipbuilding industry down there too, of course. But everyone in Elizabeth worked at Singer’s at one time or another. Some maybe out on Newark Avenue, at the Burry Biscuit Cookie Company. People either making sewing machines or making cookies.’” It is strange how this line of insignificant detail is so poignant and significant in context: “Sure, all the immigrants, when they come over, could get a job at Singer’s. That was the biggest thing around. That and Standard Oil. Standard Oil out at Linden. The Bayway section. Right at the edge of what they called then Greater Elizabeth. . . . The mayor? Joe Brophy. Sure. He owned the coal company and he was also mayor of the city.”59 The canary funeral in Newark, the self-sufficient cosmos of East ­Orange, and the neighborhoods of Elizabeth achieve permanence through detail and beauty through narrative voice, the New Jersey vernacular; but the city itself is on the cusp of destruction. Its children, with the encouragement of their memory-besotted parents, have chosen not to stay in the ancestral city. In the same family, the intensity of Newark memory cohabits with an intense desire to leave. The history of Newark, as exposed in the Newark trilogy, reveals a city that wishes—if such a thing were possible—to leave itself behind.

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Leaving Sorry, but there’s no escaping destiny, bubi, a man’s cartilage is his fate. But I don’t want to escape! Well, that’s nice too—because you can’t. Oh, but yes I can—if I should want to! But you said you don’t want to. But if I did! Portnoy’s Complaint Alienated? Just another way to say “Set Free!” Nathan Zuckerman in The Anatomy Lesson

Leaving Newark is so natural that there is no discreet moment of departure in the Newark trilogy, no packing of bags, no train leaving the station, no hand waving goodbye. When Newark’s sons leave, their leaving confirms other facts and other decisions—casually taken, lightly made. Coleman Silk was somewhere “on his trajectory outward” when he left New Jersey, his leaving a small point on a larger trajectory, from the inward world of East Orange, from the Silk family, and outward into America.1 America itself rewards leaving or does not seem to punish it. The three heroes do not leave for Europe: they are not writers and have nothing in common with the Lost Generation, who left America because it was somehow intolerable or because Paris or Pamplona or the Côte d’Azur was irresistible. These New Jersey–bred heroes do not even leave for some enclave of bohemian rebellion within America. They are not portraits of the artists as young men, leaving the village and the church for a cosmopolitan modernity, liberated or alienated from the past by their exceptional freedom. Leaving itself is liberating, a liberating embrace of America, not a liberation from America. They are Americans after all, living out American dramas, and, as Americans, they must be embracing themselves by embracing their native land; or so they think. Each of the three heroes is a US soldier for a while. One makes his way out to rural New Jersey, back to an Ur-America where Revolutionary War battles were fought. The other two—Ira and Coleman—pass through the gateway of New York City, which absolves

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them of their Newark particularity, sending them forward or outward, as New York’s Ellis Island once had, into America.2 At many points, the Newark trilogy is haunted by Moby-Dick, by Melville’s imagination of disaster on one level and on another by the imperative of leaving that starts Ishmael, the melancholic New Yorker, on his long journey. The first chapter of Moby-Dick, “Loomings,” establishes Ishmael’s attraction to the sea. His name a biblical synonym for exile, Ishmael lives in “your insular city of Manhattoes,” which pushes its residents outward, in spirit at least: “Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the Battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.” New York is filled with New Yorkers lost in “ocean reveries,” staring at the ships that ring the island of Manhattan, wishing to be out on the open sea. “Tell me,” Ishmael the narrator asks, “does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all these ships attract men thither?” Unlike the New Yorkers who dream of leaving but remain tied to the city’s jobs and the city’s worries, Ishmael has the courage to go. He is also compelled to leave by an inner dissatisfaction that is more morbid than heroic, a man more curious to see the world and to flee the world he knows than a man burning to transform himself. A trip that will end in disaster begins in despair: “Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul . . . then I account it high time to go to sea as soon as I can,” Ishmael explains.3 He leaves New York, without leaving America: his whaling ship, the Pequod, is a microcosm of America, of its social structure, of its careening ambition, its rough-hewn fraternity and its vigorous appetites. This is the America reached by those with the will to leave their hometowns or, in the case of the Pequod’s mad captain, Ahab, his home island of Nantucket.4 Roth’s latter-day Ishmael is not so much Coleman or Ira or the Swede as Mickey Sabbath, and Sabbath’s Theater is a symphony of leaving. First there is Mickey, whose family idyll on the Jersey shore is shattered by his brother’s death. In turn, his mother’s grief kindles the eros of leaving in Mickey: “In 1946, at seventeen, when, instead of waiting a year to be drafted, Sabbath went to sea only weeks after graduating, he was motivated as much by his need to escape his mother’s tyrannical gloom—and his father’s pathetic aloofness—as by an unsatisfied long-

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ing that had been gathering force in him since masturbation had all but taken charge of his life.” Mickey’s first wife, Nikki, “was of course in flight from a domineering, old-fashioned father she loathed.” Mickey’s second wife, Roseanna, writes in her diary that “my mother’s mission in life was to justify leaving [her husband],” writing of her own “reenactment of leaving my father at age thirteen, 39 years ago, in February.” The will to leave is mirrored in the impossibility of leaving. “Everything passes?” the novel asks. “Nothing passes,” it answers.5 Sabbath’s mistress, Drenka, whose state trooper son makes a cameo appearance in The Human Stain, leaves Mickey by dying, just as his brother had during World War II. This is Sabbath’s internal drama, played out in the theater of his soul. Yet those who have left him, by dying, are the ones who are most alive to him. Typically, Sabbath stands at his parents’ graves, readying himself to leave and unable to leave: The repeated leaving and returning did not escape his mockery; but he could do nothing about it. He could not go and he could not go and he could not go, and then—like any dumb creature who abruptly stops doing one thing and starts doing another and about whom you can never tell if life is all freedom or no freedom—he could go and he went.6

Sabbath’s Theater ends with Sabbath in a nirvana of leaving. Arriving and leaving are mystically fused after Sabbath has physically returned to the Jersey shore of his childhood. There he is “freed from the urge that was the hallmark of his living: the overwhelming desire to be elsewhere. He was elsewhere. He had achieved the goal,” telling himself that “elsewhere, Sabbath, is your home and no one is your mate.”7 Another fable of leaving, sweet as Sabbath’s Theater is salty, is Goodbye, Columbus, the Newark trilogy in reverse. The character who leaves is not the male protagonist, Neil Klugman, but his summer girlfriend, Brenda Patimkin. The servile Neil lacks the history-altering ambition of the Swede, Ira, and Coleman, and his lack of motion is the impulse around which the novella crystallizes. His parents, “those penniless deserters,” have left for Arizona, but Neil is still in Newark, living with his aunt and uncle and working at the Newark Public Library. The library is the place where his ambition is negated. Toward the novella’s beginning, he muses that “the library was not going to be my lifework, I knew it”; and later, with more anxiety, he asserts that “the library wasn’t

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going to be my life.” The novella’s end is reached when Neil finds himself returning, not just to Newark, but to his mediocre job in Newark. First he contemplates his image in the glass door of Harvard’s Lamont Library, hallowed ground in the landscape of American ambition. For a while he lingers before the library. Then, “I did not look very much longer, but took a train that got me into Newark just as the sun was rising on the first day of the Jewish New Year. I was back in plenty of time for work.”8 The motion of Goodbye, Columbus is of Neil moving back to the Newark that is his unspectacular, lower-middle-class destiny. Neil tries, and fails, to leave Newark, while Brenda leaves Neil and leaves Newark at the same time.9 Roth’s novella retraces the emotions of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story, “Winter Dreams,” Fitzgerald’s dress rehearsal for The Great Gatsby. Leaving, in “Winter Dreams” as in Goodbye, Columbus, is not only spatial but a matter of rising up in social class. Both short story and novella begin in a country club, a place of elevated social status. Fitzgerald’s protagonist is Dexter Green, and the club in Goodbye, Columbus is the Green Lane Country Club; Dexter is twenty-four when he falls in love with Judy Jones, Neil twenty-three when he falls in love with Brenda. Middle-class Neil meets upper-­ middle-class Brenda just outside Newark.10 His visit to Brenda’s house is literally an ascent from Newark: “Once I’d driven out of Newark, past Irvington and the packed-in tangle of railroad crossings, switchmen shacks, lumberyards, Dairy Queens, and used-car lots, the night grew cooler. It was, in fact, as though the hundred and eighty feet that the suburbs rose in altitude above Newark brought one closer to heaven.” The departure from Newark is heavenly, even more than the suburbs themselves. Leaving Newark implies erotic excitement and anticipation, Newark a sundry map that can be redrawn in fantastic, lyrical color. “Inside my glove compartment,” Neil thinks, “it was as though the map of The City Streets of Newark had metamorphosed into crickets, for those mile-long tarry streets did not exist for me any longer, and the night noises sounded as loud as the blood whacking at my temples.”11 Neil enjoys the fantasy of leaving, but he is also—more than he fully knows—a Newark native son. When he first embraces Brenda, he senses wings on her back. They are the wings of fantasy, just as Brenda is Neil’s vehicle for flight. “The smallness of the wings did not bother me,” Neil concludes; “it would not take an eagle to carry me up those lousy hun-

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dred and eighty feet that make summer nights so much cooler in Short Hills than they are in Newark.” Neil first meets Brenda near a swimming pool, an image associated with a Gaugin painting of “native women standing knee-high in a rose-colored stream.” New Jersey Brenda becomes an exotic Tahiti beauty in Nathan’s gaze, “like a sailor’s dream of a Polynesian maiden, albeit one with prescription sun glasses and the last name of Patimkin.” The comic fantasy works because of Neil’s distance from Brenda, despite their both being Jewish and having Newark roots. It is Neil’s attachment to Newark that creates this distance. When Brenda avoids the word “Radcliffe,” by saying she goes to school in Boston, Neil reads this as betrayal: “I disliked her for the answer. Whenever anyone asks me where I went to school I come right out with it: Newark College of Rutgers University. I may say it a bit too ringingly, too fast, too up-in-the-air, but I say it.” Neil is content to be in Newark and cherishes his “deep knowledge of Newark, an attachment so rooted that it could not help but branch out into affection.” Being from Newark makes Neil vaguely more Jewish than suburban Brenda. When Neil demonstrates his knowledge of a Yiddish word, he wins the approval of Brenda’s father, who works in Newark and who says, “They’re goyim, my kids, that’s how much they understand.”12 The father’s sarcasm measures what his children have left. Brenda has journeyed so far into America that she never quite sees Neil from Newark. As the story begins, Brenda asks Neil to hold her glasses so she can go swimming, a gesture that is doubly symbolic. Not only will Brenda refuse to focus on Neil but she sees him, from the beginning, as someone destined to serve her. “‘Brenda,’ I said, ‘you haven’t asked me anything about me,’” Neil complains. Then, “for the first time in two weeks I’d known her she asked me a question about me.” Brenda speaks to Neil as if, like her, he has left Newark: “Money is a waste for her,” Brenda says of her mother. “She doesn’t even know how to enjoy it. She still thinks we live in Newark.” Brenda’s father cannot remember Neil’s name, and Brenda’s mother, who resents Brenda’s freedom, resents Brenda more for dating a boy from Newark. The one Patimkin family member who recognizes a kindred spirit in Neil, who sees Neil clearly and speaks with him candidly, is Leo Patimkin, Brenda’s miserable Willie Loman–like uncle: “Leo was forty-eight years old and he had learned. He pursued discomfort and sorrow,” as is the case with

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Neil, who pursues Brenda with an intuition of sorrow. Diving into the country club swimming pool, “I was sure when I left the water Brenda would be gone.”13 Toward the summer’s end, he feels “a rumor of the hollowness that would come when Brenda was away.” And throughout he remains her subordinate: “I drove Brenda to the train at noon, and she left me” to return to Radcliffe. When they confront each other, in Boston, she places culpability on Neil’s shoulders: “You keep acting as if I was going to run away from you every minute.” Though the observation is astute, the tenses are wrong. Brenda had long ago left for New England, and Neil, stymied by his “muscleless devotion” to library work and to sundry Newark, is too modest to leave with her.14 ❊ The Swede, Ira, and Coleman resemble Ishmael and Mickey Sabbath more than they do Neil Klugman. They are the ones who leave and not the ones who are left. They have the will to leave, and, for them, leaving Newark is their entry into a complicated America. America can accept them on generous terms, a country rich in precedent for taking in those who leave. Charles Taylor refers to an “American tradition of leaving home” and for Werner Sollors “it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the exodus is one of America’s central themes.”15 The act of leaving informs the founding myths of the Plymouth Bay Colony and Jamestown, which another mythic arrival (and leaving) resembled at the turn of the century, the wave of immigrants who came between the 1880s and 1920s, grandparents to the heroes of Roth’s literature; or the black migration from South to North that informs The Human Stain. American culture even celebrates those who left the East Coast for the West, whose ancestors had left Europe, joining these various myths into a conflation of mobility with national destiny: pilgrims, immigrants, pioneers, perpetually finding and crossing frontiers. All have their measure of heroism in American culture, but the very ease of mobility and acceptance comes with a cost that can trouble the terms of acceptance. One has left Newark; one is an American; one has cast off the old labels, with all their unwanted historical connotations. New labels can be worn lightly, and in this lightness is a space to be filled, the space created by leaving. Precisely this space is a danger zone for the Newark trilogy’s heroes. They can fill it “honestly” or they can play games, filling empty space with

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fantasies that would have been ridiculous in Newark but are plausible in America. In his study of Philip Roth, Ross Posnock points to “the ideology of American selfhood—the individual’s sovereign immunity to social claims—a fantasy that remains at the center of our culture.”16 Having dispensed with kings, a massive republic crowns the individual, and this empowered sovereign may do as he pleases, ordering social claims as he likes or ignoring them altogether. Leaving Newark can invite deception, not just the discovery of a new self but the creation of a false self, a false self in need of a false history. In Operation Shylock, leaving Golden Age Newark is associated with leaving the Garden of Eden and also with the discovery of fiction, each departure involved with the knowledge of good and evil. Leaving Newark encourages the fictionalizing of self in a novel about selves that are doubled and doubled and doubled. An adult character named Philip Roth, who happens to resemble the novel’s author, struggles to defend himself from a Philip Roth imposter, who also resembles the author of the novel. The narrative voice reflects on how he, Philip Roth, “should never have left the front stoop in Newark. I never longed so passionately . . . for my life before impersonation and imitation and twofoldedness set in, life before self-mockery and self-idealization.” Leaving confuses the relationship between surface and thing, between the self and the world, transforming humble Newark back into the site of divine equilibrium. Paradise was Newark “back when what was outside was outside and what was inside was inside, when everything still divided cleanly and nothing happened that couldn’t be explained. I left the front stoop of Leslie Street, ate of the fruit of the tree of fiction, and nothing, neither reality nor myself, had been the same since.”17 By comparison with the reality games in Operation Shylock, the Newark trilogy is simplicity itself, though in all of the trilogy’s novels, self and reality are adversarial partners, their confusion associated with the sin of maturity, which begins in leaving Newark. Once exiled from the front stoop, the self metamorphoses from oneness into twofoldedness, its oneness left behind in the singular place, where Adam was Adam and Eve Eve. The fruit of fiction is gathered in the bitterness of the ensuing exile. For all the symbolism and metaphysical meaning encoded in the act of leaving, these novels of departure also trace a hard historical fact. Newark itself endured a mass exodus after World War II, causing “socially disastrous patterns of

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under­employment and transience” by the 1990s.”18 Over time, too many native sons and daughters had left Newark’s front stoops. When they leave, the Swede, Ira, and Coleman enter a fun house of masks and disguises, mostly of their own choosing and of their own making. There is exhilaration in trying on masks. Simone Weil’s image of Greek heroes leaving for war perfectly describes the three Newark protagonists on their way out of Newark: “To the spirits of those embarking no necessity yet presents itself; consequently they go off as though to a game, as though on a holiday from the confinement of daily life”—or, put in slightly different terms, as though on holiday from the confinement of history.19 Daring and talent and intelligence are taxed to make the most effective masks and to convince others that mask and face are identical. Coleman, to take the most profound example, turns his face from black to white—by an act of mental, not physical, will—and wears for decades the mask of a New Jersey–born Jew. (This is the story he tells others about his white self.) The mere fact of Coleman’s metamorphosis is miraculous, though beneath the miracle is a hard core of brutality and selfishness. The Swede carries a named mask from adolescence to adulthood. His house—in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, Old Rimrock the temporal opposite of Newark—is a mask of another kind, a piece of Colonial or Revolutionary Americana that he does not so much own as pretend to own, implicating his family in the pretense. Ira wears masks for a living, and he has several masks, one of which is political: he is a communist but will not admit this openly, so he wears the mask of an American democrat, a child of Abraham Lincoln. The masks these men wear are convenient. They make certain appetites, certain romantic configurations, and certain professional aspirations possible. They speed the trajectory outward, redefining the limits of “outward” and eventually of “inward,” adding length to the distance they can travel from lowly Newark, opening Manhattan to Ira, a WASP refinement to the Swede, and academic New England to Coleman. These are places on the American map that they could not have reached without their masks and disguises and fake names, their many-sided historical swindles.20 Masked men, the Swede, Ira, and Coleman are surrounded by masked women who have left their own Newarks. In The Human Stain, Coleman is paired with a French literature professor, Delphine Roux,

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who persecutes him, though she is also his unlikely doppel­gänger. She has left France for America so that she can have her own story and not be defined, as Coleman would not be defined, by family and region and history. Delphine Roux is an upscale but also a classic immigrant to America. Coleman and Delphine are united, finally, in their respective solitude; there is no cathartic unmasking at the end of their journeys. The Swede’s wife is Dawn, an Irish-Catholic from Elizabeth, New Jersey, who plays the WASP patrician in Old Rimrock. Eventually, she plays at being the Swede’s wife, betraying him with a New Jersey neighbor after undergoing a face-lift in Switzerland. One mask engenders another, deception multiplying into infinity. Ira’s wife is an actress, Brooklyn born, who disavows her past, fleeing first to California, leaving home in the grandest way she can, becoming a Hollywood star, then a star on Broadway. At some point, Chava Fromkin, her real name, disappears and is replaced by Eve Frame. Her marriage with Ira is disastrous, leaving Ira mentally unstable, without any mask at all or only mask, without any self. Eve unmasks Ira with political ferocity, publishing a memoir of their marriage under the sensational title I Married a Communist and doing so at the height of McCarthyism, when such revelations could be matters of state. Roth/Zuckerman can then unmask these unmaskings in a novel with the same sensational title. The journey out from Newark becomes, in the Newark trilogy, a journey back to Newark, where the stories behind the mask come into focus. The Swede, Ira, and Coleman do not want to go back to Newark. There is nothing for them to go back to once they don their masks and get involved with their masked women; but neither do they ever arrive anywhere. Their masked leaving makes for an endless—and difficult— journey. The Newark trilogy is Homeric in its themes but not in its structure. Odysseus and Penelope, in this New World, would have no continuous Ithaca, no solid palace, and no way of recognizing the voyager who has evaded danger, disorientation, nonrecognition, and misrecognition. Odysseus must finally set aside his talent for artifice and deception, after Penelope sees who he is, for his journey to end where it begins, in Ithaca, in Odysseus’s Newark. By contrast, the delight of leaving and never returning is an American delight. Ira’s America, tinged with political fantasy, is strange and unreal, a proletarian experiment eternally waiting to happen, the baroque dream of an authentic

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working class. Ira’s infatuation with communism is his way of being an adult American. He has a thirst for belonging that derives from the death of his parents, “an early orphaning that freed Ira to connect to whatever he wanted but also left him unmoored enough to give himself to something almost right off the bat, to give himself totally and forever.”21 He tries not to give in to violence, his inherent rage. If Coleman is Odysseus, Ira is Achilles. At the age of sixteen, Ira kills a man, a crucial moment of personal history that, in his brother Murray’s retelling of the story, is inseparable from the urban detail of Newark history: He [Ira] lived on a dinky little street way down by Dreamland Park, where they built the project after the war. He made the turn onto Meeker at Elizabeth Avenue and was headed down the dark street across from Weequahic Park, in the direction of Freylinghuysen ­Avenue, when a guy emerged from the shadows where Millman’s hot dog stand used to be.22

When Ira has a violent episode in the army, almost killing a man, it is the second such episode: “Ira had already killed somebody. That’s why he left Newark and headed for the sticks and worked in the mines when he was a kid. He was on the lam,” Murray explains.23 It is a dark story that will have a dark ending, and there is nothing Napoleonic in Ira’s flight from Newark. It is an act of necessity, with the subterranean mines as his hiding place. Ira’s communist America, his hope for a radical future, follows from the darkness of his obscure personal past. Ira’s new self, founded on the denial of murder, is his communist self. In the army, he meets a communist, Johnny O’Day, who begins to educate this rude New Jersey boy. Ira assimilates the communist stylization of working-class life. He has a working-class love affair—with a stripper—that almost results in marriage. His romance is a “communist” romance, since “humanity to Ira was synonymous with hardship and calamity,” according to Murray, and Donna Jones knows hardship and calamity, even more so after she aborts Ira’s child.24 A chance resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, the archetypal self-made man of American politics, leads Ira to work as a Lincoln impersonator: Lincoln’s fervor for emancipation captivates the communist Ira.25 Achieving greater and greater success, Ira circulates in the world of the 1940s left-wing elite, attending Henry Wallace rallies

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and listening to Paul Robeson sing. O’Day, who leaves the army for a job in the Midwest—ostensibly working for a factory while trying to organize its workers—is Ira’s Middle American, working-class conscience. A note of hypocrisy hovers above Ira’s communist self. He marries a wealthy actress and socialite; he abhors Harry Truman and any kind of centrist liberalism, often feeling contempt for the moneyed world of Manhattan; yet he lives in a Manhattan townhouse. When Ira’s marriage begins to fail, he heads back to Zinc Town, to which he had escaped as an adolescent. Ira’s communism is a doomed project, in part because Ira is more than naïve politically, in part because the communist movement, still something of a cultural factor in the 1940s, evaporated in the 1950s. Ira’s love affair with proletarian America mandates a return to Zinc Town and not to Newark. Coleman’s America is more radiant, a fantasy country that he is able to locate. Often enough, America satiates Coleman’s “hunger to leave the house and be transformed.” Defying the horrible racial logic of American life, Coleman manages to move to an American rhythm, his defiance an American defiance. It is his native culture that encourages him “to become a new being. To bifurcate. The drama that underlies America’s story, the high drama that is upping and leaving—and the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive demands.” Coleman becomes an American by pretending to be white, and America is wonderfully indifferent to Coleman’s drama. There is no police force to investigate his racial sleight of hand, no commission to deny him the pleasures of self-deception and the deception of others. “What he’d learned in the navy is that all you have to do is give a pretty good and consistent line about yourself and nobody ever inquires, because no one’s that interested.” What matters is the story you tell—that it be a good, believable story—for it need not be a true story. Coleman’s untruth clarifies, oddly enough. Passing himself off as a Jew makes Coleman feel at home in America: “As a heretofore unknown amalgam of the most unalike of America’s historic undesirables [Jewish and black], he now made sense.” It is a democratic choice, on Coleman’s part, to claim his equality with other American citizens, even if they persist in their tragic, inconsistent attachment to racial inequality. His racial lie connects him to the pioneers but even more power­fully to the Declaration of Independence, making Coleman an unlikely relative of Thomas Jefferson: “Was he merely being another American and, in

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the great frontier tradition, accepting the democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard if to do so contributes to the pursuit of happiness?”26 For decades, American happiness is Coleman’s to pursue. True to its title, American Pastoral is suffused with classic American motifs. Most obvious is the life story of Dawn, the Swede’s wife, who leaves Elizabeth (her Newark) via the Miss America competition. She competes in 1949, representing New Jersey in Atlantic City. In her own opinion, she is competing for her family, for the scholarship money she might win, and for a prize that might make her family proud; but this is her opinion and closer to self-delusion. In her mother’s opinion, Dawn had been heading toward social mobility within Catholic New Jersey; the path was already laid out for her. A good Catholic marriage would have taken her to Spring Lake, an affluent Irish American community, where she could “have had a wonderful life,” her mother believes; “St. Catherine’s and St. Margaret’s are there. . . . But Mary Dawn’s the rebel of the family—always was. Always did just what she wanted and from the time she marched off to be in that contest, fitting in like every­ body else is not something she wanted.”27 The contest is described in meticulous detail, all of which reinforces a sense of the Miss America competition as staged, regimented, and conformist. It is no orgy of individualism, more a low-grade cultural spectacle informed by the false rhetoric of public service. Dawn’s mother is not wrong in her historical analysis, for Dawn becomes Dawn by competing in this contest, dropping her Christian name for her more generic second name, Dawn, suggestive of new beginnings, as is the surname O’Day. Dawn feels like she is ascending to the American heights in the Miss America contest, and she does not want to descend back to mundane Elizabeth. Making it out to Silver Lake might be her mother’s pursuit of happiness, but this is the pursuit of happiness on a small scale. Dawn and her husband, the Swede, are united by their intoxication with America, by her efforts to be Miss America and his efforts to marry Miss America or at least Miss New Jersey. She leaves off the telltale Catholic prefix, her first name, something that he, the Swede, never had to do. In Portnoy’s Complaint, Alexander Portnoy calls his girlfriend the Monkey in part to avoid her real name, Mary Jane. As he asks his therapist, “(Is there a clue here as to why I so resisted calling the Monkey by her name, except to chastise her? No?)”28 Seymour Levov’s fellow

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Jews had baptized him the Swede, fashioning a Nordic American out of a Newark Jew. This childhood transformation is not hurtful for the Swede. Like Coleman’s, it is exciting. The Swede carries his nickname “with him like an invisible passport, all the while wandering deeper and deeper into an American’s life, forthrightly evolving into a large, smooth, optimistic American such as his conspicuously raw forebears— including the obstinate father whose American claim was not inconsiderable—couldn’t have dreamed of as one of their own.”29 The name as passport is a conspicuous detail: the Swede is crossing borders, traveling from place to place, from country to country, with the vague suggestion that he is coming to inhabit somebody else’s life, an immigrant leaving the homeland of the self. He is wandering, open to experience, open to change. His father, Lou, by comparison, is obstinate, stubbornly tied to Newark, and his Jewish forebears are raw, unrefined, untempered by the blessings of America, as raw as the Swede is smooth. They are small in the narrowness of their ambitions and pessimistic because this is what history had told them to be, what anti-Semitic, strife-torn Russia had forced them to be. Theirs were visible, conspicuous passports, stamped in dark, intractable letters, and they could not—would not— wander from Jew to American, not overnight. The Swede has evolved beyond even the dreams of his ancestors, whatever these dreams were, and, for this reason, he wanders the American strand alone. America reverberates for the Swede; Judaism does not. As he tells Dawn, “I used to go to the High Holidays with my father. . . . I never understood what any of that stuff had to do with being a man. What the glove factory had to do with his being a man anybody could understand—just about everything . . . the factory was a place where I wanted to be from the time I was a boy. The ball field was a place I wanted to be from the time I started kindergarten.” Judaism is a foreign religion, unrelated to the stuff of manhood, to which hard work and professional achievement are central. Sports, the American pursuit of happiness par excellence, has less to do with his father’s manhood than with American manhood. The Swede’s distinction in sports presages his distinguished American manhood, rooted in the fact that “he loved America. Loved being an American.” The American thread is what ties up the Swede’s life, making it whole, a jubilant passage, all the more American for the Swede’s leaving Newark and the immigrant accents still to be heard in

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its streets and ethnic enclaves. As an adult, the Swede comes to know that “all the pleasures of his younger years were American pleasures, all that success and happiness have been American . . . all the loneliness he would feel as a man without all his American feeling.”30 The Swede leaves Newark without suffering a moment of alienation, dismissing religious Judaism on the grounds of American manhood, implying that the two are alien to each other, at least in the Levov family, and doing so without guilt or difficulty. What he feels is the rightness of choosing America above Newark and above Judaism. Leaving Newark for America is a choice so natural that it hardly seems a choice. The Swede leaves Newark, not so much by physically leaving the city but by marrying a non-Jew. With his Irish-Catholic wife, he leaves the city behind, leaving behind his family and creating a future uncolored by the rules and precedents of the past. His marrying Dawn is his bar mitzvah of assimilation into America. The Swede’s first girlfriend had been Irish-Catholic, and Lou broke up their relationship. When the Swede’s mother learns that he wishes to marry Mary Dawn Dwyer, she expresses the hope that Dawn will convert to Judaism. The Swede rejects this proposal bluntly, explaining that “a man to whom practicing Judaism means nothing, Mother, doesn’t ask his wife to convert.” Lou takes a different approach, trying to tether the Swede and Dawn to the Levov family as much as he can, trying to prevent his son from leaving the Jewish orbit, from being the paterfamilias of a Catholic family. Lou invites Dawn to an interview, as comic as it is serious, and he uses his business skills to negotiate a settlement between his Judaism and her Catholicism. As the Swede recalls, “His father had deliberately let the negotiation string out until the twenty-two-year-old girl was at the end of her strength and then, shifting by a hundred and eighty degrees his position on baptism, wrapped up the deal giving her only Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the Easter bonnet.” When Dawn sees the material of reconciliation in their dealing, Lou disagrees sharply. He, Lou, is not like Dawn’s father: “he [Dawn’s father] is a devout catholic. and i am a jew. that is no small difference.” It is a short sentence, a simple declaration, “I am a Jew,” and it is precisely the sentence that Lou’s son, the Swede, never wishes to speak. The Swede is an American, elaborating his personal declaration of independence by marrying outside the tribe, the marriage that raises the Swede into a stratosphere of happi-

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ness, his greatest achievement: “Dawn was the woman who had inspired the feat for which even his record-breaking athletic career had barely fortified him: vaulting his father. The feat of standing up to his father.”31 It is the Swede’s way of gaining an impeccably American passport. ❊ For the Swede, Ira, and Coleman, being American is not enough. They try to vault themselves to the highest rungs of American life, as if the energy required to vault oneself out of Newark can only be continued, the vault a spring that is perpetually uncoiling. The first step of leaving Newark dictates the second step of entering America on the most exceptional terms. Otherwise, why make all the effort to leave Newark? Since one is no longer tied to Newark, one can walk untied in America, realizing all that this fabulous country has to offer, and walking untied to hometown and family history, these three heroes start to travel in interesting circles, to shade the truth about one or another detail, to play the games to which they feel entitled, to deceive others as to who they are. In Old Rimrock, the Swede is a country squire. He imagines himself as Johnny Appleseed, a man from American mythology, and he enjoys the conceit tremendously. Ira is an American radical with some affiliation to the Communist Party, a phony man of the people, without enough irony or cynicism or honesty to see the distance between himself and an actual communist or the distance between himself and the common man. Coleman must endure the agony of his children’s birth. Once he knows that their physical appearance will not reveal the blackness of their biological father, he can appreciate the full extent of his achievement, a departure from New Jersey so absolute that even his wife and children are convinced of the family history Coleman has fabricated for them. The games the Swede, Ira, and Coleman play are all dangerous, especially since they involve others in their execution. The irony of their entry into America, their assertion of the American “I” against the black or Jewish “we” and against the Newark “we,” is that they cannot escape questions of culture, history, and family. They can only try to shape these questions to suit the rules of their games. Ira’s game is political. He keeps his communism hidden behind a veil. Ira is a mentor to the young Nathan Zuckerman; Ira’s brother, Murray, is Nathan’s English teacher; and Nathan’s family is pleased

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when Ira, a small-scale celebrity, befriends Nathan. When Ira takes Nathan into the milieu of radical politics, Nathan’s father, a New Deal Democrat, starts to worry about Ira’s radicalism, a pre-McCarthyite worry and more a matter of ethics than of politics. Nathan’s father interviews Ira and asks him whether he is a communist. Ira says no, and many years later Nathan learns that “Ira was not telling the truth.” For Nathan, this lie is of a piece with other communist lies, communism a persuasion to which deception is second nature. Ira’s lie is one bead on a necklace of communist misinformation: what begins with Ira culminates in national scandal, in the figures of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and in the iconic figure of Alger Hiss, who lived for decades on the audacity of his lies. Nathan’s infatuation with radicalism, radicalism more than communism, is short. As a student at the University of Chicago, he abandons radical politics for the glories of high art, but his adult disappointment with communist deceit still runs deep. When he learns that Ira had lied to his father, Nathan suffers considerable pain: “Accepting that the man who had brought me into the world of men could have lied to our family about being a Communist was no less painful for me than accepting that Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs could have lied to the nation by denying that they were Communists.”32 In such ways do high politics and everyday politics, the two tributaries of history, feed into one another in the Newark trilogy. The author Nathan consciously mingles Ira’s lie with the lies of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs. Nathan’s brush with communism was a brush with history, even in a city as peripheral to the history of communism as Newark, New Jersey. To signal that he was in fact a communist, Ira had given Nathan a Red Army Chorus record, and the record reveals a communist paradox to the mature Nathan Zuckerman. A particular historical crisis produced revolutionary fervor, and revolutionary fervor incited its followers to forget the obvious lessons of history. In Red Army Chorus songs can be heard “the spectral residue of those rapturous revolutionary days when everyone craving for change programmatically, naively—madly, unforgivably—underestimates how mankind mangles its noblest ideas and turns them into tragic farce.” Ira is living out the last of these rapturous days or living in their afterglow. The mad, unforgivable game of communist conviction conforms to no credible idea of history or human nature. In the communist dream of the future it is

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“as though human wiliness, weakness, stupidity, and corruption didn’t stand a chance against the collective, against the might of people pulling together to renew their lives and abolish injustice.”33 Ira’s involvement with communism is not especially political—he does not actively serve the party or the international communist movement—when Nathan gets to know him. Nor is Truman’s America especially welcoming to a collective destiny. America refuses Ira the chance to implement the noble, the farcical, or the tragic elements of the communist idea, making Ira’s communism more a psychological than a political experiment. Ira’s most elaborate experiment is with his own multitiered self, political radical at the center, radio celebrity on the outside. Gone and forgotten is the Newark self that had killed as a teenager and slipped into a homicidal rage in the army. After leaving Newark, Ira builds an artificial edifice in hopes of hiding or erasing the shame of his Newark boyhood. His brother, Murray, marvels at Ira’s trajectory, the convolutions of a man “determined to assert unflaggingly one being in secret and another in public and a third in the interstices between the two, to be Abraham Lincoln and Iron Rinn and Ira Ringold all rolled up into a frenzied overexcitable self.” Coleman Silk can keep his name because he has so profoundly hidden his family history; the Swede and Ira each engage in name changes; Ira can become his professional alter ego, Iron Rinn, the Ira turned to Iron. (Joseph Dzhugashvili had changed his name to Stalin, which means man of steel, and Adolph Hitler had been born Alois Schickelgruber.) Like many American Jews of his generation, Ira sheers Ringold of its Jewish-sounding suffix. When Ira is famous, living in New York with an even more famous actress as his wife, he returns occasionally to Newark, going close to the street where he had committed murder. Murray cannot believe his boldness, the unflagging determination to ignore past experience and expect that others will have ignored it as well. Murray asks, in retrospect, “How drunk on metamorphosis could he get, the heroic invention of himself he called Iron Rinn? Back virtually at the scene of the crime, and he allows his mug to go up on the wall?”34 The wall is a wall of celebrity photographs, evidence of a restaurant’s illustrious history, a commonplace of New York–area restaurants. A closer look at Ira’s photograph suggests Ovid or Kafka to Murray, the teacher of literature. Nor does Ira ever get caught and exposed as the Ira Ringold who killed. His boldness goes unpublished,

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yet another reason to be drunk on metamorphosis, a phrase that could be applied with equal justice to Coleman Silk and the Swede. Ira’s intoxication with metamorphosis explains his marriage to Eve Frame, whose skills at metamorphosis exceed even Ira’s. Husband and wife are connected by a shared utopianism. Murray Ringold, the de facto narrator of I Married a Communist, offers as much analysis as he does narrative: “Ira called his utopian dream Communism. Eve called hers Sylphid [Eve’s daughter]. The parent’s dream of the perfect child, the actress’s utopia of let’s pretend, the Jew’s utopia of not being Jewish, to name only the grandest of her projects to deodorize life and make it palatable.” Eve’s biography mirrors the biography of Dawn Dwyer / Dawn Levov, with every detail taken to a greater extreme. Born Chava Fromkin in Brooklyn, Eve elopes as a teenager with a bartender’s son and goes to California, acquiring the last name of Mueller. Hollywood works its magic on Chava Mueller. In Murray’s retelling, “She hit California and she changed her name and she was a knockout and she got into pictures and then, under the studio’s pressure and prodding, with its help, she left Mueller and married this silent-screen star, this rich, polo-playing, upper-class genuine aristocrat, and took her idea of a Gentile from him.” The sense of Murray’s language revolves around the word “genuine,” anchoring a description of self-invention in the grand California style. Not only does Eve leave Mueller for Carlton Pennington, a homosexual whose marriage to Eve is a studio marriage, but she also allows her public history to be retouched and rewritten, excising Brooklyn and Mueller altogether. Mueller’s “connection to Eve was all but erased from the record books.”35 When the arrangement with Pennington fails, Eve marries Jumbo Freedman, a Jewish Broadway producer, as if to balance the ethnic Brooklyn of her childhood with the cosmopolitan Hollywood of her adult years. By marrying Ira, Eve has married a communist, as she confesses in her ghost-written autobiography, and Ira has married a Jewish antiSemite. Eve’s games end in anti-Semitism. She is the perfect Manhattan hostess, the perfect liberal spirit, the spirit of art and culture and civilized manners. Surface beauties render her invisible even to her husband: “He [Ira] doesn’t know who she [Eve] is, to be honest, nobody would have right off. Nobody could have. In society, Eve was invisible behind the disguise of all that civility,” says Murray. Civilization is not

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inconsistent with barbarism, just as educated, sophisticated Eve contains within her a subversive anti-Semitic hatred, which has its origins not in classic anti-Semitic theories but in the Jewish ambience of her childhood. She hates the parts of her past that she has allegedly escaped, harboring contempt “for the garden-variety, the standard-issue Jew she saw shopping in the department stores, for the run-of-the-mill people with New York accents who worked behind counters or who tended their own little shops in Manhattan, for the Jews who drove taxis.”36 For Murray, Eve’s anti-Semitism is equivalent to leaving Newark, an instance of the dangers that a hurried, heedless leaving can invite: You’re an American who doesn’t want to be your parents’ child? Fine. You don’t want to be associated with the Jews? Fine. You don’t want anybody to know you were born Jewish, you want to disguise your passage into the world? You want to drop the problem and pretend you’re somebody else? Fine. You’ve come to the right country. But you don’t have to hate Jews into the bargain.37

Eve’s experiments issue in nihilism. In Newark, she has an anti-Semitic outburst directed at Murray and his wife, followed by silence. She is driven back to New York, smiling: “Underneath the smile there was nothing at all,” Murray recalls, “not her character, not her history, not even her misery. She was just what was stretched across her face.” She has rebelled against life in Murray’s opinion, which is intimately connected to history, metamorphosing into “something from whom life itself had escaped.” It is her daughter, Sylphid, who intones family history when she calls her mother a “kike bitch.”38 Ira, Eve, and the Swede are clearly in flight from Jewish history. They do not wish to live as Jews, and, more than this, they reject the cumulative difficulties of Jewish history, the burden of exile, the inevitability of struggle—leitmotifs of modern Jewish history inscribed in the book of Genesis. In The Counterlife, Nathan Zuckerman comments on a surprising pastoral temptation among Jews, in a historical argument highly relevant to the Newark trilogy. It is inspired by a visit to the Jewish settlement of Agor in Israel, to which Nathan’s brother Henry has fled from New Jersey: As I discovered at Agor, not even Jews, who are to history what ­Eskimos are to snow, seem able, despite the arduous education to the

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contrary, to protect themselves against the pastoral myth of life before Cain and Abel, of life before the split began. Fleeing now, and back to day zero and the first untainted settlement—breaking history’s mold and casting off the dirty, disfiguring reality of the piled-up years: this is what Judea means to, of all people, that belligerent, unillusioned little band of Jews . . . the idyllic scenario of redemption through the recovery of a sanitized, confusionless life. In dead seriousness, we all create imagined worlds, often green and breastlike, where we may finally be “ourselves.”39

The concluding allusion to the green and breastlike New World, from The Great Gatsby’s legendary last paragraphs, joins an unlikely Jewish pastoral with an American book of Genesis, an American dream of pastoral new beginnings. Ira and Eve destroy themselves with this kind of American dream in mind and with their respective efforts to break history’s mold. In a literary postscript to The Facts, Roth’s autobiography, Nathan Zuckerman accuses Roth himself of succumbing to the pastoral temptation. The pastoral, Newark in its Golden Age, is not credibly pastoral if one struggles to leave it: “You’ve begun to make where you [Philip Roth] came from look like a serene, desirable, pastoral haven, a home that was a cinch to master, when, I suspect, it was more like a detention house you were tunneling out of practically from the day you could pronounce your favorite word of all, ‘away.’”40 The Swede’s pastoral games do not culminate in anti-Semitism, but they do rebound against him, making thematic twins of Eve’s Sylphid and the Swede’s daughter, Merry. Sylphid is all Pennington and no Fromkin, and she is filled with rage toward her mother, perhaps having intuited the improbability of her mother’s Hollywood persona. Merry is secretly baptized, the first-generation product of Old Rimrock and the product of the Swede’s leaving Newark. Unlike Eve Frame, the Swede is the picture of adult health, a caring father, a handsome husband, a well-earning businessman; he is sincerely caring, effortlessly handsome, and honest in business; his identity-bending games are subtle and not always apparent to the Swede himself. At the age of sixteen, he had dreamt of the house he would one day inhabit, envisioning “a large stone house with black shutters set on a rise back of some trees. A little girl was on a swing suspended from a low branch and one of those big trees. . . . Just as happy, he imagined, as a kid can be.” The

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Swede is a servant to this image, to a vision that is less than Gatsby­ esque. It is not fabulous wealth and the ethereal Daisy Buchanan but a stone house that can be bought with legally earned money, not the denizens of Manhattan nightlife and high society gathered round his home but something far simpler, almost banal—a little girl on a swing, feeling the happiness that the Swede and his Newark friends had felt on the ball field. This is the American dream as a healthy dream, within reach, far from the sickly green light that lures the Great Gatsby into perilous waters. The image of an American home with a swing, dreamt by the Swede in American Pastoral, is happened upon by Alexander Portnoy in Portnoy’s Complaint, when he visits his non-Jewish college girlfriend, the Pumpkin: “The white clapboard house in which the Pumpkin had grown up might have been the Taj Mahal for the emotions it released in me. Balboa, maybe, knows what I felt upon first glimpsing the swing tied up to the ceiling of the front porch.”41 The Swede’s is a dream that equates America with solid ground, as opposed to the water of the Long Island Sound, the reflecting pool of Gatsby’s dreaming: “It looked indestructible, an impregnable house that could never burn to the ground and that had probably been standing there since the country began.”42 Yet the Swede’s dream, so reassuring on its surface, takes him, like Gatsby, in the direction of peril. Old Rimrock, New Jersey, is truly dangerous. It is ideal for the young Swede, “who excitedly foresaw, in perfect detail, the outcome of his story,” and the detail, at first glance, is lovely: beautiful nature, a beautiful rural home built of stone and giving off the glamour of early American history. Leaving Newark for Old Rimrock continues the motion of vaulting for the Swede, who had vaulted over his father by marrying a non-Jew. Lou dislikes the idea of living in Old Rimrock. He argues not for Newark but for a satellite of Newark, Newstead. “In Newstead,” Lou contends, “he [the Swede] could live with his family among young Jewish couples, the baby could grow up with Jewish friends,” even if the Swede had not married a Jewish woman. In Newstead, he could recoup some of the losses incurred by vaulting out of Jewish Newark. It is typical of Lou to see the Swede’s vault as loss. It is why Lou had argued against the marriage to Dawn in the first place: “no hard feelings but i think maybe everybody should just go their own way,” Lou concludes during his interview with Dawn. Old Rimrock means

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more than the loss of Newark, in Lou’s eyes; it is a place of prejudice, “a narrow, bigoted area. The Klan thrived out here in the twenties,” not the gorgeous America of the Swede’s dream but an alien and somewhat forbidding place. The Swede is impervious to this mentality, associating Old Rimrock with pioneering adventurism. The Swede’s longing to leave Newark is connected to hubris: “Everybody else who was picking up and leaving Newark was headed for one of the cozy suburban streets in Maplewood or South Orange, while they, by comparison, were out on the frontier.” Old Rimrock is desirable precisely because his father would not move there, the Swede a freer man because “what Mars was to his father was America to him.” He is already wearing American garb—of a slyly fictitious make—“settling Revolutionary New Jersey as if for the first time.” Open hearts will be met with other open hearts, the WASP respected and admired, not feared or disliked. “We are not going to have anybody’s resentment,” the Swede says of himself and Dawn, and their lack of resentment will be rewarded by full acceptance into rarified Old Rimrock.43 The Swede is either naïve or delusional, his Old Rimrock homestead the setting for an ethnic opera buffa. The historical pedigree of his house is so fine as to make its inhabitants, children of Newark and Elizabeth, unworthy, at least without an ironic alertness to actual American history. The Levov house has “exterior walls constructed of stones collected from the fireplaces of the Revolutionary army’s former campsites in the local hills,” and the Swede and Dawn approach this fireplace and these stones as something like family heirlooms, a self-indulgence more ridiculous than pretentious. Dawn practices dairy farming on her Old Rimrock estate, a reprise of Marie Antoinette playing the shepherdess. When she is featured in a Morris County Weekly article, she tries to express the oneness of herself, her family, her home, and the long history visible in her estate. She is a latter-day Martha Washington: “Beneath a photo of her standing before the pewter plates lined up on the fireplace mantel . . . the caption read, ‘Mrs. Levov, the former Miss New Jersey of 1949, loves living in a 170-year-old home, an environment which she says reflects the values of her family.’”44 Mrs. Levov is right in one respect: it is an environment that reflects the values of her family, but these values are not so much reflected in the pewter plates above the fireplace and the 170-year-old home as they are in the daring of the

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Levov claim to them, in the utter lack of self-mockery that might make such pretense tolerable. Dawn had wanted the newspaper to omit her status as a former Miss New Jersey, and it is the one detail of family history that sheds a revealing light on this phony family history. The Miss America competition is not a debutante’s ball for the American elite. Its appeal has much more to do with postimmigrant and ethnic striving to be American; otherwise, there would be little need to compete for the title. The old stone house shows the distance Dawn has traveled before arriving in Old Rimrock. While Dawn is positioning herself as the matron of her home and curator of its history, the Swede is Johnny Appleseed, as innocent a game as a man can play. Though the Swede has bought a historic home and agrees with his wife about the family values reflected in it, he is less drawn to ownership of WASP history than to a rapturous departure from all history, which, with Johnny Appleseed, is the participation in American myth. When the Swede walks to and from his property, he imagines himself as Johnny Appleseed, sowing seeds, striding across his land, his joy in tune with the nation’s awesome bounty. The Swede and Johnny Appleseed are contiguous, the Swede “big, carnal, ruddy as Johnny Appleseed himself, someone to whom something marvelous was happening”—was happening, in an ongoing, joyous, never-ending present, larger than the future or the past. The Swede’s identification with Johnny Appleseed stems from the absence of history that surrounds all mythic figures, from Johnny Appleseed’s ethnic good fortune, for Johnny “wasn’t a Jew, wasn’t an Irish Catholic, wasn’t a Protestant Christian.”45 The Swede is less of a fake than his wife, though he has embroiled his family in contradictions of his own making. Old Rimrock renders Newark history—with its worries about anti-Semitism, its group identifications, its ethnic resentments—irrelevant. Maybe it renders all history irrelevant, and one can happily commune in its walkways and pastures with the spirit of Johnny Appleseed. Yet Old Rimrock is sought after, by the Swede himself, for its connotations of Colonial antiquity and its embodiment of WASP belonging, of the kind that he and Dawn are aping in their 170-year-old home. The game of enjoying a history that is not one’s own is underscored by the Orcutts, a WASP family living in Old Rimrock. It is with the ­Orcutts that the Swede’s games grow less innocent. Bill Orcutt is a gen-

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uine WASP and, in other respects, a charlatan. He had broken “with the traditions of the world he’d been born to [and] moved to a lower Manhattan studio to become an abstract painter and a new man,” as if imitating the voyages of Coleman, Ira, and the Swede; but he is no Jackson Pollock. He has only his WASP background to elevate him above other talentless artists: he “never could hammer out for himself an aesthetic prerogative or, for that matter, any but the prerogative whose rigid definitions had swaddled him at birth.” His failure to achieve professional distinction heightens the prestige of his background, a quality that he projects, since “the mainspring of Orcutt’s character—and this he [the Swede] was sure of without having to speak to him [Orcutt]—was knowing all too well how far back he [Orcutt] and his manners had reached into the genteel past.” Orcutt signals local history as much as he does WASP gentility. He is “president of the local landmarks society, already established as the historical conscience of a new generation.” He becomes the historical conscience of the Levov family, showing that they are frauds and releasing, in Dawn, the very quality that she and the Swede had come to Old Rimrock to forget. Orcutt stimulates resentment in Dawn. Behind her newspaper profile is a note of anxiety; she is unsure of her chosen path, while Orcutt is eminently sure of himself; “the confidence [of Orcutt], that’s what unstrung her [Dawn], that great confidence.”46 When Orcutt takes the Swede on a tour of Old Rimrock, “recounting the glory days of the nineteenth century,” the Swede steadfastly refuses resentment, though he and Orcutt do not meet as equals. Orcutt’s tour is an episode, dense with symbolism, that underscores the Swede’s disorientation and exposes the myth of Johnny Appleseed, who has dismissed Old World designations like Irish-Catholic or Protestant or Jew, as childish wishful thinking. The Swede knows his own disorientation, and, disastrously, he decides to impose it upon his daughter. Orcutt shows the Swede the Morris Canal, leading the Swede back to his own family history, which has nothing to do with Orcutt or Old Rimrock. The word “Morris” reminds the Swede of his uncle Morris, changing the Swede from a man without history into the son of Lou Levov, “associating the name of the canal with the story of the struggles of their family rather than with the grander history of the state [of New Jersey].” Orcutt gives the Swede his Newark patrimony in a way that could

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not be more indirect. Walking in an old cemetery, the Swede “couldn’t remember ever in his life feeling more like his father—not like his father’s son but like his father—than he did marching around the graves of these Orcutts.” Ancestral rhythms move through the Swede, as does the realization that all history, for the Levovs, is stored in the city of Newark, a realization that the Swede will ignore at his own and at his daughter’s peril. The Swede’s realization is unsettling: “As soon as you got back earlier than Newark, back to the old country, no one knew anything. Earlier than Newark, they didn’t know their names or anything about them, how anyone made a living, let alone whom they’d voted for. But Orcutt could spin out ancestors forever. Every rung into America for the Levovs there was another rung to attain: this guy was there.”47 The Swede’s realization is telling in its inaccuracy. In Newark the Levov family was there, and there is a there in Newark, which is obvious to the Swede’s father. For the Levov family, it is the only there. By making Newark into Gertrude Stein’s there-less Oakland, the Swede denies the patrimony activated in him by Orcutt’s foreign presence. The Swede goes beyond amnesia when he decides that Orcutt will be responsible for Merry’s patrimony, as far as family stories are concerned. It is a spectacular decision and a terrible one. Listening to Orcutt, the Swede thinks to himself that “when Merry got to be a schoolgirl he’d inveigle Orcutt into taking her along the very same trip so she could learn firsthand the history of the county where she was growing up.” Orcutt will be Merry’s Lou Levov, her font of storytelling, and even this substitution, with all the evasion it entails, is not enough for the Swede. He must claim the best of Orcutt’s stories as his own, a story about the peach train that used to travel through Old Rimrock to New York City, a story there to tell Merry at the right moment. It is a story that Johnny Appleseed could tell. The Swede, not Orcutt, “could tell her about that train and the trees and the blight when the time came, take her to show her where the tracks used to be. It wouldn’t require Orcutt to do it for him.”48 The other stories would require Orcutt’s erudition. Seymour Levov has no historically bred ugliness in him and no resentment of the heritable kind, but he is not self-reliant enough to live out his ahistorical destiny or his ahistorical creed. The Swede wants his daughter to have a historical sensibility, to be at home in Morris County, to have within her the treasure trove of stories that normal families have. If

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the Swede’s family has no treasure trove of stories, nothing from Newark or Elizabeth that has the cachet of Orcutt’s New Jersey tales, then another family’s trove will have to be leased and, in certain choice instances, passed off as property of the Levovs. ❊ Merry Levov will grow into a troubled adolescence, get involved in radical politics, and end up bombing the post office in Old Rimrock. Her hostility to America begins in Old Rimrock, and her hostility to her parents begins in the intuition that they have given her less than they should have, despite the family’s wealth, solicitude, caring, and love. Family history has been emptied out, something alien put in its place, and Merry wages war on her parents’ WASP pretenses. Merry’s leaving is more extreme than even Coleman’s. She is a fugitive from justice, as Ira had been for a time. She is subjected to the torture of leaving, of repudiating all the protection of home and family, entering an America that is the inverse of the Swede’s fantasy land, a place of horrors where Merry lives in abject poverty and where she is raped several times. Merry leaves the civilized world, not fully by choice but in ways complicit with choice. She chooses to leave civilization by choosing, ultimately, to live in Newark’s devastated downtown. Her descent into unprotected poverty is a frightening commentary on the pattern of leaving that her father had established and unsuccessfully disguised in his careless identification with Old Rimrock and its hallowed history. The Swede, Ira, and Coleman leave Newark out of an attraction to America at large, out of a will to create their own destinies. Merry wants to destroy Old Rimrock more than she wants to leave it, and she leaves Old Rimrock irreparably by traveling the short distance to the no-man’sland of downtown Newark, thus eviscerating her suburban childhood. Merry detonates her bomb in 1968, and by 1973 the terrible history of Merry’s bombing has itself been wiped away. It is as if clearing the historical slate is all this family knows how to do. The Levovs have the will and the money to remake their lives. This time their striving is a matter of self-preservation, and no longer an excited game, lest the grief of Merry’s story inundate all who have been touched by it. After years of suffering, Dawn reads an article in Vogue about a Swiss doctor, Dr. LaPlante, who specializes in face-lifts. In 1973, “the year of Dawn’s

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miracle,” the Levovs travel to Geneva. The Swede is appreciative and, once again, impressive in his naïveté: “‘He [Dr. LaPlante] did do a great job,’ the Swede said. ‘Erased all that suffering. He gave her back her face.’” Suffering erased, face restored, Dawn says, finally, how much she hates the old stone house that reflects the values of her family. Its history is minimized into a more modern thirst: “Almost immediately after the reconstitution of her face to its former pert, heart-shaped preexplosion perfection, she decided to build a small contemporary house on a ten-acre lot the other side of Rimrock ridge and to sell the big old house, the outbuildings, and their hundred-odd cows.” If the previous journey, the journey that was an exodus from Elizabeth and Newark, was a journey into America, this second journey is a journey back, the only destination that Dawn may still have available to her. She wants to journey away from the Swede, who has already betrayed her with an extramarital affair. There is nothing connecting the two any longer, only a history of trauma. Dawn continues her travels into America by having an affair with Orcutt, a WASP object of desire that her husband never was, but otherwise she is traveling back to the pristine world of her childhood. Plotting to sell the old house, Dawn had “arrived back not merely at Dawn with her face-lift and her petite gallantry and her breakdowns and her cattle and her decisions to change her life but back at Dawn of Hillside Road, Elizabeth, New Jersey”—a location specific enough to encompass street, town, and state.49 The Swede’s games begin in folly and end in deadly seriousness. Coleman Silk’s games are serious from the beginning, though the game of creating whiteness out of blackness is not only serious. It is also superbly individual, and Coleman takes pleasure in knowing that he is “a cunning self-concoction if ever there was one, a product on which no one but he held a patent.” Coleman’s pleasure is corrupted, however, by the manner of his leaving. Having failed to leave with Steena, who leaves him because he is black, Coleman grows wiser. If he is to leave, it will have to be a total leaving. He will marry his girlfriend, Iris, as a Jew and, more important, as a white man: “Two years after they [Coleman and Iris] met, they decided to get married, and that was when . . . the first large payment was exacted.” The year is 1953, and the payment is telling his family that he will no longer see them, that he is throwing aside his patrimony to live as a white man.

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It is “the moment when your fate intersects with something enormous,” with all that lies outside the individual. No one else may have a patent on Coleman’s unusual whiteness, but his is an individual act of rebellion involving others, the notion of a purely individual fate a fallacy used by Coleman to sweeten his decision. When he tells his mother what will be, she does not oppose him. She locates the flaw in his thinking, the illusion of freedom that Coleman has mistaken for something real. “There was always something about our family, and I don’t mean color—there was always something about us that impeded you,” she tells him. “You think like a prisoner. You do, Coleman Brutus. You’re white as snow and you think like a slave.” Freedom is freedom from slavery, not a deceitful escape into whiteness, which only reinforces the cruelty of white and black as absolute, divided, coercive categories. By accepting the rules of the game, Coleman makes white whiter and black blacker. Coleman’s mother continues: “Now I could tell you that there is no escape, that all your attempts to escape will only lead you back to where you began. That’s what your father would tell you. And there’d be something in Julius Caesar to back him up.”50 But Coleman’s father is dead and Shakespeare only a dramatist. Coleman will not be persuaded about the futility of escape. He has decided to leave and to leave forever. Coleman’s strength, indispensable for leaving, is not strength of character. It is mere strength. He will go on to a professorship at a New En­gland college, teaching Homer frequently, and the Iliad is “Coleman’s favorite book about the ravening spirit of man. Each murder that has its own quality, each a more brutal slaughter than the last.”51 Coleman’s first small rebellion against his father had been to box. He knows how to inflict pain, honing his strength to this end and letting the worst punch fall against his own family and against his mother. Ross Posnock alludes to “the brutality of Coleman’s severance from his mother.” Posnock connects Coleman’s brutality to his romantic individualism: “With the fatal simplicity of all romantic individualists, he [Coleman] imagines his will is sovereign,” all the while thinking, as his mother says, like a slave.52 Coleman initiates a flood of loss, a widening void opened by his leaving. His mother’s family is surrounded by history, recounted with great fullness and detail, of the kind reserved for Newark in the Newark trilogy, the cosmos of remembered experi-

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ence that keeps loss and leaving at bay. There is “the intricacy of the family’s American genealogy,” and it means nothing to Coleman. Nathan Zuckerman’s narrative voice registers the empty space, characterizing the world from the viewpoint of Coleman’s mother. The tones of resignation are more passive than anguished, alluding to Lawnside and Gouldtown, places of family history: “Many things vanish out of a family’s life. Lawnside is one. Gouldtown another, genealogy a third, and Coleman Silk was a fourth.”53 Coleman is strong to the end. Many years later, when he thinks of telling his wife, Iris, the truth, he decides against it. He does not long for Lawnside or Gouldtown, nor can he tell his children stories about these historic places. Coleman’s colleague at Athena College in New England is Delphine Roux, her story a Newark trilogy in miniature. Delphine makes a decision similar to Coleman’s, without having his brutality. She is from France, from a wealthy, educated family, and she comes to America to flee her mother, “to make her exit as a bitplayer in the long-running drama . . . that was the almost criminally successful life of her mother.” Because of her mother, “Delphine hated all those families, the pure and ancient aristocracy of the provinces . . . the traditions of the stupid Walincourts [her mother’s family name].” Delphine comes to America for graduate school, gets a job at Athena College, thrives at the production of postmodern literary scholarship, but she is despondent. Whatever he may be, Coleman never thinks himself a fraud: he is too much the romantic individualist to see his leaving in any other than heroic terms. Delphine fears that “she is to herself who she always was, that all the exotic Frenchness has achieved in America is to make her the consummate miserable misunderstood foreigner.” Her exotic Frenchness, though she is French, is equivalent to the games that Coleman, Ira, and the Swede play. Delphine’s leaving France for America retraces the trajectory of Coleman, Ira, and the Swede, the large payment exacted from all three. She is Ishmael without Queequeg, at sea in a painful solitude, the terminal destination of her leaving. “She is utterly alone, unsupported, homeless, decountried,” a very moderate version of Moby-Dick’s Pip left on the open sea by his shipmates.54 Delphine is smaller than Ira, the Swede, and Coleman because she is defined almost entirely by the will to leave and wants nothing from America other than respite from France. The majesty of an American self courageously acquired is not her aspiration.

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Delphine Roux, an expatriate European academic in America, is exceptional. Hers is not an obviously French story. The Swede, Ira, and Coleman prove a more general rule about cities like Newark and about America itself, a country that has normalized leaving, making it routine and desirable, linking it to the realization of potential and the acquisition of strength. It is as if Americans are born with the intention of leaving, only to become adults in search of a destination. The young Nathan Zuckerman has internalized this American lesson as much as the three protagonists who are his “creations.” Zuckerman’s literary attraction to the Swede, Ira, and Coleman may stem from this circumstance: that they are all men defined by leaving, defined more by leaving than by being from Newark. The adolescent Nathan Zuckerman attends a dinner party at Ira and Eve’s Manhattan home, surrounded by wealth and fame. At the party are Katrina Van Tassel Grant and her husband, Bryden, a newspaper columnist who will go on to become a McCarthyite politician. Katrina has her own radio program, which Nathan’s mother enjoys. On the radio, Katrina presides over a perfect American family, perfectly rooted in the Hudson Valley. Nathan knows secondhand that “dinnertime in the Grant house was reserved for discussion with her four handsome children of their obligations to society, that her friends in traditional old Staatsburg (where her ancestors, the Van Tassels, first settled, reportedly as local aristocracy, in the seventeenth century, long before the arrival of the English), had impeccable ethical and educational credentials.” Silly as such credentials are, Nathan holds them in high esteem, unlike Sylphid, Eve’s daughter, who can see through the Grants’ social posturing: “Poor mother and her social ambitions,” Sylphid complains. “Katrina is the most pretentious of all the rich, pretentious river folk up in Staatsburg, and he’s supposed to be a descendant of Ulysses S. Grant.”55 When Nathan has a chance meeting with Katrina Van Tassel Grant, he sees only her pedigree and family history. He cannot see, or cannot speak about, his own. On his mother’s behalf, he asks Katrina for an auto­graph. She responds to him with mild curiosity, “‘What is your background, young man?’ I [Nathan] didn’t understand that she was asking to what subspecies of humanity I belonged. The word ‘background’ was impenetrable—and then it wasn’t. I had no intention of being humorous when I replied, ‘I don’t have one.’”56 In Katrina’s

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presence, Nathan is neither Jewish nor from Newark. He has no background comparable to hers, only the teenage arriviste’s eagerness to belong to New York City. More than that, Nathan does not see Newark as a place that could generate background, not like the historic Hudson Valley, settled by the Dutch, by families like the Grants and Van Tassels, then by the English, until the Hudson Valley became American ground. Nathan, too, will leave Newark, hardly surprising for a young man destined to become a novelist. Ambition demands this departure, forging a path from Newark to the University of Chicago, to Manhattan, and eventually to New England, a normal enough itinerary for an American intellectual. Remarkably, Nathan returns to Newark in his fiction and writes at great length about the background he once denied having. The Newark trilogy is Nathan’s effort to reverse the logic of his negative answer, while exploring the implications of his innocent or notso-innocent words. The Swede, Ira, and Coleman tell themselves and others that they have no background, none that would trouble their decisions to leave, none worth commemorating in story and passing on to their children. Theirs are backgrounds written in water, to be drawn or redrawn or eventually to evaporate, and Newark has an impermanence that demands so little of its native sons. Its decline further contributes to their mass exercise in denial and forgetting. This is a story that Nathan Zuckerman already knows firsthand. In Zuckerman Unbound, he is an author who has acquired money and celebrity. In the novel’s last section, resonantly titled “Look Homeward, Angel,” Nathan returns to Newark, which he has long ago left for New York. Reeling from the death of his father, he has his driver take him through once-familiar streets, their slum status a referendum on him and his losses: “‘Over,’ he thought. All his lyrical feeling for the neighborhood had gone into Carnofsky. It had to—there was no other place for it. ‘Over. Over. Over. Over. Over. I’ve served my time.’” Is it Newark or Nathan, the misunderstood author, who is over? Does serving time equate Newark with prison? Nathan goes back to Chancellor Avenue and encounters a young black man there. Nathan harbors historical erudition that is irrelevant to this man, just as Nathan is himself irrelevant. “Had the fellow cared to ask, Zuckerman could without any trouble have told him the names of the three families who lived in the flats on each floor before World War II.” The man asks him who he is: “‘No

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one,’ replied Zuckerman, and that was the end of that. You are no longer any man’s son, you are no longer some good woman’s husband, you are no longer your brother’s brother, and you don’t come from anywhere anymore, either.”57 The displacement of background gives way, over time, to the destruction of background. With this displacement and this destruction the self is lost, making one into no one and into a no one locked into permanent exile. Reflecting upon his younger self in I Married a Communist, Nathan is astonished by the vacancy in his statement to Katrina—“I don’t have one”—and by the immediacy of the untruth behind it. His willingness to lie is natural, unprovoked, and uncoerced: nobody had “forced me to fawn and lie. It was just the easiest thing to do. It was worse than easy. It was automatic.”58 Lying is the path of least resistance and so, too, is leaving Newark, despite all the resistance that the Swede, Ira, and Coleman encounter on the way out: the Swede, who marries a non-Jewish woman; Ira, who tries to conquer his rage and live according to higher principles; and Coleman, who must deprive his family of their son, thus depriving himself of his family. Their heroic labors are only a surface heroism. Beneath the masks and the games, they are American automatons, their cherished individualism a reflex instilled in them by their culture, by its clichés, and by its more superficial, unrewarding dictates. And it is for these dictates that they allow themselves to lie. They do not have Nathan’s awful candor. To the question of background they have ready answers. They do have a background, for they have invented it, the automatic consequence of their leaving Newark. By middle age, these heroes have put rebellion and self-invention behind them, coming to live well in their masks, automatically. They become the curators of their self-fashioning. The protagonists of the Newark trilogy build their traditions out of leaving, out of games played with history. It is easy and automatic to lie about history, to seek out the convenient untruth and weave it into a tapestry of invented history, using “history” to claim that arrival and leaving are one and the same. When Coleman tells his mother he will leave, she recalls his father. Had he been living, Mr. Silk would have listened to Coleman and quoted from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar a self-made man of world-historical proportions, a man made of ambition brought low by intrigue and historical upheaval. Julius Caesar does not leave a

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hometown in the way that the Swede, Ira, or Coleman leave Newark. Shakespeare’s play is focused on leaving of another kind, on Caesar’s metamorphosis from Roman citizen to king and Rome’s transition from republic to kingdom and from kingdom to empire. A virtuoso of mastery, Caesar believes that he can direct historical change. His hubris is effective, convincing Cassius, one of the conspirators against Caesar, that history is subordinate to great men. Just after hinting at Caesar’s weakness, and just before encouraging Brutus to ponder Caesar’s displacement, Cassius tells Brutus: Why, man, he [Caesar] doth bestride the narrow world Like a Colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs, and peep about To find ourselves dishonorable graves. Men at sometime were masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.59

Other men are small, like the narrow world, compared to a warrior and statesman on par with Caesar, who disregards the warning about the Ides of March spoken at the play’s outset. Bad omens are for the weak, for petty underlings, those whom history controls, not for those who control history. Cassius offers one theory of history; Brutus, another. In Caesar, Brutus sees a spiritual sickness born of metamorphosis. Power and metamorphosis will be a “serpent’s egg” of misfortune, should ­Caesar ever become king:             But ’tis a common proof, That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder, Whereto the climber-upward turns his face; But when he once attains the upmost round, He then unto the ladder turns his back, Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees By which he did ascend.60

Ambition finds its source not in colossal stature but in lowliness, rash metamorphosis from low to high inciting murder and, for Brutus, driving forward the conspiracy against Caesar. The climber, seeing only the distance traveled, scorns the journey. (Brutus is Coleman’s middle name.)61

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Julius Caesar is an anachronistic, illuminating commentary on the Newark trilogy. History is chaos, and we are not the masters of our fates. We cannot fully determine the significance of leaving, since we control only a small portion of the journey. Another conspirator against Caesar, Casca, explores the idea of chaos, which courses throughout the play. Political instability in ancient Rome intersects with the divine wrath or with a divine merrymaking that is the same as historical chaos. In Casca’s words:              O Cicero, I have seen tempests when the scolding winds Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen Th’ ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam To be exalted with the threatening clouds; But never till tonight, never till now, Did I go through a tempest dropping fire. Either there is a civil strife in heaven, Or else the world, too saucy with the gods, Incenses them to send destruction.62

Caesar’s ambition is buried beneath the ambitious ocean swell, the violence of his ambition akin to the Melvillean rage and foam of the ocean storm, exalted by the threatening clouds. Had Coleman’s father quoted from Julius Caesar in hopes of educating his son and of tempering his fanaticism for leaving—which rests on an expectation of smooth seas and fine weather—he might have noted the smallness and eventual emptiness of Caesar’s metamorphosis. To this end, Coleman’s father might have cited Mark Antony’s words upon seeing Caesar’s murdered body, on the shocking transience and thinness of imperial ambition: O mighty Caesar! Dost thou lie so low? Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, Shrunk to this little measure? Fare thee well.63

Th re e  At History’s Mercy “As Americans,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once remarked, “we have our own duty to be authors of history.” Andrew Bacevich, American Empire

In the Newark trilogy, history is an abstraction personified. History’s grip is more tangible, a pressure exerted from without, and it is the crux of the drama. In these novels, history is a force that has a name. Though it could be nameless or differently named—destiny, fate, fortune, circumstance—history moves through patterns that delineate a collective destiny, patterns larger than any individual story and less general than fortune or circumstance. In The Human Stain, Coleman Silk does not simply lose his job because of a conflict with a colleague. He runs up against a persecuting spirit flourishing on college campuses and, with the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal of 1998, alive in national politics as well; Coleman’s misfortune is made historical through this spirit.1 In I Married a Communist, Ira Ringold does not merely endure a failed marriage. His failed marriage ends in the McCarthyite persecution of Ira and his brother, trapping an individual character in the machinery of national history. The Swede’s daughter does not simply rebel against her father and mother. Her rebellion takes on historical form; she joins with the Weathermen, her rebellion prompted in part by the Vietnam War. In each case, the patterns are unique to their moment as well as points on a long historical arc. In the Newark trilogy, 1960s radicalism, 1990s political correctness, and McCarthyism are generic only in their capacity to cause harm. In the words of Greil Marcus, “The solitary individual who can sin stands in front of the rolling canvas of history” in the Newark trilogy.2 This same individual can be found on the canvas itself. At the trilogy’s core is the destruction of Newark. All of the city’s constituent elements are American, some even stereotypically so— Newark’s founding by Puritans, its participation in the American

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Revolution and Civil War, its enthusiasm for economic development and industry (for modernity), its black community and its many European immigrants keen to be Americans. Newark is also stereotypically American in being a place that is very often left. A city that can fade into the American continent may serve as a microcosm of American history in a way that a more unconventional city, a New Orleans or a San Francisco or a New York City, cannot. The trilogy begins in the Depression and comes to a close in the boom years of the Clinton era, starting with a war not yet won and ending up in an America that has surpassed its Soviet enemy. Clinton’s America could indulge in the prolonged luxury of presidential scandal. These are decades of national ascendancy, mirrored in the ascendancy of the trilogy’s three protagonists, each of whom tastes the sweetness of American success, for a time. Newark’s story of decline could get lost in the larger story of America triumphant, but these decades of American advance happen also to mark Newark’s descent. By placing Newark at the center of his American trilogy, Roth is not balancing out a Whig interpretation of American history or retouching myths of American self-improvement. He is exploiting the organic tension between Newark’s difficult history and a perplexing, many-sided American century. Newark’s difficulties are extreme without being unusual. They can be fit into the nation’s history. The July 1967 riots are the focal point of Newark’s decline, manifesting an active will to destroy, to tear down buildings, to vent anger on the masonry and streets of a big American city. The riots also unleashed the military power of the National Guard, which was sent in to restore order.3 The national meaning of these riots, touched upon in American Pastoral, is peripheral to the Newark trilogy. The history of the riots is not handled in any great depth; no character in these books is a participant; the riots are experienced but not willed or understood by the characters who witness them. The crucial history, symbolized in Newark’s destruction, is the city’s decline after the riots, the loss of neighborhood life and with it of communal memory, the loss of the Newark that immigrants had done much to build, the terrible reversal of fortune for those blacks who had migrated from the South in search of opportunity and whose children are tied to a city in chronic decline, less able to leave than white Newarkers. Newark’s history is a sharply

At History’s Mercy

American instance of decline. Consider an example already mentioned: ­Columbus Homes were built to improve housing conditions in Newark’s Italian American First Ward, which was selected for urban renewal in 1953. Multistory apartment buildings, poignantly named after Columbus, replaced the neighborhood where, in 1920, Emidio Russomanno laid his canary to rest, after some ten thousand people had watched its funeral procession. By the end of the 1970s, the neighborhood itself had died. ­Columbus Homes were completely uninhabited, and “the obliteration of the neighborhood was all but complete. It was an unnatural landscape, ravaged by years of decay, arson, vandalism, and neglect,” writes Michael Immerso, a chronicler of Newark’s Little Italy.4 The history of such loss is the history that matters most in the Newark trilogy. In American Pastoral, Nathan Zuckerman’s narrative comes so close to Newark’s destruction that he seems to be giving destruction a voice, to be writing not from the vantage point of a city falling into ruin but from within a violence that has already laid claim to the city. Three days of rioting engulf Newark, and the narrative voice sings the destruction that is at hand: “Yes, here it is, let it come, yes, the magnificent opportunity, one of human history’s rare transmogrifying moments: the old ways of suffering are burning blessedly away in the flames, never again to be resurrected.” Destruction here is an almost erotic pleasure with eros turning to religion in a few words, by the time suffering is being burnt blessedly away and resurrection denied. “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,” the Iliad’s opening line: the singing in American Pastoral is more fiendish than Homeric, for it carries no poetic ideal of valor or heroism, no program of social renewal, no hint of political progress that might justify the destruction.5 The old ways of suffering are not to be abandoned, at least not for some better age. The old ways of suffering are not to be resurrected, “instead to be superseded, within only hours, by suffering that will be so gruesome, so monstrous, so unrelenting and abundant, that its abatement will take the next five hundred years. The fire this time—and next? Nothing, nothing in Newark ever again.”6 The destruction is swift, accomplishing in three days a feat of suffering that will take five hundred years to undo and leaving nothing in its wake. The slow work of building up a city, building up a civilization, is only history’s bright, optimistic surface: in a single transmogrifying moment the course can be reversed and the edifice of

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civilization converted into a multiplication of nothings. In this respect, the civic and the individual meaning of history are commensurate. What history does to Newark it can do to individuals as well. Ira’s brother, Murray, cannot evade Newark’s destruction. Murray is good enough to stay in Newark out of civic obligation, his civic commitment closer to folly than to wisdom. “I got mugged twice,” he tells Nathan. “We [Murray and his wife, Doris] should have moved after the first time and we should certainly have moved after that second time. The second time I was just around the corner from the house, four in the afternoon, when three kids surrounded me and pulled a gun.” The man who refused to leave out of defiance will leave out of sorrow. “I left Newark after Doris got killed. . . . I wouldn’t leave the city, you see. I wasn’t going to move out of the city where I had lived and taught all my life just because it was now a poor black city full of problems. Even after the riots, when Newark emptied out, we stayed on Lehigh Avenue, the only white family that did stay.” Murray of course is powerless to reverse Newark’s decline: “I spent the last ten years there [on Newark’s South Side], until I retired. Couldn’t teach anybody anything. Barely able to hold down the mayhem, let alone teach. . . . Worst ten years of my life.” Nathan, listening to the story of his high school English teacher, feels a sense of kinship. “I am myself an aging man who knows what unexalted conclusions can be reached when one examines one’s history probingly,” Nathan thinks, and it is ambiguous if the history here is more biography or more the history of one’s times. Whether personal or national, probing historical inquiry will lead to unsettling conclusions. Nathan does little to separate the biographical and the national. The two together make “the entire story of how Murray Ringold, who’d chosen to be nothing more extraordinary than a high school English teacher, had failed to elude the turmoil of his time and place and ended up no less a historical casualty than his brother. This was the existence that America had worked out for him—and that he’d worked out for himself by thinking . . . by being reasonable in the face of no reason.”7 History is no Enlightenment project. It is too implicated in turmoil, and two ominous words stand with grim finality at the end of Murray’s voluminous story and Newark’s centuries-long history—“no reason.”

At History’s Mercy

❊ Initially, the Newark trilogy’s three protagonists do not see history as “no reason,” if they see history at all in their youthful reckonings with life, if they see history as more than an archaic garment to be dropped, the vestiges of Jewish life that make less and less sense in America, on the one hand, or the cloak of blackness that never suited Coleman Silk, on the other. Nor was their Newark, with all its ethnic and racial balkanization, a city that bore the traces of historical disaster. It was never a beautiful city, it was no place for aesthetes or political utopians, but it was a city that could be tied to the tradition of American boosterism, a city made vibrant by economic growth, by the labor of its citizens, by the enterprising spirit that had attracted inventors and entrepreneurs in the nineteenth century. Thomas Edison brought his American genius for science and business, which promised greater comfort and prosperity, to Newark. In this Newark, history was reasonable, whether or not it was a fantasy, a Chamber of Commerce promise or an immigrant’s dream. Newark was a productive city rooted in the American republic. When Franklin Roosevelt called for an “arsenal of democracy,” outlining America’s purpose in World War II, he could have pointed to Newark, which would enthusiastically lend its factories to the war effort and its residents to the war. Yet “no reason” had found its way to this very place and, once entrenched, “no reason” made itself at home in Newark. For Newark’s blacks, “no reason” was more clearly visible, or visible earlier, than for its Jews. Yet for all three protagonists, there is little in their Newark childhoods to anticipate a hurricane of “no reason” coming from nowhere. When history reaches for the Swede and Ira, it works through the family. The Swede’s immersion in “no reason” starts with his daughter. By choosing to act on the historical stage, Merry will turn the history of her family inside out. Instead of traveling ever further from poverty, Merry takes her family from civilization to barbarism and from decency to crime. She embarks on her journey from Old Rimrock, the moneyed home of the Levov family, and travels back to Newark, where the ­Newark-born Swede is forced to see that history is pain or that history causes pain, that the house of history is one where suffering and loss are welcome, frequent guests. Parroting Weathermen clichés, Merry is more

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accurate than she knows when she promises to bring the Vietnam War to America, to her community, to her home and family. In Ira’s case, the roughness of McCarthyite denunciations, his history, enters his home and finishes off his home life. His wife, Eve, uses Ira’s past against him, not the murder Ira had committed as a teenager in Newark, his real crime, but Ira’s involvement with the Communist Party—nothing very serious, if enough to land Ira in McCarthy’s net. Eve’s memoir, I Married a Communist, is a false history put at the service of historical change, politics as a tool of vendetta between husband and wife. Coleman’s professional home is a liberal arts college, and it is here that history, no less irrational for being petty, comes looking for him. An offhand comment is misconstrued as racism, and Coleman loses his professional, even his moral, standing; the stress gives his wife a heart attack. Coleman’s story is doubled by the national trauma or farce of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, in which the domestic intimacies of the White House blended into the vicissitudes of high politics. What began in a White House hallway culminated in congressional impeachment and arguably in Al Gore’s losing bid for the 2000 election, consequences running for time immemorial. For Coleman, the same process runs backward: a collegiate witch hunt lands him in the arms of a younger lover. The protagonists of the Newark trilogy are not educated by history. They do not become better or wiser by walking history’s frightful labyrinth. Not one of the three novels is a bildungsroman, though one could imagine an educational program for them: men who leave their hometown, take on false identities to varying degrees, encounter a crisis engendered by history, realize who they are, cast off their masks, and come to some understanding of themselves and their world—through a glass darkly and then face-to-face. One could superimpose ethnic or racial pride onto this narrative. History punishes the Swede and Ira for not being sufficiently Jewish, until they are compelled to return to their roots, and Coleman must likewise be forced out of hiding and made to acknowledge his blackness. In this revelatory light, history’s grip might be painful and unavoidable, but it would also be salutary, an antidote to the self-deception that the Swede, Ira, and Coleman have all chosen to indulge. As it is, there is nothing that these three protagonists really learn from history, either from the destructive force of history in their own lives or from the destruction of Newark that is its

At History’s Mercy

thematic parallel, other than that history can be “no reason.” This blank lesson drives Ira toward insanity, reducing him to a wordless isolation. Coleman stays sane by refusing to learn the lessons that history tries to teach him. He will not apologize for his “racist” comment. He rejects the standards and expectations of his college community. The Swede suffers and suffers after his daughter and wife leave him, and then he founds another family. Having failed with the first, he appears to flourish with the second. Ira may be undone by history. Coleman and the Swede match its violence with their own animal energy, and none of them arrive at any kind of epiphany. The epiphany of the Newark trilogy is not theirs to grasp. All are vulnerable to history’s grip, and the Swede, Ira, and Coleman are especially vulnerable because they have hollowed out their lives. They have emptied themselves by manipulating their life stories. At first, they had made their lives more interesting by leaving Newark on self-fashioned terms. Yet when Ira is assaulted by the McCarthyite storm, his skill at impersonating Abraham Lincoln is useless. When Coleman is accused of being a racist, accused on the assumption that he is white professor of classics, the one thing he cannot say is the one thing that might have exonerated him—that he is black. When the Swede learns the story of his daughter’s crime and of her descent into an American hell, the athletic skill that had won him his name, his Nordic passport into America and out of Newark, cannot help him. All of the heroes are trapped not so much in lies they have told but in the space they have maintained between the world of their childhood and the world of their adulthood. There is no bridge—made of stories, the fundament of culture—to give them strength, no bridge between present and past. If any character has this epiphany, it is Lou Levov, the Swede’s father, who despairs for Newark after the 1967 riots, while still subsisting on his close connection to the city. Newark’s decline, for Lou, suggests a national disorientation, some postwar confusion born from a willed rejection of context. “I sometimes think that more has changed since 1945 than in all the years of history there have ever been,” Lou speculates; “the lack of feeling for places like what is going on in Newark—how did this happen? You don’t have to revere your family, you don’t have to revere your country, you don’t have to revere where you live, but you have to know you have them, you have to know you are a part of them. Because if

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you don’t, you are just out there on your own, and I feel for you.”8 The Swede, Ira, and Coleman, after they leave Newark, are in exactly this predicament. They are out there on their own. Privy to the drift of the Newark trilogy, the Swede’s brother, Jerry, states it bluntly to Nathan Zuckerman. Jerry had never had the Swede’s advantages, the athletic prowess, the good looks, the effortless calm. He is an angry child who goes on to lead a chaotic adult life, multi­ ple divorces, multiple families, a high-pressure medical career. Jerry is the opposite of his brother; he is aggressive and prone to seeing life as nasty and brutish. To evade this truth, in Jerry’s view, is to invite disaster, which is how he understands the relationship between the Swede and his daughter, Merry. Jerry meets Nathan Zuckerman at a high school reunion, where he tells Nathan that the Swede’s daughter is a political terrorist from rural New Jersey; she has bombed the post office in Old Rimrock. Jerry does not see Merry as an accident of fate but as the product of the Swede’s myopia. The Swede “brought her up with all the modern ideas of being rational with your children. Everything permissible, everything forgivable, and she hated it.” Speaking of Merry and the Swede, Jerry details his affection for chaos: “My brother thought he could take his family out of human confusion and into Old Rimrock, and she put them right back in.” Later in the novel, which is imagined by Zuckerman on the basis of Jerry’s important words, Jerry confronts the Swede, not about Merry but about himself, the Swede. At issue are the Swede’s emptiness and America’s malevolence. “You keep yourself a secret. Nobody knows what you are. You certainly never let her know who you are,” and for this reason “the reality of this place is right up in your kisser now. With the help of your daughter you’re as deep in the shit as a man can get, the real American crazy shit.” Jerry’s thesis about America has history’s chronological rhythm: “It is not rational. It is chaos. It is chaos from start to finish.”9 Jerry’s words are a poem on the subject of “no reason.” The Swede is a nobler character than Jerry, noble in his naïveté, but it is Jerry’s thesis that replicates the thrust of novel and trilogy. The Swede works off admirable impulses. He does what he can to protect his daughter from irrationality and chaos, as he had been protected by his country, his community, and his parents when he was a child, the beloved son of a happy family, the nurtured son of World War II–era Newark; but the

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Swede takes this impulse to a less-than-rational extreme, not admitting to his daughter that there are such things as chaos and irrationality. She must discover these basic truths on her own, which leads her to politics and to Jerry’s celebration of chaos. The chaos that Merry first comes to know is the Vietnam War. As a child, she cannot understand it. She is ten or eleven when she sees Buddhist monks immolate themselves on television; this is in 1962 and 1963. The images engrave themselves in her mind: “She had been terrified for weeks afterward, crying about what had appeared on television that night, talking about it, awakened from her sleep by dreaming about it.” The narrative voice emphasizes the distance between America and Vietnam, in the waning months of the Kennedy presidency, when “as far as everybody knew, America was merely at the periphery of whatever was going haywire there.” Such distance is too rationally conceived for a child to grasp. Merry can only respond to the image itself, “the nimbus of flames, the upright monk, and the sudden liquefaction before he keels over . . . into their home on Arcady Hill Road the charred and blackened corpse on its back in that empty street.”10 This is a macabre visualization of the Latin phrase et in Arcadia ego (I, death, am also in Arcadia). In her horror, Merry turns to her parents, who comfort her with praise without truly assisting her. They praise her sensitivity, instructing her that “unfortunately there are people who don’t have a conscience, that is true. You are lucky, Merry, you have a very well-developed conscience. . . . We’re proud of having a daughter who has so much conscience and who cares so much about the well-being of others,” graciously illustrating their incomprehension. Merry is less concerned with the monks’ well-being than with their suicidal passion, with the “no reason” of their actions. The Swede searches for a reason that will assuage his daughter’s fears, an explanation for the heart of darkness. He “carefully read the papers in order to be able to explain to her why the monk had done what he did,” but to no avail. For Merry, it is an ongoing spiritual drama, an end to her girlhood and, obliquely, the birth of her political adulthood. She loses her terror and becomes almost fascinated by the suffering being shown to her from Vietnam. She sits “transfixed before the [television] set for minutes on end, her gaze . . . focused inward—inward where the coherence and the certainty were supposed to be, where everything she did not know was initiating a gigantic upheaval.” Just as

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her parents fail to understand Merry’s first reckoning with history, they do not see the growing emptiness in her. Asked at school to answer the question, what is life?, she writes “a single, unplatitudinous declarative sentence: ‘Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.’” This impresses the Swede: “It’s smarter than it sounds. She’s a kid—how has she figured out that life is short? She’s somethin’, our precocious daughter. This girl is going to Harvard.”11 A possible emptiness, implicit in the Swede’s nickname, is, with Merry, an actual emptiness—wrongly interpreted by the Swede as her ticket to Harvard. Merry’s is a mutable self, something that comes to appall the Swede, though she is the daughter of a man with a mutable self. She is alive to “fantasy and magic. Always pretending to be somebody else.” As a child on the verge of becoming a teenager she is obsessed with Audrey Hepburn, a preoccupation that takes on ominous overtones: “What began benignly enough when she was playing at Audrey Hepburn had evolved in only a decade into this outlandish myth of selflessness.” The narrative voice here is the Swede’s inner monologue, and the Swede may be unsteady in his judgment. Perhaps it is not an evolution into the myth of selflessness. Perhaps this child, given no sense of life’s hardships, raised in an environment unnaturally separated from uncertainty and irrationality, has neither a clear idea of the self nor the bracing chance to test her young self against adversity. Perhaps her parents have too severely smoothed the surface of their family life. Jerry seems to believe something along these lines: “Knockout couple,” he says of Dawn and the Swede. “The two of them all smiles on their outward trip to the USA. She’s post-Catholic, he’s post-Jewish, together they’re going to go out there to Old Rimrock to raise post-toasties. Instead they get that fucking kid.” In his own way, the Swede concurs: “Always a grandiose unreality [for Merry], the remotest abstraction around—never self-seeking, not in a million years. The lying, inhuman horror of all this selflessness.” Like the Swede, Coleman has a child who entirely repudiates his expectations, the father’s mutable self begetting a self-contradiction or a vacuous selflessness: “Because of his unmistakable enmity for his father, Mark [Coleman’s son] had made himself into whatever his family wasn’t—more sadly to the point, into whatever he wasn’t.”12 Isolated from the reality of violence, Merry later decides to fill the void, the brief period of time in which you are alive, with her own kind

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of violence. Where the Swede’s Weequahic High School football pennant had hung, Merry puts up a Weathermen poster. She offers a quasiCatholic devotion to the figure of Franz Fanon, imbibing his appeal to revolution and showing a powerful thirst for his story. Author of The Wretched of the Earth, a revolutionary treatise, Fanon was “a French theorist whose sentences, litanized at bedtime like a supplication, had sustained her.” Mixing the Vietnam War, a war with her parents, and a war with the honky America of Weathermen invective, Merry plants a bomb. It tears as much into the life of her father as it does into her hometown: “After turning their living room into a battlefield, after turning Morris­town High into a battlefield, she went out one day and blew up the post office.” Vietnam and Old Rimrock are not incompatible at all. This description has a specificity of detail typical of the Newark trilogy, in which objects and names collect historical meaning over time, uniting one historical epoch with another. Together with the post office, Merry’s intended target, she destroys “Dr. Fred Conlon and the village’s general store, a small wooden building with a community bulletin board out front and a single old Sunoco pump and the metal pole on which Russ Hamlin . . . had raised the American flag every morning since Warren Gamaliel Harding was president of the United States.” Merry then goes underground, protected from no one, drifting back to Newark, to live there as a Jain, leaving everything behind with a radicalism that neither the Swede nor Coleman Silk could ever fathom, leaving “behind forever the Judeo-Christian tradition.”13 The Swede must go to Newark to meet with his vagabond daughter and to be confronted, in the city of new beginnings, with the dead end of his family history. The setting is Newark some seven years after the riots have taken place. The city is wasted, and on the way to meet his daughter the Swede passes “a reptilian length of unguarded wall barren even of graffiti. But for the wilted weeds that managed to jut forth in wiry clumps where the mortar was cracked and washed away, the viaduct was barren of everything except the affirmation of a weary industrial city’s prolonged and triumphant struggle to monumentalize its ugliness.” Merry is living in utter destitution, her hovel a lingering political statement. Her surroundings at the edge of this weary industrial city “made it look as if she continued to believe her calling card was to change the course of American history.” For the Swede, the evi-

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dence is clear: Merry has not simply traveled back in time, to the immigrant poverty of his grandparents. She has placed herself beneath their poverty, and Newark now offers a poverty that even his grandparents would not have known. His daughter’s residence is worse than the one “her greenhorn great-grandparents had, fresh from steerage, in their Prince Street tenement.” Merry’s existence negates any advance that the Levovs had made, the very reason for their being in America in the first place, for making the trip from some forgotten spot on the AustroHungarian or imperial Russian map. The music of the Swede’s thinking is funereal: “Three generations. All of them growing. The working. The saving. The success. Three generations in rapture over America. Three generations of becoming one with a people. And now with the fourth it had come to nothing. The total vandalization of their world.”14 ❊ The Swede, who had been at one with America and its delirious promise of optimism and self-improvement, is made to feel an agonizing twoness. History had lifted him up, elevating him even as an adolescent to a Swede among Newark Jews, giving him everything that he ever had asked of it. And then history had changed colors and taken everything that was dear to him, punishing him without mercy: ­theodicy in the form of lived experience. The Swede “had learned the worst lesson that life can teach—that it does not make sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again. It is artificial and, even then, bought at the price of an obstinate estrangement from oneself and one’s history.” It is a lesson in “the evil ineradicable in human dealings” and one that the Swede wants desperately not to learn. His daughter must be the victim of others, as evil cannot come from within. The Swede thinks that “there had to be forces outside. The prayer went, ‘Lead me not into temptation.’ If people were not led by others, why was that the famous prayer that it was.”15 Merry’s dwelling is a lesson in history as well, a subject that never interested the Swede until he felt himself at its mercy: How had he become history’s plaything? History. American history, the stuff you read about in books and study in school. . . . History, which had made no drastic impingement on the daily life of the ­local

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populace since the Revolutionary War, wended its way back out of these cloistered hills and, improbably, with all its predictable unforeseenness broke helter-skelter into the ordered household of the Seymour Levovs and left the place in shambles. People think of history in the longer term, but history, in fact, is a very sudden thing.16

Twice the Swede, mired in history, is likened to John F. Kennedy. One association is his own, connecting the daughter’s bomb with the shots that ended Kennedy’s charmed life. The Swede’s daughter makes him “so angry he feared that his head was about to spew out his brains just as Kennedy’s did when he was shot.” At another point, Nathan Zuckerman makes the connection between the Swede and JFK. JFK was “only a decade the Swede’s senior and another privileged son of fortune, another man of glamour exuding American meaning, assassinated while still in his mid-forties. . . . I thought, But of course. He is our Kennedy.”17 More than Pearl Harbor, more than the September 11 attacks, the assassination of JFK opened the American imagination to the arbitrary possibilities of native history, to the nearness of wrong turns. It is the point at which twentieth-century European and twentieth-century American history meet. In Europe, the nightmare of modern history began with a random assassination, Archduke Ferdinand killed in Sarajevo for provincial, small-minded reasons, unleashing world war, civil war, revolution and paving the way to countless atrocities. (The Newark riots did not begin with an assassination but with something similarly arbitrary, “the police beating of a black cab driver who resisted arrest for minor traffic violations,” as Lizabeth ­Cohen writes.)18 No longer thinking of JFK, Zuckerman points to the intersection of European and American misery, to which Merry has inadvertently alerted her father, who “at the age of forty-six, in 1973, almost three-quarters of the way through the century that with no regard for the niceties of burial had strewn the corpses of mutilated children and their mutilated parents everywhere, the Swede found that we are all in the power of something demented.”19 The Swede’s discovery has little do with Europe, with America, or with the twentieth century. The power of something demented can be released at any time and in any place. Twentieth-century Europe—like America in November 1963—is merely an instructive example of a general principle.

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The 1960s provide a rich backdrop for the Swede’s crisis. He is harmlessly successful, so much so that it is strange. In the immediate postwar years, this success had social resonance for someone of his background. Others were also moving up the ladder of education and wealth, to a higher plane of existence. After learning of his daughter’s bomb, the Swede begins to see the strangeness of his own success: “He who had always felt so blessed to be numbered among the countless unembattled normal ones might, in fact, be the abnormality, a stranger from real life because of his being so sturdily rooted.” He could never have imagined that his success could cause hatred. Yet it is precisely those who are offended by success, those who see themselves as history’s victims, who are the Swede’s antagonists, and they are the surrogate family that has adopted his daughter. They do not stop at stealing his daughter. They are trying to teach the Swede a political lesson—that no one is so privileged as to be unembattled. If some are embattled, all must be embattled. The Weathermen, the Black Panthers, and other 1960s radicals were “shepherding him at long last to the truth, to the truth as they knew it to be for every Vietnamese man, woman, and child, and tot, for every colonized black in America . . . the something that’s demented in American history! . . . Welcome to the fucked-over-by-America human race!” The Weathermen achieve something of a triumph with the Swede. Though they do not convert him to their understanding of political virtue, they deprive him of his own understanding, until “there seemed to be nothing left of the man who could not be diverted from his task, who neglected no one in his crusade against disorder, against the abiding problem of human error and insufficiency.”20 For the first time, the Swede knows solitude and not only the solitude of a suffering father but the solitude written into his very name, of a Swede with no connection to Sweden. He has no referents for his suffering. Details connected with his daughter, slightly Catholic because of her grandparents and very much a political radical, run through the Swede’s tormented mind. He turns to the radical icon Angela Davis for help: “Alone in the kitchen at night the Swede begins to have heartto-heart talks with Angela Davis.” Davis is on trial, somewhat like his errant daughter, and the Swede asks for Davis’s deliverance in bizarrely Catholic terminology. The word “alone” is given priority in the following description of the Swede: “Alone then and in secret he prays—

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ardently prays to God, to Jesus, to anyone, to the Blessed Virgin, to St. Anthony, to St. Jude, to St. Anne, St. Joseph—for Angela’s acquittal.” Only when alone could the Swede entertain such absurdities, which may not be absurd at all: there is no Newark figure, or Newark story, or Jewish set of references that would be of any greater help to the Swede. The Swede discovers his inner life, to which there is little romance and nothing like edification, “an inner life, a gruesome inner life of tyrannical obsessions, stifled inclinations, superstitious expectations, horrible imaginings, fantasy conversations, unanswerable questions. . . . Enormous loneliness.” This suffering reveals the truth of suffering, the reality of pain, and the unreality and untruth of all else, at least for “this riven charlatan of sincerity, an artless outer Swede and a tormented inner Swede, a visible stable Swede and a concealed beleaguered Swede, an easygoing, smiling sham Swede enshrouding the Swede buried alive.”21 The visible and sincere have no substance, they offer no light, and the inner Swede must live in darkness. By comparison with the Swede, Ira Ringold suffers even more severely. The Swede will endure great hardship, divorce his wife, never reclaim his daughter. He will also remarry and have the kind of family he had hoped to have the first time, whatever despair lingers on in him. His brother finds him weeping alone in a car, while the rest of the family is at a restaurant. Even with his new family, the Swede cannot forget the daughter who vanished into Newark. As Jerry recalls, “We all went to this stone-crab place . . . lots of noise, the kids all showing off and laughing. Seymour [the Swede] loved it. But when the pie and coffee came he got up from the table, and when he didn’t come back right away I went out and found him. In the car. In tears. Shaking with sobs. I’d never seen him like that. My brother the rock. He said, ‘I miss my daughter.’” Later on, the Swede contacts Nathan Zuckerman, who had idolized the Swede as a boy in Newark. The Swede and Nathan had met at a baseball game in 1985, and in 1995 the Swede sends Nathan a terse, ineloquent note about his father: “Most everybody thought of my father as indestructible, a thick-skinned man on a short fuse, not everyone knew how much he suffered because of shocks that befell his loved ones.”22 In combining the word “shock” with the word “suffered,” the Swede is writing about himself in this note, a man still suffering through history’s shocks. The Swede then invites Nathan to dinner in New York and says noth-

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ing at all about the note. He is entirely mute, and Nathan dismisses him as a business success and a nonentity in literary terms. No good novel could be written about the Swede, for he has neither a story nor a voice for speaking out his story. When Nathan meets Jerry at their Newark high school reunion, after the Swede’s death, Nathan realizes that he has misunderstood everything. Jerry’s revelatory words echo the bomb that Merry exploded in Old Rimrock. They are the elemental facts out of which a fine novelistic web can be spun, with Nathan saying in his novel-within-a-novel what the Swede could not say in his note or at the dinner table. Though not dissimilar, Ira’s fate is, again, worse than the Swede’s. I Married a Communist is narrated by Ira’s brother, Murray, as present a narrative voice as can be, able to stipulate every nuance, full of humanity and warmth and not without the novelist’s sharp critical intelligence. Zuckerman does not imagine Ira’s story as he does the Swede’s. He records Murray’s words, which give history a less explosive quality than it has in American Pastoral. In American Pastoral, history arrives with the force of a bomb: like the Newark riots, Merry’s Weathermen are an unexplained source of chaos. In I Married a Communist, history is not a force that erupts from the political unconscious, from the rage of the Weathermen or the rioters in Newark, bringing overt destruction. In I Married a Communist, history reflects the cold mathematics of political destruction rather than the hot rage of political terrorism. Historical violence, in I Married a Communist, is political ambition in search of the right vehicle, a rational ruthlessness practiced by those with political power, with reputations to defend and with careers to make. Mc­ Carthyism gives history its malevolent energy in the years between 1950 and 1954, and this energy is used by individuals to their personal advantage, all of which Murray analyzes scrupulously. Murray dissects the layers of historical change that undid his brother, touching less upon the “no reason” of history and more upon the knowable human motivations, cravings, and dilemmas that generate historical change. An English teacher by profession, Murray is not an unreliable narrator. He is a voluble narrator with astute interpretations of his own, and he knows the theme of the story he is telling, which is betrayal. As Murray says, “To me it seems likely that more acts of personal betrayal were tellingly perpetrated in America in the decade after the war—say,

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between ’46 and ’56—than in any other period in our history.” The noxious cloud of recollection and accusation gave betrayal cachet: “It was everywhere during those years, the accessible transgression, the permissible transgression that any American could commit.” The plot of the novel connects two strands, private and public betrayal, into a larger historical movement. Bryden Grant is an ambitious politician. He and his wife, Katrina, wish to ascend the mountain of success, Bryden a kind of low-grade Caesar and Katrina a midcentury Lady Macbeth, who “under Eisenhower and again, later, under Bryden’s mentor Nixon . . . straddled Washington society like fear itself,” a socialite analogue to McCarthyism. In the McCarthy period there is a need for victims: such is the cut of this particular historical pattern. The novel’s other historical strand is represented by Eva Frame, Ira’s wife, who disappoints Ira by not having children with him and who is then disappointed by Ira’s infidelity. She exacts her revenge by publishing a work of purported nonfiction, which elicits a negative review from Murray. I Married a Communist, Eve’s book, is well received, suggesting a public hunger for “anything to empty life of its incongruities, of its meaningless, messy contingencies, and to impose on it instead the simplification that coheres—and misapprehends everything.”23 Eve’s book fuels Bryden Grant’s career, the personal and political reinforcing one another. History’s handiwork is tense with irony. History destroys Ira, it promotes and then betrays Bryden Grant, and with mild vindictiveness it exposes Eva Frame for the actress she is, revealing the woman within the frame. Some escape history, some are singed by it, some are burnt, and at the bottom it is “no reason” that makes the difference, that separates the singed from the burnt and the burnt from those whom history allows to go scot-free. Katrina Grant is among the lucky. Murray sees her on television during Nixon’s funeral in 1994, a solid political matron: “Life seemed never to have forced her to acknowledge, let alone to surrender, a single one of her pretensions.” History went light on Richard Nixon as well. He was allowed the dignity of a presidential funeral, forgiven by the passage of time. Bryden is among the less lucky: “He too was capsized by Watergate. Threw his lot in with Nixon and, in the face of all the evidence against his leader, defended him on the floor of the House right down to the morning of the resignation. That’s what got Grant defeated in ’74,” Murray recalls. Those who try to capi-

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talize on history’s destructive powers can themselves get destroyed by history: “Nixon had Alger Hiss, Grant had Iron Rinn. To catapult them each into political eminence, each of them had a Soviet spy.” Eve Frame had defied history by denying her Jewish roots, living as a Hollywood star and then as a wealthy Manhattanite. Later in life, Murray’s wife, Doris, sees her on television, closer to her uncorrected first self—one might say her Adamic self, were she not named Eve—because she has grown older. Doris returns Eve effortlessly to a Jewish context, Eve’s resting place in history. “You know whom she looks like now that she’s built like that? Mrs. Goldberg, from Tremont Avenue in the Bronx,” Doris observes mirthfully. Then Murray’s narrative voice adds a lifelike roster of Jewish names, “Remember Molly Goldberg, on The Goldbergs? With her husband, Jake, and her children, Rosalie and Samily? Philip Loeb. Remember Philip Loeb?”24 This is Eve Frame in the unwanted grip of American ethnicity and in the grip of the Newark trilogy’s mania for names and naming names. Private acts of vengeance have overlapping public consequences. Murray loses his job because of his connection to Ira, and Nathan is deprived of a scholarship because of his connection to Ira. Neither is  deflected for long from what they wish to do, while Ira is utterly devastated by his wife’s book. A big man, full of energy and seeming self-confidence, with the power to vault himself from the poor streets of Newark to the lower reaches of American celebrity, Ira falls into nothingness after losing his job. History’s grip is not something he can withstand. At first he is “infuriated, brooding, devastated, obsessed”— like Ahab gored by the white whale. Then, unhinged by “the forces of unreason,” Ira aspires to be a Newark Adam: “After the book [I Married a Communist], Ira set out to become his own uncorrected first self.” What remains is Newark but not a Newark he can use. The return to his childhood self is not at all cathartic. He does not strip away the bad and discover of the seed of goodness that adult life had kept from flowering. It is more a return to primitivism, when Ira shed “everything that ever tamed him, all the civilizing accommodations . . . and . . . was stripped back to the Ira who dug ditches in Newark. Back to the Ira who’d mined zinc up in the Jersey Hills. He reclaimed his earliest experience, when his tutor was the shovel. He made contact with the Ira before all the moral correction took place.”25 Ira’s answer to moral trauma is to

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deny himself any position in society. He had affronted society’s laws once by killing as a boy. Leaving Manhattan for New Jersey, a broken man, he is returning to an earlier isolation, anything but a prodigal son stepping back into his father’s arms. Ira, a man of action, does not have the right words at his disposal when he suffers, although as a communist he had been outspoken and his radio career had involved ceaseless public speaking. He can return to the physical city of Newark and to the Jersey Hills, but Newark has not given him, or he has not taken from it, any of the civilizing accommodations that accrue to his first self. One such civilizing accommodation would be a story or set of stories, and Ira’s brother, Murray, a knower of stories, entertains the idea of Ira returning to his primeval Newark self: “Well, maybe . . . he just achieved the old survival clarity he had digging ditches [as a teenager], before all the scaffolding of politics and home and success and fame got erected around him, before he buried the ditchdigger alive and donned Abe Lincoln’s hat. Maybe he became himself again, the actor of his own way.” Murray’s language contains its own qualifications: being one’s own actor is a curious key to authenticity. More persuasive is Murray’s sad commentary on his brother, that his “passion was to become someone he didn’t know how to be. He never discovered his life, Nathan.” Not able to discover his life, a Columbus who never reaches India, Ira is alienated from his own words, for he does not know what truth they should express. “He even stopped talking so much,” his brother remembers. “All that endless outraged rhetoric. Going on and on when what this huge man really wanted to do was to lash out.”26 Of course, Ira does not tell Nathan his story or even hint at it, as the Swede does with his clumsy letter. History has rendered Ira thoroughly mute. ❊ The theme of muteness is everywhere in the Newark trilogy. Like literacy, it is one of the trilogy’s master themes. In American Pastoral it is the Swede, his spirit squeezed in history’s grip, who cannot speak; in I Married a Communist Ira stops talking because he cannot fathom the narrative of his life. The theme of muteness is reflected in its opposite— the assertive plenitude of narrative, storytelling, and literature. The writer Nathan Zuckerman is a felt presence in each of the three novels.

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Murray is an English teacher; Coleman, a professor of classics. To stand close to literature is to stand close to wisdom, and Newark stories—this trilogy’s lifeblood—are the wisdom upon which it is based. Literature and stories teach, and those who know literature should be unsurprised by history’s malice, which can be articulated in words. As Murray says, in the midst of talking about Ira: Professionals who’ve spent their energy teaching masterpieces, the few of us still engrossed by literature’s scrutiny of things, have no excuse for finding betrayal anywhere but at the heart of history. History from top to bottom. World history, family history, personal history. It’s a very big subject, betrayal. Just think of the Bible. What’s that book about? The master story situation of the Bible is betrayal . . . Job—betrayed. Job betrayed by whom? By none other than God himself. And don’t forget the betrayal of God. God betrayed by our ancestors at every turn.27

Ira and the Swede are not literary men. Nor would their lives be quickly improved by immersion in the Old Testament, in Tolstoy, or in Gibbon. Ira and the Swede are writers nevertheless, artists who have reduced their feeling for stories to the manipulated story of their own ahistorical lives, made vivid by leaving Newark. Though able to betray others, they are unschooled in the fine points of betrayal, the impulse Murray sees at the heart of history, and they are betrayed by those closest to them, Ira by his colleagues, the Swede by his daughter, and both of them by their wives. The pairing of literacy with the theme of muteness means that, for Ira and the Swede, a lack of literacy abets an eventual muteness.28 The theme of muteness versus literacy reaches its apex in The Human Stain. It is broken into several characters, each with a particular relation to stories, speaking, muteness, and history. The Human Stain revolves around four main characters: Coleman Silk; Delphine Roux; Lester Farley, a Vietnam veteran; and Faunia Farley, his ex-wife. Of the four, Delphine is least involved in history, and she is not made mute by history, as are Ira and the Swede. Like Eve Frame, though, she desecrates literacy. Delphine and Eve employ untrue stories to deceive and spread confusion, as opposed to the illuminating, truthful, gorgeous narrative tapestry that Murray weaves over several nights for Nathan—as opposed to Nathan’s composite endeavor in the Newark trilogy. Zuckerman’s three Newark novels are literacy raised to the Olympian heights

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of literature. This ascent gains stature through contrast: Faunia, for example, is the victim of her family history, which, because she is so hostile to literacy and to stories, is unknowable to others; her words cannot be fully trusted. It seems, though, that she was molested by a stepfather and has endured the consequences over a traumatic adulthood. Her diaries are kept from Zuckerman. Her former husband, Lester, who returns psychically damaged from the Vietnam War, recapit­ulates the connection between America and Vietnam that deranges Merry Levov’s childhood. The American pastoral cannot save Lester, cannot loosen history’s grip upon him, and he stands perpetually on the edge of his pathological rage. He, too, cannot speak about his past. Nor—for a very different reason—can Coleman. Coleman is schooled in great literature and able to speak his mind fluidly on all subjects except that of his own actual past. He becomes the narrative prisoner of his own self-invention. Delphine Roux and her hunting of Coleman highlight the subject of literacy perverted. Coleman’s downfall is a matter of words. He notices that two students have been absent from his class, and he asks whether they exist or whether they are “spooks.” The students happen to be black, and the word “spook” is taken, in context, to signify racial prejudice. Delphine sympathizes with the students’ claim that Professor Silk is a racist. Professionally trained to interpret words, she accepts a flagrant misreading. She is literate to the point of being illiterate, unearthing the hidden truth that is an easily recognizable falsehood. For all its absurdity, the dilemma of Coleman Silk, attacked for using the word “spooks,” is not merely satiric. Nor is The Human Stain a comedy of academic manners like Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim or Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. Delphine’s illiteracy goes beyond satire’s impishness, and its implications are meant to be frightening. Words can be lifted from context, made to serve conspiratorial ends, and in the right climate intelligent people will righteously acquiesce in what they know to be dishonesty. Hitler’s crazed understanding of Jewish life, spelled out in Mein Kampf, was made into state dogma in Germany, and millions acted upon his lunacy. The Moscow trials demanded public confession of nonexistent crimes and plots, absurdities that were transparent, if hard to subdue, at the time. Millions joined in spectacles of mass dishonesty, not just in Stalin’s Soviet Union and not due to state coercion

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alone. The perversion of literacy—of stories, narrative, speech, words— was endemic to both fascism and communism. American academia in the 1980s and 1990s, combining certain fears with certain sensitivities, perpetuated a twentieth-century tradition of misreading and misinterpreting. A fortunate victim, Coleman Silk is not shot for his misdeeds, but he is forced into a quasi-totalitarian condition of guilt without crime. Because words are willfully misread, Coleman is persecuted for thoughts he did not actually have, an instance, of “the Orwellian issues of language as communication, or the corruption of communication, that he [Philip Roth] often raises,” as Alan Cooper puts it.29 First Delphine misreads; then she writes and speaks untruths. Part I of The Human Stain is sardonically titled “Everyone Knows.” These are the first two words of a letter, supposed to be anonymous, but written by Delphine to Coleman. She is jealous of Coleman for having an affair with a younger woman, someone who works as a janitor, and Delphine wishes to shame Coleman for his unbridled libido. The letter is malicious but less malicious than Delphine’s outright lying after she accidentally sends an e-mail—revealing her desire for Coleman—to the entire college. She claims that Coleman broke into her office and forged the e-mail. She relies on the adverse opinion of Coleman that “everyone” already has to make her story credible. Her story is pure misinformation, and the situation amounts to an elegant literary joke. Delphine is a young professor who has mastered the jargon of postmodernism, more out of careerism than out of a real commitment to its ­philosophical-political agenda. Officially, she believes in the uncertainty of texts, the death of the author, in the unreliable signage of the written word. This is what she teaches her students, while in her communal life she relies on the stability of (false) knowledge to advance her career. Everyone knows that Coleman is guilty of something, everyone will ostracize him at her request, and everyone does. The toppling of an oldfashioned professor like Coleman, who defends the grandeur of literature and the necessity of tradition, would make the environment more congenial for Delphine, who triumphs as far as her professional ambitions are concerned. In a subtle way, however, her success renders her mute. She cannot speak the truth of her desire, or her loneliness, and must engage in literary subterfuge. Like Coleman, Ira, and the Swede, the story she cannot tell is the story of her unhappy inner life.30

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The figure of Lester is in even deeper harmony with the Newark trilogy’s motifs. He is among the Vietnam veterans “who, in their postwar lives, had themselves been through the worst,” which is not quite the same as being through the worst in the war. Lester acts as if there is only regular life to live out in rural Massachusetts, where The Human Stain is set, though he, for one, cannot live up to his ideal of normalcy: “But then— . . . because there was no alternative for Farley, no way to prevent the past from building back up and calling him into action and demanding from him an enormous response—instead of it all being behind him, it was in front of him.” The spatial metaphors are crucial, for history’s grip would matter less if its effects were immediate and temporary. Memory makes this impossible, leaving no option but to live with the past, however terrible or wonderful. History does not vanish into the past, something conveyed by verb tense in Lester’s realization that “once again, it was his life”—was and is.31 History is not a discrete set of events in these novels, and it is anything but a dramatic backdrop, like the Russian Revolution in the film version of Doctor Zhivago or the Civil War in Gone with the Wind. Lester is not made to participate in history by going off to fight in Vietnam. His postwar suffering suggests a generalization that could follow from Homer or Tolstoy: history is what the characters carry with them.32 History is what Odysseus must endure after the war, as he tries to return home. History is the mingling of war and peace, public and private. In War and Peace, war is filled with the petty concerns—with dress, status, appearance, career—of peacetime, and peace is filled with the high drama of war, the victories, reversals, and losses of romantic and family life. In the Newark trilogy, history plays itself out between the event (the Vietnam War) and the individual (Lester). Much of history comes after the fact. This is the generalization that Lester personifies when he goes to see the Vietnam Memorial Wall. The wall is Maya Lin’s wall, designed for the National Mall, though in Lester’s case it is a reproduction taken around to small communities, bringing the wall to those unsure about visiting it. The wall’s design perfectly reflects the Newark trilogy’s interplay of literacy and muteness, “a perpendicular cemetery of dark upright slabs sloping off gradually at either end and stamped in white lettering with all the tightly packed names.” The wall has no historical text. It makes no effort to tell the story of the Vietnam War, which would lead

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inexorably to the agony of narrative. Yet Maya Lin’s wall is not devoid of text, and by resembling a cemetery it is not mute about its own significance. The wall commemorates the loss of life in names, projecting an eloquence without rhetoric and commemorating the “58,209 people who no longer take walks or go to the movies but who manage to exist, for whatever it is worth, as inscriptions on a portable black aluminum wall supported behind by a frame of two-by-fours in a Massachusetts parking lot of a Ramada Inn.”33 The awkward profusion of prepositional phrases in this sentence evokes the “tightly packed names” on the wall, the density of lifelike detail that death terminates. By refusing to tell a single story about the Vietnam War, the wall points its viewers to 58,209 stories that, mostly, cannot be told, even if they can be approached and felt by those who come to view the wall. Lester must be coaxed into viewing the wall. He goes with a group of Vietnam veterans, their trip of indeterminate merit, and Lester feels dead. In her essay on Homer, Simone Weil emphasizes the connection between war and muteness, which she applies to the figure of the solider: “The conquering soldier is like the scourge of nature. Possessed by war, he, like the slave, becomes a thing, though his manner of doing so is different—over him too, words are as powerless as over matter itself. And both, at the touch of force, experience its inevitable effects: they become deaf and dumb.”34 Lester “used to be tortured by it [the war], now he can’t be connected to it in any way.” He can acknowledge “the mystery of being alive and in flux,” but there is no release when he looks at the wall. The pain is not calmed, and the deathly feeling not diminished. He cannot travel productively to the past. That may be his only epiphany at the wall, a vision of health and wholeness that is fruitlessly peripheral to his inner life. He can sense that “everything out there is supposed to save him from death. Link him backward to Les the boy. That is the recurring dream: the unbroken boy on the farm.” Yet he cannot erase the breakages that war has forced into his life. His doppelgänger is a man by the name of Swift, a man “who called himself Swift, having legally changed his name after his discharge, as though his no longer being Joe Brown or Bill Green or whoever he was when he was drafted would cause him, back home, to leap out of bed every morning with joy.” They go to the Harmony Palace, a Chinese restaurant, and Swift helps Lester get through the meal. The day could be declared a

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success. A group of troubled veterans had gone to confront the past, legible before them in the names of the dead, and nothing disastrous happens. They had confronted it, and then they had gone out to eat. Swift, however, is unredeemed by the experience. Sitting in the van on the way back home, he falls into “a bitter and disgruntled silence, because once the flickering neon lights are behind them, so is the memory of himself that he seems to have had at the Harmony Palace. Swift is now busy stoking his pain.”35 Farley’s ex-wife, Faunia, is not just mute. She pretends to be illiterate. Section 3 of The Human Stain is titled “What Do You Do with a Kid Who Can’t Read?” This is a question Coleman’s daughter asks of her father. She teaches at a New York City school, where she encounters a little girl who cannot read. Faunia is a grown-up woman who claims that she cannot read, having run away from home at an early age and worked odd jobs until becoming a janitor at Athena College. Coleman is Faunia’s lover, and one day he comes across her roughhousing with her fellow janitors. To Coleman, her juvenile behavior suggests the discrepancy between adult misery and childhood or the connection between childhood and adult misery. Coleman imagines Faunia in his daughter’s classroom: “She is wearing a green corduroy jumper, fresh white stockings, and shiny black shoes . . . composed, well mannered, permanently a little deflated, a pretty middle-class Caucasian child with long blond hair in butterfly barrettes at either side.” Faunia, the adult woman, carries the full legacy of her traumatic childhood and only slightly the traces of her family’s history. She had been born to a well-off New England family. When Nathan meets Faunia’s father, at the end of The Human Stain, he hears “evidence of a privileged New England childhood in his speech that dated back to long before either of us was born.” No such thing could be heard in Faunia’s speech. It is only through her physical appearance that she could be connected back to her ancestry.36 Her family and its history are an illegible atavism, a physical trace that is disappearing, just as her New England ancestors have long ago disappeared. The master story of the Newark trilogy—the flight from home, the self-fashioning, the brush with history—figures in Faunia’s biography. In her case, though, the pieces are more fragmentary than with the Swede, Ira, and Coleman, occurring in almost the opposite order.

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Faunia falls into the grip of disaster at a much younger age, when she was still the innocent girl who might have appeared in the classroom of Coleman’s daughter. Coleman describes Faunia as “a woman whose life’s been trying to grind her down for almost as long as she’s had life. Whatever she’s learned comes from that.” Her response is to leave, to have been “a runaway since age fourteen, on the lam from her inexplicable life for her entire life.” She is similar to Ira, who had had also been on the lam, as his brother puts it, and who cannot ever find himself. She is similar to Coleman at least in her will to be a runaway. Faunia’s flight may be even more extreme than Merry’s flight from home. Merry ultimately renounces Judeo-Christian ethics for an unlivable ideal of asceticism. Faunia goes further and renounces the human in herself, the human quality that expresses itself preeminently in speech and literacy and storytelling. Faunia wishes to be an animal. Atypically “for someone who seems to have lived entirely without luck, there’s no lament in her,” Coleman observes to Nathan, because Faunia has separated herself from the human tendency to lament, wedded as it is to the tendency to speak, to form one’s story in one’s own words, and to give it the cadence of a narrative voice or the melody of song. She has abandoned herself to the “petrifactive quality of force,” to borrow a phrase from Simone Weil’s essay.37 Faunia longs to be a crow, thinking to herself (as Nathan imagines) that “there are men who are locked up in women’s bodies and women who are locked up in men’s bodies, so why can’t I be a crow locked up in this body?” Because they are animals, crows cannot lament, Faunia reasons: “Me and the crows. That’s the ticket. . . . When they get smashed by something, that’s it, it’s over.” The flight from the human is, at its best, a flight from the megalomania of suffering, allowing one “to live with one’s failure in a modest fashion.”38 Coleman’s infatuation with Faunia invites the present-tense joy of eros. She aspires to the consciousness of a crow, and Coleman, stung by his academic scandal, is drawn to her precisely because she lives without history and without the trappings of culture. Faunia refuses the exchange of memory common to a conventional romance, and Coleman finds Faunia to be “not the most but, morally speaking, the least repellent person he knows, the one to whom he feels drawn because of having been aimed for so long in the opposite direction—and because the underlying feeling of rightness that controlled him formerly is ex-

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actly what propelled him now.” Coleman had sacrificed enormously for his position at Athena College, cutting ties with his family to gain it, and he can easily cut his ties with Athena College, erasing one set of historical markers and replacing them with timeless eros. Coleman is overwhelmed by “the delectation of this elemental eros.” Beyond giving pleasure, eros causes change: “That the primal seems a solution is not news—it always does. Everything changes with desire,” and Coleman can change himself from an aging man sunk in resentment to a man in love with the present moment. His mother reprimanded him for thinking like a slave, and with Faunia he experiences “the onslaught of freedom at seventy-one.” They dance in the evening, their energy dissolving into pleasure’s embrace. As imagined by Nathan: “There they dance, as likely as not unclothed, beyond the ordeal of the world, in an unearthly paradise of earthbound lust where their coupling is the drama into which they decant all the angry disappointment of their lives.” They defy, and are still subject to, the earthly rules of gravity. Faunia is the professor’s teacher, pulling him out of time: “Don’t think it’s about tomorrow. . . . All the social ways of thinking, shut ’em down,” she instructs him.39 Faunia’s teaching bristles with nihilism, and in the improvised logistics of Faunia’s and Coleman’s erotic passion the earthbound triumphs over the unearthly. For Faunia, all history is commensurate with her own suffering; hers is the only story that matters. About the molestation she endured as a child she tells Coleman, “It’s like when you’re a child in a war. You ever see those pictures in the paper of kids after they bomb their cities? It’s like that. It’s as big as a bomb”—as big as Merry’s bomb, as big as the explosions that rocked Newark in the summer of 1967. Faunia’s vision of the world gives the novel its title, an almost inhuman acceptance of human fallibility that, in her wording, has a note of moral majesty: “‘The human stain,’ she said, and without revulsion or contempt or condemnation. Not even with sadness. ‘That’s how it is.’” For Coleman it is not enough or it is too much. He cannot resist commenting on the human stain, thinking about it, putting it in words. It is, after all, the summer of 1998, and the entire country is abuzz with the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Older man and younger woman, Clinton and Lewinsky had been bound up in a relationship similar to Coleman’s and Faunia’s, ending with both Clinton

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and Coleman condemned for their appetites, placed at the moral margins of their respective communities. At breakfast, Coleman starts to discuss the scandal, sending Faunia into a rage. “You really think this is the important stuff in the world? It’s not that important. It’s not important at all. I had two kids. They’re dead. If I don’t have the energy this morning to feel bad about Monica and Bill, chalk it up to my two kids, all right?” Faunia’s two kids had died in a fire, and nothing in history or politics can compare with their death. Faunia leaves Coleman’s house to commune with her crows, “none of them intent on teaching her a thing . . . she knew all she needed to know about the human race: the ruthless and the defenseless. She didn’t need the dates and the names. The ruthless and the defenseless, there’s the whole fucking deal.”40 Faunia, with her considered ignorance of history, is the only one to whom Coleman tells his story. Coleman had cultivated a friendship with his neighbor, Nathan Zuckerman, hoping that Nathan would write the story of Coleman’s persecution. Coleman himself had tried to write this story and given up on the idea. Another book about academic moral excess is boring, a useless enterprise compared with a book about Coleman’s actual life, but Coleman is disabled by an inability to write his true story. As Ross Posnock argues, the later-in-life damage inflicted upon Coleman only makes his secret—the secret of his race, his family, his past—more secure. With Coleman, Posnock sees secret bleeding into self: “What remained intact, unrepudiated, is the secret, which is, finally, nothing less than his core Silk self.”41 Coleman can live with his secret. He does not tell his own children, which means, according to America’s racial code, that they could have black children without knowing that they themselves are black. Coleman’s sister believes that “it was frighteningly cruel for Coleman not to tell his children” his vaunted secret, cruel to his children but not necessarily to himself.42 Coleman’s confession to Faunia could be the climax of the novel, a moment of extraordinary unmasking, when Coleman is finally able to speak the truth of his personal history; but Faunia, who had already guessed that he is black, does not care. The story of his passing is bland and empty compared with her epic tale of woe. Faunia is the last person to have an ear for his story, and Coleman must consign himself to something less than literacy, to a solitude that is more bearable than the Swede’s chronic alienation and far more bearable than Ira’s perma-

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nent disgrace. Well trained for solitude, Coleman is not destroyed by it after history makes him more alone. Coleman publicly invokes his blackness only once, in a moment of rage. When he receives a threatening anonymous letter, he goes to a lawyer. An ambitious young man, the lawyer lectures Coleman on how to live, and in the course of his lecture the lawyer humiliates the older man. Coleman listens silently and then erupts with anger. First, he wants to strike the lawyer, then “drawing back, reining himself in, strategically speaking as subtly as he could—yet not nearly so mindfully as he might have—Coleman said, ‘I never again want to hear that selfadmiring voice of yours or see your smug fucking lily-white face.’” The word “lily-white” is the hinge on which Coleman’s life history swings in The Human Stain. A few paragraphs after he speaks it, the narrative goes back in time to New Jersey and to Coleman’s black family, as if, with a single word, Coleman has accidentally summoned his real story. Yet the lawyer, so unexpectedly labeled lily-white, is baffled by this portentous clue. He can understand Coleman’s anger; he cannot understand why, in a conversation between two white men, it would matter that either of them is lily-white. As the lawyer says to his wife, “I wanted to help him and instead I insulted him and made things worse for him. No, I can’t fault him for unloading on me like that. But, honey, the question remains: why white?”43 Only an archeologist of the self, like Nathan Zuckerman, can travel through this single word, Coleman’s one deviation from the guarded fiction of his whiteness, and explore the layers of New Jersey verity beneath it. For the cocky young lawyer, a single word is not enough to penetrate through to the story of Coleman’s lily-white self. Coleman’s failure to tell his story is burlesqued in a eulogy delivered by an academic colleague. The eulogy is intended to be self-critical, a judgment on the college community that hectored Coleman for no reason at all. Athena College fell prey to the “ever-present evangelists of the mores of the moment,” the eulogist contends, an accurate enough statement but too simple a verdict on a complicated life. It is public speaking with no feeling for the individual who has died. Not knowing the secret that gave Coleman’s life its force, the speaker misses the point of Coleman’s life, yet another instance of misreading in The Human Stain. The speaker attributes an Aristotelian perfection to the works

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that Coleman taught as a classicist, criticizing the present for falling off from this standard: “The human desire for a beginning, a middle, and an end—and an end appropriate in the magnitude to the beginning and middle—is realized nowhere so thoroughly as in the plays that Coleman taught at Athena College. But outside the classical tragedy of the fifth century B.C., the expectation of completion, let alone of a just and perfect consummation, is a foolish illusion for an adult to hold.”44 Murray’s defense of literature is more appealing. The masterpieces convey “literature’s scrutiny of things,” and they elaborate the dynamic of betrayal, Coleman having been betrayed by his colleagues, and Coleman having betrayed his family by leaving and his children by telling them that their father is white. The speaker gets even the official side of Coleman’s life wrong. Like Delphine, he is highly educated and an educated novice in the scrutiny of things. Coleman’s story, a story that “everyone knows,” is a case study in the tenacity of ignorance. Coleman is the most complex of the three Newark trilogy protagonists. He is stronger than the Swede and Ira, and history’s vengeance upon him is less devastating. Coleman may have lost his wife and grown estranged from his children because of the college’s stupidity, but it is not the same as the divorce that both Ira and the Swede under­go, the betrayal from within the family that eviscerates the Swede and Ira. After history has done its work on them, their attachments to others weaken. Ira vanishes into provincial isolation, and, by inference, the Swede is less romantic and dreamy with his second family than he had been with his first. Well into his second family, the Swede is still involved with the shock and suffering he writes about to Nathan, still a “riven charlatan of sincerity.”45 By comparison, Coleman is energized by his confrontation with history and could almost say, like his namesake Brutus, having suffered a military defeat, “I shall have glory by this losing day . . . for ­Brutus’ tongue / Hath almost ended his life’s history.”46 Coleman had stared down history once before, not letting it tie him to Newark, when the odds against leaving as a white man were almost impossible. He had defied history by having a “white” family and by pulling it off. When the unjust denouement of his professional life is complete and Coleman is sent beyond the borders of propriety, he follows a new course. Coleman’s long training in cheating history may make him less susceptible to the pain of its grip when it closes around him. With the Newark trilogy

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in mind, Greil Marcus writes that “American identity cannot be taken away any more than it can be granted. It is found, discovered, made up, a declaration that each must make,” and Coleman exemplifies this claim, challenging the premise that the stable self, grounded in honesty, community, and history, is necessarily a strong self. Self-fashioning, over time, is inseparable from tradition.47 At age seventy-one Coleman is still capable of an erotic new beginning, and the eros that Faunia and Coleman discover is hard to praise or to criticize. It is not redemption for either of them, and it is not the exploitation that Professor Roux assumes it to be. Coleman is stripped of his status and of his family, and he is freed from them at the same time.48 The extramarital affair between Coleman and Faunia is neither simple nor simply good. When Coleman lapses into his customary social ways of thinking, he encourages Faunia to contemplate suicide. Faunia thinks to herself that “he’s reading to me about Clinton from the New York Times and all I’m thinking about is Dr. Kevorkian and his carbon monoxide machine.” She had, by her own admission, contemplated suicide twice before, and death could be considered the epitome of her moral philosophy, the cleanest way of abolishing past and future. After she dies, her funeral fixes her more in the animal than in the human world. She is laid to rest in a cemetery “inhabited by coyote, bobcat, even black bear, and by foraging deer herds said to abound in huge, precolonial numbers.” Faunus, the patron saint of her name, is the god of animals. (Faunia also resembles the Monkey, Alexander Portnoy’s girlfriend in Portnoy’s Complaint, whose bad spelling and sexual abandon make her animal-like in Portnoy’s eyes.) Driving to Coleman’s funeral, Nathan is partially persuaded by Faunia’s nonhuman, elemental feeling for trauma, despite being the ostensible author of the Newark trilogy, a rigorous effort to portray the human in history. Perhaps human history is merely an afterthought to nature, its grip minimal compared to “the terrific abrasive force of the glacial onslaught that had scoured these mountains on the far edge of its booming and southward slide.” More convincing, for Nathan, is the equivalence between the power of nature and the power of history, of lives lived “in time.” Witnessing “those mammoth rocks all tumbled sideways like a ravaged Stonehenge, crushed together and yet hugely intact, I was once again horrified by the thought of the moment of impact that had separated

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Coleman from Faunia and from their lives in time and catapulted them into the earth’s past.”49 ❊ The conclusion of The Human Stain develops this image of nature without humanity and without history, of the earth’s inarticulate past, a contrary gesture to the trilogy’s larger pattern. Lester’s tongue almost ends the Newark trilogy. Nathan sees Lester ice fishing. He believes that Lester has killed Faunia and Coleman, and with a hint of personal danger in the air he walks over to Lester. The scene is full of whiteness, the terrifying whiteness Melville analyzes in “The Whiteness of the Whale,” one of Moby-Dick’s most memorable chapters. Nathan and Lester are in Melville’s “wide landscape of snows,” white being a color that contains all colors and that is not a color at all, impossibly full and terrifyingly empty at the same time.50 The lake’s emptiness draws Lester; in winter the snow-covered lake shades the civilization around it into whiteness. He tells Nathan, “There’s no houses anywhere. No dwellings. There’s no cottages on the lake. . . . They live in cities. They live in the hustle and bustle of the work routine. The craziness goin’ to work. The craziness at work. The craziness comin’ home from work. The traffic. The congestion. They’re caught up in that. I’m out of it.” Yet the novelist comprehends what nature cannot, which is that Lester has “murdered in Vietnam and he’s brought the murderer back with him to the Berkshires, back with him from the country of war, the country of horror, to this completely uncomprehending other place.”51 Lester’s false identification with whiteness and purity recalls Macbeth’s question about the color of murder: “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine / Making the green one red.”52 The alchemy of Nathan’s imagination transforms Lester’s depeopled, storyless retreat into “this loony bin of a lake,” implying that Lester is not “out of it” at all but complicit in the craziness he condemns, making the white one red and enlisted still in the overseas war.53 The Newark trilogy’s last paragraph depicts Lester sitting alone on his white lake. Its phrases restate the trilogy’s substance, balancing the majesty of stories with the human propensity for illiteracy and the beautiful folly of the pastoral with the intrusive assaults of history. Nathan

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sees “the icy white of the lake encircling a tiny spot that was a man, the only human marker in all of nature, like the X of an illiterate’s signature on a sheet of paper. There it was, if not the whole story, the whole picture.” Emphasis here falls on the smallness of the human marker in nature’s immensity and on the fragility of the human, the illiterate’s X opening out to the ideal of a whole story and the promise of a whole picture. The setting is serene. The novel’s—and trilogy’s—final sentence breathes resignation, a contentment with America similar to that felt by the Swede when he was growing up in Newark. America had saved him from Hitler, and it would let him live on Arcady Road. America had not saved Lester from Vietnam, although it had allotted him years in the Berkshire Mountains, the rural tranquility that gives him his brooding sense of superiority toward those who “live in cities.” Again, pure nature could be seen as achieving preeminence over impure humanity, in the shadow of an impure century: “Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life offer up a vision as pure and peaceful as this one: a solitary man on a bucket, fishing through eighteen inches of ice in a lake that’s constantly turning over its water atop an arcadian mountain in America.”54 It is as if Lester has ascended Thomas Mann’s magic mountain, entering an Alpine retreat from Europe’s hustle and bustle. He could be joining the “febrile patients on the verandas of Swiss sanatoria imbibing the magic-mountain air”—to take a phrase from The Ghost Writer.55 There Lester might heal, like Thomas Castorp in The Magic Mountain, from the wounds that civic life has inflicted on him, though in The Magic Mountain the pastoral dream of healing is illusory. Mann’s novel ends in history’s grip, with the advent of World War I. The Newark trilogy draws to a similar conclusion. Though Lester may dominate the final paragraph of The Human Stain, the novel is not chronological and does not really end with Lester’s solitude or with the wordless whiteness of his lake. Nor does the Newark trilogy adhere to any kind of linear plan. By its very nature storytelling is an art that wreaks havoc with time, and storytelling is a business laid bare in the Newark trilogy, as are other more practical businesses—glove making in American Pastoral, taxidermy in I Married a Communist, and dairy farming in The Human Stain. At the literal end of The Human Stain, Nathan is merely stopping to chat with Lester. Nathan is going back to Newark, to replace the mute X of Coleman’s life with the fulsome detail of

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literary narrative. He is going to speak with Coleman’s sister, Ernestine, a meeting that falls outside the novel, though presumably it informs the novel Zuckerman presents to the reader. Zuckerman’s return to Newark is a pilgrimage repeated three times—in different forms—throughout the Newark trilogy. Without Newark, history’s grip could be as blank as Lester’s lake. One might say that The Human Stain concludes with the desire to know Newark for the first time, to discover late in life the mysteries of origin and the mysteries of time’s passage, so that Zuckerman can bend Coleman’s life back to the city he had left. Zuckerman has a talent for stories, developed over a long literary career, a native’s expertise in Newark stories and a robust imaginative appetite for civic hustle and bustle—for the jubilation of leaving, for the sidestep of the pastoral fantasy, and, finally, for history’s cold inevitability. In I Married a Communist, Newark comes to Nathan, who is hidden away in Massachusetts. Nathan’s old English teacher, Murray, is taking a Shakespeare course at Athena College. Murray places Nathan back in Newark, where the sad story of Ira’s childhood begins, leading to his committing murder, his time in the army, his becoming a communist, his becoming a celebrity, his terrible marriage to Eve Frame, and his fall from grace in the early 1950s. Murray has lived his entire life in Newark. As with Lou Levov, his voice and his Newark stories are of a piece. Murray and Lou Levov both have remarkable voices: they compete with the voice of Zuckerman himself and are at least as rich in resources as the novelist’s professional voice. The voices of Murray and Lou carry the widest range of emotion, from despair to defiance. They thrive on detail, which is almost always local detail from the Newark cosmos, quickly conveying sarcasm, irony, disgust, and affirmation, and their voices are large enough to suit an epic subject. In Lou’s case, it is Newark’s decline. He cannot speak about his granddaughter, Merry. Here his voice is as silent as the Swede’s, but when it tells of Newark and its collapse, Lou’s voice is vital. Murray has the epic of his brother’s collapse to sing. His story is very long; it lasts several nights, delving into the smallest, most intimate details of his brother’s life—whether the details of the marriage bed or the details of twentieth-century ideology. Beyond Ira and Newark, Murray’s larger subject is awe, generated from a prolonged reckoning with history and with the image of someone (everyman) caught in history’s grip. It is as if Lou and Murray im-

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press their literature on the hermitlike Nathan Zuckerman, who earlier had lost his talent for creating literature. They save Nathan from having to write about an America without Newark. The Newark trilogy begins with a “we” that is certain of its communal belonging, with Newark’s Jewish community anxiously following the progress of World War II. By the trilogy’s end, this “we” has attenuated to Lester’s antisocial “I.” The progression from a communal Jewish Newark, warm with sympathy, to Lester isolated in a frozen New En­ gland is not social commentary. Americans are not necessarily more disaffected in the 1990s than they were in the 1940s. Roth is not lamenting the influence of television, the Internet, cars, or suburbia or decrying some cultural shift that has left Americans bowling alone. The community and the self are not involved in some theoretical claim about anomie and modern America. The community and the self live in circles of tension, a theme in almost all of Roth’s fiction. Newark parents push their children to leave the Newark fold, and when Nathan chooses, he can go back to Newark, the physical place in northern New Jersey or the Newark of memory and imagination, which is the Newark of story. The community and the self collide in the domain of history: Coleman with the college, the Swede with a “community” of 1960s radicals, Ira with the McCarthyite American polity. In smaller ways, each had collided with the community into which they were born, their Newarks and their families. Lester and the Jewish Newark of the 1940s stand on opposite sides of a historical divide. Newark Jews were lucky to be where they were in the 1940s; Lester was unlucky to be drafted and sent to Vietnam in the 1960s; Jews in Warsaw or Budapest were alienated from luck in the 1940s; and there were other Americans of Lester’s generation who were not sent to Vietnam. Lester cannot explain his misfortune, he cannot get away from it, and there is no satisfying explanation for why “Newark will be the city that never comes back,” as Lou Levov proclaims after the riots.56 The “we” and the “I,” the city and the self, must engage in history, whether it is a never-ending irrational war or something gentle and benign. What everyone should know, however, is how rough this war can be. One cannot know when or why history will exert its grip, but one can know that its grip will be exerted, which makes the Swede, Ira, and Coleman poor students of history. Had they known more about

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history’s true nature, they might have held on more closely to certain possessions. The Swede and Ira would surely have left Newark. There was nothing to stop them, but the Swede might not have quieted his Newark voice to the same degree. He might have resisted being called the Swede or at least had the forbearance to know that masks, for all the delight of wearing them, can be hard to remove.57 Ira’s task was more difficult. He left Newark to escape a crime he had committed there, but the voice he finds for his internal rage is the voice of communism—brittle, self-righteous, and deceitful. His brother, Murray, has honed a voice of exquisite clarity and local nuance, to which deception is anathema, precisely the quality of voice Nathan Zuckerman possessed as a precocious young writer. This was “voice: something that begins at around the back of the knees and reaches well above the head,” expressing the whole person and uniting the full-voiced person with the surrounding world.58 A voice with more Newark accents might have been the voice the Swede and Ira needed when history rolled over them. Instead, they are mute, the opposite of Lou or Murray in relation to Newark. Lou’s voice minimizes the loss of Newark without denying it. Philip Roth’s own father, sick with cancer, but strong in the telling of his Newark stories, could also talk through his suffering. By contrast, Coleman’s task was almost impossible. He could have stayed in Newark and been good to his family. He could have told his own children the story of his origins and of his leaving. Virtue privileges truth over fabrication. Yet Coleman, as a black child born in Newark in the 1920s, began life in history’s distressing grip, and for decades he was wily and strong enough not just to pass as white but to slip past America’s racial history altogether. Though his racial past never catches up with him, history is more cunning than even Coleman Silk. It attacks him first as a white man accused of racism, and then as a man publicly pretending to be Jewish when for decades he had been struggling to hide the fact (or the fiction) of his blackness, wholly indifferent to the valence of his Jewish disguise. Coleman is “killed [by Lester] as Jew. Another of the problems of impersonation.”59 History’s grip will be exerted even if it has to forgo the heavy charms of tragedy and take the form of a wicked joke.



Conclusion; or, Kafka in Newark His Greenwich Village was part Dostoevski’s Saint Petersburg and part Kafka’s Amerika. Anatole Broyard on Delmore Schwartz, Kafka Was the Rage The ways in which Kafka allowed an obsession to fill every corner of every paragraph, and the strange grave comedy he was able to make of the tedious, enervating rituals of accusation and defense, furnished me with any number of clues as to how to give imaginative expression to perceptions of my own. Philip Roth, “In Search of Kafka and Other Answers”

If history can take the form of a wicked joke, literature can play jokes of its own on history. The literary imagination is not subservient to historical fact. It can rearrange history, devising manufactured contingencies and doing so in all sincerity. Franz Kafka, for example, was a historical figure. He was born in 1883 and died in 1924. He was Jewish, lived mostly in Prague, and wrote in German. Likewise, the Kafkaesque, the mood and mentality associated with Kafka, exists in historical time. Kafka’s name telegraphs distinct ideas about twentieth-century history. One is that Kafka shows us the prison-house of modernity: the death of God, the rise of bureaucracy, the loss of community. Another is that Kafka describes the prison-house of modern politics, of totalitarianism before the fact. History showed due deference to literature when the Nazis and then the Soviets occupied Kafka’s Prague. A third idea is that Kafka portrays the prison-house of modern Jewish life, the plight of an emancipated, assimilated Jewry menaced by anti-Semitism and the plight of a great writer living in Christendom without belonging to it. Kafka was beguiled by Yiddish and Hebrew, yet he was obligated to write in the language of Martin Luther. Kafka’s serial estrangements amount to a symbol of modern suffering, of which his slender, Semitic face and sad eyes are iconic. These are ideas that anticipate and confirm the Holocaust. Kafka saw the concentration camp at the heart of modern European history, one might conclude, thus foreseeing the destiny of his family, his city, and his people.

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Kafka, the writer and the man, walks hand in hand with history, and this “historical” Kafka stands behind one of Philip Roth’s most arresting literary jokes. In the realm of literature, where all is possible, Roth brought Kafka to Newark, the Newark of Neil Klugman, Brenda Patimkin, Alexander Portnoy, Nathan Zuckerman, Coleman Silk, Ira Ringold, and the Swede. The joke—on Kafka, on Newark, on Roth—is a short story–essay, “‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka.” Roth published it in 1973. The story’s narrator, a Newark boy, has Franz Kafka as a teacher at Hebrew school. The boy is blessed with good fortune and a good sense of humor: “Already at nine, one foot in college, the other in the Catskills.” He is also aware of the contemporary disasters spreading across Europe and has “redemptive fantasies of heroism . . . about the ‘Jews in Europe.’” Kafka is one such Jew from Europe with an aura of “remote and melancholy foreignness.” Like the African Americans in his Newark neighborhood, Kafka has migrated to Newark and, like them, his mind lingers on the place left behind: “Dr. Kafka lives in a room in the house of an elderly Jewish lady on the shabby lower stretch of Avon Avenue, where the trolley still runs and the poorest of Newark’s Negroes shuffle meekly up and down the street, for all they seem to know, still back in Mississippi.” Kafka’s wartime indigence notwithstanding, “Looking at Kafka” is a comic story, its comedy a romance between Kafka and the narrator’s aunt Rhoda. She has long been unmarried and is drawn to Kafka’s “big sad refugee eyes.” A date is arranged: “Dr. Kafka calls and takes my Aunt Rhoda to a movie. I am astonished, both that he calls and that she goes; it seems there is more desperation in life than I have come across yet in my fish tank.” A family warmth develops. Whatever the distance between Prague and Newark, Kafka and Aunt Rhoda are both Jewish. Kafka speaks with the boy’s grandmother “in Yiddish about gardening.” The comedy attenuates when Kafka pulls away from Aunt Rhoda. Later, the narrator feels himself in obliquely Kafkaesque tension with his father, “Can it possibly be true (and can I possibly admit) that I am coming to hate him for loving me so?”1 Kafka’s shadow falls across Newark more than Newark’s shadow falls across Kafka. When Kafka dies in 1948, he receives a modest obituary studded with New Jersey detail. “Dr. Franz Kafka,” it reads, “a Hebrew teacher

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at the Talmud Torah of the Schley Street Synagogue from 1939 to 1948, died on June 3 in the Deborah Heart and Lung Center in Browns Mill, New Jersey. Dr. Kafka had been a patient there since 1950. He was 70 years old. Dr. Kafka was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and was a refugee from the Nazis. He leaves no survivors.” The word “leaves” jumps from the obituary back to the narrative: “He also leaves no books: no Trial, no Castle, no Diaries.”2 By 1939, Kafka had already written The Trial, The Castle, the stories, the diary entries, and other works as well. Kafka may himself have done what he instructed his friend Max Brod to do and destroyed his literary oeuvre. Or something else could explain the vacancy. For Kafka to be Kafka, perhaps he had to stay in Europe. Perhaps his manuscripts—seminal documents in Europe’s terrible modern history—cease to exist when Kafka ceases to live in Europe. Just as Aunt Rhoda could not bestow marital bliss on Kafka, America might not have been able to usher The Trial and The Castle into the modern canon. If so, Kafka belongs to Europe, to its languages, its literatures, its oppressions. Either America is too un-­Kafkaesque or Kafka too un-American. To encounter Kafka in Newark is absurd, comically absurd, and the absurdity is not so much geographic as imaginative or historical. Kafka belongs elsewhere in the twentieth-century literary landscape. Nevertheless, “Looking at Kafka” is hardly a phantasmagoric exercise, like Roth’s Kafka-themed novella, The Breast, or “The Metamorphosis” by Kafka himself. Kafka could have come to Newark in 1939; he could have worked as a Hebrew teacher; he could have been introduced to someone’s aunt Rhoda. The story’s conceit is at least as plausible as the prospect of Thomas Mann or Theodore Adorno or Hannah Arendt emigrating from Germany to America in order to survive the war. “Looking at Kafka” juxtaposes Kafka the inevitable European with Kafka the potential American. In Kafka’s photograph one sees “the nose of half the Jewish boys who were my friends in high school,” Roth writes in the nonfiction essay attached to the short story. This fact— that Kafka is kin—is a simple fact of physiognomy, and, depending on historical whim, physiognomy may or may not summon destiny: “Skulls chiseled like this one [Kafka’s] 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.”3 As Daniel Medin writes,

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“Roth’s Kafka . . . is an adamantly postwar Kafka, a Kafka read in the wake of atrocities.”4 The Weequahic High boys escaped the ovens. American citizens, their noses were not their destiny, or their noses led them to a different destiny. Kafka’s younger sisters, also kin, fell more precipitously into history’s grip. The tension in “Looking at Kafka,” generated by merging historical landscapes, is among the most productive in Roth’s literary art. It was apparent decades before the Newark trilogy—arguably from the very moment he started to write. Roth has been continuously discovering Kafka, continuously integrating the Kafkaesque into his self-consciously American literature and continuously writing between his America and Kafka’s Europe. American exceptionalism, America’s refusal to be Kafkaesque, forms a question to which Roth’s fiction offers an infinity of answers. Roth’s first recognizably Kafkaesque character is Alexander Portnoy, a prisoner who builds his own cage and places himself on trial, serving as prosecutor and as jury. Portnoy’s manic despair fuels the comedy, the grave comedy, of his predicament. In an interview, Roth noted “that his [Portnoy’s] most powerful oppressor by far is himself [which] is what makes for the farcical pathos of the book.”5 Each effort at escape is a step toward entrapment, the drama all the more Kafkaesque for taking place in New York, in the Age of Aquarius, rather than in repressed Newark shortly after the Second World War. Melancholic, sickly, deprived Kafka haunts the American libido in its 1960s heyday. After the Age of Aquarius, Roth heard a Kafkaesque note in American politics, extending from Lyndon Johnson through to Gerald Ford, as the United States was visibly losing its rational, Enlightenment veneer. Nixon’s America betrayed its complicity in the ridiculous, behind which the menace and the darkness were there to be studied. Roth’s richest engagement with Kafka began after visiting Prague in the early 1970s. The extreme and the solipsistic—Portnoy’s Kafka—subsided, as Roth’s historical sensibility expanded beyond the immigrant moment, beyond Jewish American assimilation, beyond Watergate, and beyond the Vietnam War. For Roth, “Looking at Kafka” was less a thought experiment than a summing up, after which Kafka could be more quietly and organically Americanized. Kafka’s heroes, with their altered names and their knack for metamorphosis, already had an American dimension, and Americans could live at times in the world of The Trial and The Castle. The

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quality of “no reason,” the historical quality that governs the Newark trilogy, is not unique to Central Europe. It is equally an American quality, which makes Kafka an excellent guide to American character and American history. Kafka even devoted an entire novel, Der Verschollene (The Lost One), to the subject of America. Max Brod had it published, to lasting effect in Germany and America, as Amerika.6 To be in the grip of “no reason” is to live in Kafka’s world. Kafka in Newark—this is no literary gimmick. Kafka in Newark is the joke that explicates the Newark trilogy as well as the historical canvas into which it coheres. ❊ In the four decades between Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and The Human Stain (2000), the distance between Kafka’s Europe and Roth’s America, between Prague and Newark, has progressively narrowed for Roth. Hana Wirth-Nesher writes of “Philip Roth’s long odyssey from Newark to Prague.”7 An enriching distance would become an enriching proximity. In a 1963 essay, “Writing about Jews,” Roth defends “the need for a Jewish self-consciousness that is relevant to this time and place, where neither defamation nor persecution are what they were elsewhere in the past.” Roth’s youthful audacity was to write so assuredly from an American libretto, without open reference to “the harsh and distant European past,” a phrase from Roth’s autobiography. The anger he inspired among his postwar Jewish American readers, from the rabbis to Irving Howe, was for the Americanness of his historical purview, which in 1959 or 1969 could look like amnesia, a willed ignorance of the twentieth century. After the Second World War, the literary-political air was so electric that portraying flawed Jewish characters could be interpreted as anti-Semitism or as an invitation to anti-Semitic violence. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Roth defended his freedom to function outside the Holocaust’s shadow, to write under the American sun, but he was aware of a split Jewish consciousness in America: American pleasures were incessantly colliding with European fears, twentiethcentury and older. With his early short stories in mind Roth would concede this much to his critics circa 1971: “Only five thousand days after Buchenwald and Auschwitz it was asking a great deal of people still frozen in horror by the Nazi slaughter of European Jewry to consider, with ironic detachment, or comic amusement, the internal politics of

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J­ ewish life. In some instances, understandably, it was asking the impossible.”8 For internal politics one might also read “the American scene.” Problems ensue when a people “frozen in horror” read a writer who appears oblivious to this horror and divorced from the literary cause of furthering Jewish interests (whatever this cause might be). The absence of defamation and persecution anywhere could be meaningless in light of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Swimming in American freedom, the Jewish writer in America was not at total liberty. Even in Roth’s earliest stories, persecuting Europe and defamationfree America are not simple opposites. Together with Goodbye, Columbus, these stories (“The Conversion of the Jews,” “Defender of the Faith,” “Epstein,” “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings,” and “Eli, the Fanatic”) involve a blurring of lines. Young Roth knew very well that America was an anomalous place in Jewish history. In continental Europe “to grow up Jewish was tragic,” Roth recalled. “And that [tragedy] we [in New Jersey] seemed to understand without even needing to be told.”9 The first stories he wrote about Newark were conceived with Prague—or Berlin or Warsaw or Vilnius—in mind. As Roth has said in an interview: The Jew as sufferer. . . . If the definition was not supported by my own experience, it surely was by the experience of my grandparents and their forebears, and by the experience of our European contemporaries. The disparity between this tragic dimension in Jewish life in Europe and the actualities of our daily lives as Jews in New Jersey was something I had to puzzle over myself, and indeed, it was in the vast discrepancy between the two Jewish conditions that I found the terrain for my first stories and later for Portnoy’s Complaint. Being a Jew in New Jersey was comical because it was somehow bound up with these ghastly events.10

Roth refused any sentimental bond between the Jew as sufferer, in the classic Old World vein, and the suffering American Jew. Alexander Portnoy does not suffer because of the Holocaust or because of anti-Semitism. He suffers without ever appealing to the Holocaust. His American life, alas, is bizarrely fortunate, and readers of Portnoy’s Complaint were not asked to wrap Portnoy in the historic mantle of Jewish suffering. Yet being a Jew in New Jersey was bound up—somehow—with

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the ghastly events in Europe, and it is these events that add a strange comedy to Portnoy’s American suffering. Portnoy is free and prosperous and at home in America. He has every comfort and every luxury that Hitler had taken from Europe’s Jews, and still Portnoy is suffering. Comedy, not tragedy, presented itself as the method of synchronizing New Jersey woes, some of them extravagantly small-minded, with the magisterial European tragedies.11 When Roth published Portnoy’s Complaint, in 1969, the political actualities were in flux. Portnoy’s predicament is Kafkaesque in part because his America, which feels like Kennedy’s America in the novel, is so mindlessly at ease. The Vietnam War and Watergate shifted this context for Roth, and perhaps the Newark riots did as well. Roth touched upon his new political mood in “Our Castle,” an essay he published in the Village Voice in 1974. Like “Looking at Kafka,” “Our Castle” examines Kafka’s explicitly American salience. With Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon “we are in something like the world of Kafka’s Castle,” Roth wrote. Despite America’s laws and constitution, the irrational has become firmly entrenched: “That human affairs can be settled and managed, even to some large degree understood, is an idea that is as uncongenial to the imagination of the good-natured Middle Western President [Ford] as it was to the depressed and tormented Prague Jew [Kafka].” In context, “Middle Western” is an amusing adjective, as is “good-natured.” Both adjectives make the American theme both more and less self-evident, complicating the distinction between Franz Kafka and Gerald Ford. Interestingly, it is Ford’s pardon of Nixon, not the Watergate scandal per se, that unsettles human affairs and reveals the White House to be a Central European castle. The land surveyor K. is the American people transformed by the 1960s: “It is as though the American public, having for a decade been cast in one painful or degrading role after another—Kennedy’s orphans, Johnson’s patriots, Nixon’s patsies—has now been assigned to play the part of the Land Surveyor K. in Kafka’s Castle.”12 “Our Castle” is simultaneously a revelation and a polemic written to shock its readers. America had not been built to resemble Kafka’s castle, but line up the facts in 1974 and the outrageous resemblance is there. The depressed and tormented Prague Jew is in tune with the post-Watergate American soul, with the state of the union after the heroic FDR-Eisenhower-Kennedy era.

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Roth’s personal relationship to Kafka foreshadowed “Our Castle.” In the spring of 1972, Roth had made a “pilgrimage” to Kafka’s Prague, a visit he wrote about in a 1976 New York Times essay, “In Search of Kafka and Other Answers.” Roth’s affinity for Kafka has an inner concordance, reader to writer, writer to reader, kinsman to kinsman: “I began reading Kafka in my early thirties at a time when I was enormously dismayed to find myself drifting away, rather than towards, what I had taken to be my goals as a writer and a man—at a time, in other words, when I was unusually sensitized to Kafka’s tales of spiritual disorientation and obstructed energies.” (Roth was thirty-six when he published Portnoy’s Complaint.) The spiritual is paramount in this sentence, with no hint of a Jewish spirituality flowing from Kafka’s tales to the suffering American in need of them. Yet, in 1972, Kafka’s Prague confirmed images of Jewish ancestry in Roth, of the origin before Newark. For the first time in Europe Roth did not feel American or he did not feel only American: Within the first few hours of walking in these streets between the river and the Old Town Square, I understood that a connection of sorts existed between myself and this place: here was one of those dense corners of Jewish Europe which Hitler had emptied of Jews, a place which in earlier days must have been not too unlike those neighborhoods in Austro-Hungarian Lemberg and Czarist Kiev, where the two branches of my own family had lived before immigration to America at the beginning of the century. Looking for Kafka’s landmarks, I had, to my surprise, come upon some landmarks that felt to me like my own.13

And so, Kafka could be “my” Kafka for Roth and Prague “my” Prague, which made it easier, a few years later, to see America as “our” castle. Kafka was an ancestral landmark for Philip Roth the Jew, descendant of Lemberg in Kafka’s own Austro-Hungarian empire and of Kiev in the neighboring Russian empire. Kafka was also a literary-historical landmark for Philip Roth the American citizen, commenting in print on the perfidy of Gerald Ford. Milan Kundera, a friend of Roth’s whom Roth first met in Prague, has written about Roth’s trips to Prague as a discovery (through Kafka) of politics: “A visitor to Prague, under close surveillance, Philip [Roth] had come at first only in search

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of traces of Kafka. Seeking one thing, he found another: Kafka forbidden in a country whose culture had been massacred by the Russian occupation.”14 Private disorientation and political frustration offered Roth two ways of looking at Kafka and of importing him into America. A third way ran through Kafka’s sense of humor. In a 1990 interview with Ivan Klima, Roth speaks of Kafka—in “The Metamorphosis,” The Trial, and The Castle—chronicling “the education of someone who comes to accept . . . that what looks to be outlandish and ludicrous and unbelievable, beneath your dignity and concern, is nothing less than what is happening to you: that thing beneath your dignity turns out to be your destiny.” Destiny’s degradation of dignity is terrible, and at the same time it is funny. Dignity degraded may even be the essence of humor. As Roth wrote of The Great American Novel, which he published a year after his first trip to Prague, “A feel for the sadistic, the nonsensical, and the nihilistic certainly goes into making such comedy (and into enjoying it).” This claim about Roth derives from Kafka, a writer famously aware of the nihilistic, the sadistic, and the nonsensical. Roth even heard an echo of Kafka in the Marx Brothers. “I thought about Groucho walking into the village over which the Castle looms, announcing he was the Land Surveyor,” Roth said in a 1969 interview about Portnoy’s Complaint; “of course no one would believe him. Of course they would drive him up the wall. They had to—because of that cigar.”15 This connection between Kafka and Groucho Marx, between European high modernism and American popular culture, was not casual. Roth impressed it upon his students at the University of Pennsylvania: My students may have thought I was being strategically blasphemous or simply entertaining them when I began to describe the movie that could be made of The Castle, with Groucho Marx as K. and Chico and Harpo as the two “assistants.” But I meant it. I thought of writing a story about Kafka writing a story. Of course! It was all so funny, this morbid preoccupation with punishment and guilt.16

Asked by George Plimpton about the influence of 1950s stand-up comics, Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, on his writing, Roth walked away from the question. “I would say,” he responded, “I was more strongly influenced by a sit-down comic named Franz Kafka and a very funny

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bit he does called ‘The Metamorphosis.’ ” (Roth and Lenny Bruce met once, and Roth felt that Bruce, obsessed with his legal problems, “was just about ripe for the role of Joseph K.”)17 What obtains for literature can obtain for history as well. Newark and Prague are antipodes and analogues, much like K. and Groucho Marx. The historical question was not whether the Holocaust, which Kafka escaped only by dying in 1924, could happen in America. The question was whether history had given America a uniquely rational glow, and this is a question that gets a definitive answer: Groucho Marx and Kafka’s K. are in the grip of the same transnational absurdity, forced to live down from the same castle and participants in the same joke (that things are the way they are). Roth devoted an entire novel to this global premise. Composed of countless ideological and historical couplings, Operation Shylock anatomizes “the mayhem of Jewish history in the twentieth century.” European history, American history, and Jewish history are compatible because they all proceed from a single Kafka­ esque root, and, cerebral and literary as it is, Operation Shylock unfolds with the choppy tempo, the silly plot twists, and the comic confusions of a Marx Brothers movie.18 Operation Shylock can also be read as a dress rehearsal for the Newark trilogy, and as in Roth’s early short stories, the tension between America and Europe is a life-giving tension, this time with Jerusalem added to the mix. A character named Philip Roth and living in London is faced with a Philip Roth impersonator, using Roth’s celebrity to propagandize for “Diasporism,” an exodus from the Zionist homeland and a return to Europe. The impersonator is speaking out in Israel, so Roth himself goes to Jerusalem. There he interviews the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld, an interview the Roth outside Operation Shylock conducted in 1988. In addition, the novelistic (like the actual) Roth observes the trial of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian American accused of committing atrocities in the Holocaust. Demjanjuk was on trial in Israel between 1986 and 1988. Grounded in uncertainty, Operation Shylock vacillates between American exceptionalism and the impossibility of exceptions from historical mayhem. In his interview with Appelfeld, Roth notes “the disorientation felt by people who were unaware that they were on the brink of a cataclysm,” words that beautifully describe the mind-set of the Swede, Ira, and Coleman at a certain biographical point.19 Appelfeld replies

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with a description of “no reason” and its power over Europe’s Jews circa 1939, implying a worrisome space between history, as actually experienced, and the “historical,” a misleadingly rational fiction superimposed onto the past. Limited by the limits on human reason, “the historical” is limited in its powers: The Jewish experience in the Second World War was not “historical.” We came in contact with archaic mythical forces, a kind of dark subconscious the meaning of which we did not know, nor do we know it to this day. This world appears to be rational (with trains, departure times, stations, and engineers), but in fact these were journeys of the imagination, lies and ruses, which only deep, irrational drives could have invented. I didn’t understand, nor do I yet understand, the motives of the murderers.20

A survivor, Appelfeld is tutoring Roth on the true history of the Holo­ caust. The Newark-born Roth had no firsthand knowledge of the murderers’ mythic hatred. The common ground between Appelfeld and Roth is not experiential but literary, for literature can probe deep, irrational drives, and, as Melville did with Captain Ahab, it can represent the dark subconscious. Literature is nothing other than a journey of the imagination, and literature is not beholden to final understanding or to any simple exposition of motive. Appelfeld’s statement about the Holocaust applies, through literature, to other events. His observations about history and the historical may be universal in their validity. On one plane, Roth cannot fathom Appelfeld’s words. Thinking of his American life, Roth contrasts the terrors of the Holocaust not just with peaceful America but with the ball field in Newark, a mythical force of a different order, the world for which the adult Portnoy pines and that the adolescent Swede dominates: “Hiding as a child from his [Appelfeld’s] murderers in the Ukrainian woods while I [Philip Roth] was still on a Newark playground playing fly-catcher’s-up after school had clearly made him less of a stranger than I to life in its more immoderate manifestations.”21 The sentence’s awkward wording (less a stranger than I), and its alliterative, almost Victorian euphemism for the Holocaust (immoderate manifestations), makes Roth the stranger, making the Newark playground, as typical an American place as could be imagined, a site of strangeness, even of alienation. Somehow Appel­

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feld alone and hunted in the Ukrainian woods is less the stranger to life; certainly he is less the stranger to history. On this plane, the Holocaust separates those who experienced it from those who did not: 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 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 and are intimate friends.22

The italicized words (reverse, not, antithetical, bifurcated, antinomies) accent the distance between Appelfeld and Roth. America has been exceptional for the Jews, so much so that it exiles them from their past, bifurcating their historical legacy; but this sentence also contains an antithetical truth. The two writers are heirs jointly; they have a legacy in common; the relevant antinomies are Jewish. They therefore have much to talk about. Nor is it accidental that a sentence beginning in contrasts and distinctions concludes with an affirmation of friendship. Roth can understand Appelfeld’s words, the friendship between them as tangible as the Jewish biographies they share. With Operation Shylock in mind, S. Lillian Kremer writes of Aharon Appelfeld “replacing Kafka as a living presence” in Roth’s writing.23 Roth and Appelfeld are fellow writers discussing the meaning of history. Reflecting the duality in their friendship, two plot lines converge in Operation Shylock and, by converging, underscore America’s nearness to historical mayhem. One concerns the Demjanjuk trial. Demjanjuk captivates Roth for the unresolved nature of his character and crime. He could be D. in an updated version of The Trial, falsely accused, a plaything in the hands of unknown enemies. Or he could be guilty and D. in the sense of having diminished and falsified historical credentials, of traveling on a phony passport. Victim or perpetrator, Demjanjuk has an American persona, his trial more provocative, in a literary sense, for his not being only European. If innocent, his double is the man on trial, the one whom others believe to be guilty. If guilty, Demjanjuk is a (church-going, working-class) American with a homicidal European doppelgänger, planted in a novel preoccupied with doubling.

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The author, Philip Roth, is shadowed by an imposter calling himself Philip Roth; Zionism is paired with Diasporism, the Newark ball field with the Ukrainian woods, and so on. These dualities build into an assault on singleness, on the proposition that A is A. Leon Klinghoffer is yet another double for Demjanjuk, Klinghoffer the wheelchair-bound American Jew executed by the Palestinian Liberation Front, not for any known crime but, rather, for the obvious crime of being Jewish. In ­Operation Shylock, the Israeli authorities present Roth with Klinghoffer’s diaries, a canny ideological move. Klinghoffer is precisely the kind of unremarkable, working-class Jew Roth had written about in so many of his novels. A man of his father’s generation, Leon Klinghoffer could have been from Newark. In Operation Shylock, Klinghoffer and Demjanjuk gloss American history. Klinghoffer is elaborated from a real-life model. He was born in 1916 and grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, moving later in life to New Jersey, where he worked as an appliance manufacturer. He was buried in the Beth David Memorial Park in Kennilworth, New Jersey, in 1985. Operation Shylock’s Roth reviews Klinghoffer’s diaries, knowing they may have been forged. Still, he reads them as a priceless primary source: they are “the very embodiment, these diaries, of Jewish ‘normalization.’” The diaries blend into the novel, as Roth writes on Klinghoffer’s diary book, “on the dozen or so unused pages at the tail end of the red diary. . . . I found myself working step by step into the familiar abyss, the initial shock of appending one’s own profane handwriting to the handwriting of a murdered martyr—the transgressive feelings of a good citizen vandalizing, if not exactly a sacred work, certainly a not insignificant archival curio.” As he annotates his diary and confronts the familiar abyss, Roth’s thoughts turn less to Klinghoffer than to the history around Klinghoffer. The Jewish normalization that these diaries embody must be accepted as an illusion, or it is a circumstance to which history, in the form of the Palestinian Liberation Front, pays little attention. Klinghoffer was an “ordinary person who purely by accident gets caught in the historical struggle. A life annotated by history in the last place you expect history to intervene. On a cruise, which is out of history in every way.”24 History annotates the life of Leon Klinghoffer, just as Roth annotates Klinghoffer’s diaries. Klinghoffer’s modest efforts to step out of history, unchallenged for decades, land him squarely in history’s grip.

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Klinghoffer’s diaries rewrite one of the most famous twentieth-­ century Jewish texts, the diaries of Anne Frank. Both diaries, the one by the New Jersey Jew and the one by the European Jew, gain their stature through history; their intrinsic literary stature is small. Knowing the history that follows in their wake, Roth finds the two diaries roughly comparable: “You read K.’s [Klinghoffer’s] diaries with the whole design in mind, as you read the diary of A.F. [Anne Frank],” Roth writes in his notes on Klinghoffer’s diary. “You know he’s going to be pushed over the side, so all these boring thoughts he has—which are the sum total of everybody’s existence—take on a brutal eloquence and K. is suddenly a living soul whose subject is the bliss of life.”25 Without any evident surprise or difficulty, Roth treats Frank’s European and Klinghoffer’s American context as a single context, which shades into a Jewish context, unified by a contradictory pathos: In idiom, interests, mental rhythms, diaries like K.’s and A.F.’s confirm the same glaring pathos: one, that Jews are ordinary; two, that they are denied ordinary lives. Ordinariness, blessed, humdrum, dazzling ordinariness, it’s there in every observation, every sentiment, every thought. The center of the Jewish dream, what feeds the fervor both of Zionism and Diasporism: the ways Jews would be people if they could forget they were Jews. Ordinariness. Blandness. Uneventful monotony. Unembattled existence. The repetitious security of one’s own little cruise. But this is not to be. The incredible drama of being a Jew.26

Klinghoffer and Anne Frank occupy the same territory, where repetitious security is not to be and the Atlantic Ocean no protective barrier. Another remarkable transformation takes place in these notes written for the novelist’s own edification. Klinghoffer becomes K. He has not only joined ranks with Anne Frank, from whom he must have felt some distance in his American life; he has joined ranks with Kafka’s K., an impossible alter ego for the retired New Jersey Jew. The last paragraph of The Trial, in which K. is killed by taunting assassins, could describe what happened on the deck of the Achille Lauro when Klinghoffer’s assassins came for him.27 “Kafka’s prescient irony may not be the most remarkable attribute of his work,” Roth has said in conversation with Ivan Klima, “but it’s always stunning to think about it. He is anything but a fantasist creating a dream or a nightmare world as op-

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posed to a realistic one. His fiction keeps insisting that what seems to be unimaginable hallucination and hopeless paradox is precisely what constitutes one’s reality.”28 ❊ Anne Frank recurs in Roth’s fiction. In Operation Shylock she finds a soul mate in Leon Klinghoffer, and she is also present at Nathan Zuckerman’s creation as a writer. Anne Frank was born in 1929, Nathan Zuckerman a few years later, and Roth himself was born in 1933. In The Ghost Writer, Nathan is a young man of talent visiting an eminent Jewish American writer, E. I. Lonoff. Zuckerman prizes Lonoff ’s literary achievements as well as the aristocratic New England isolation in which Lonoff lives. Zuckerman sees a virtuoso of leaving in Lonoff: “I think of you as the Jew who got away,” Nathan tells him. “You got away from Russia and the pogroms. You got away from the purges—and [Isaac] Babel didn’t. You got away from Palestine and the homeland. You got away from Brookline and the relatives. You got away from New York. . . . Away from all the Jews, and a story by you without a Jew in it is unthinkable.” Zuckerman, by contrast, is dividing his time between New York and a rural writers’ colony, but Newark is the city from which he cannot get away. “No lawn we passed, no driveway, no garage, no lamppost, no little brick stoop was without its power over me,” Nathan reflects on his native Newark.29 He longs to leave the city he loves to catalogue, to flee his family’s censure after publishing a story drawn from local experience and unflattering to the Jewish milieu involved. A story by Nathan without Newark in it would be unthinkable. Being from Newark, having family in Newark, writing about Newark, having readers in Newark, having parents with opinions on his work, Zuckerman, unlike Lonoff, must endure the burden of the particular and of particulars that are very much his. Behind the many Newark particulars is the fact that Zuckerman is Jewish and Anne Frank’s American contemporary. (Peter Tarnopol, in The Professor of Desire, has a story idea he titles “The Diary of Anne Frank’s Contemporary.”) In the verdict of family and Jewish community, it is History that should have power over Nathan and less so the Newark driveway, garage, lamppost, and little brick stoop.

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Zuckerman faces the wrath of his usually loving parents, followed by the wrath of Judge Wapter, a local dignitary. All agree that Nathan’s story does harm to the Jews, and Judge Wapter recommends that Nathan go see The Diary of Anne Frank on Broadway, which opened in 1955. The argument between Nathan and his elders is in part about literature and in larger part about America. “I happen to know what ordinary people will think when they read something like this [the short story],” Nathan’s father tells him. “And you don’t. You can’t. You have been sheltered from it all your life.” For Nathan’s father, here (America) and there (Europe) are not continents apart: “I wonder if you fully understand just how 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-themill Americans, Mr. and Mrs. Nice Guy, who otherwise you and I consider perfectly harmless. Nathan, it is there.”30 Nathan’s father enlists Judge Wapter in Nathan’s education, and when Nathan receives a patronizing letter from the judge, he stops speaking to his father. Talking with his mother on the telephone, Nathan denies any parity between America and Europe, at least where the Jews are concerned. “He [Judge Wapter] only meant that what happened to the Jews,” his mother tries to explain. To which Nathan responds: “In Europe—not in Newark! We are not the wretched of Belsen! We were not the victims of that crime!” “But we could be—in their place we would be. Nathan, violence is nothing new to Jews, you know that!” “Ma, you want to see physical violence done to the Jews of Newark, go to the office of the plastic surgeon where the girls get their noses fixed. That’s where the Jewish blood flows in Essex County, that’s where the blow is delivered—with a mallet! To their bones—and to their pride!”31

Belsen is the camp in which Anne Frank died, and despite Nathan’s efforts at American defiance, Anne Frank impinges more and more on his worried mind. Staying with Lonoff is a mysterious refugee from Europe, Amy Bellette. Nathan fills in the blank of her mystery by inventing a story. He imagines that Amy Bellette is Anne Frank, imagines marrying her, raising himself to Jewish sainthood in his parents’ eyes, and exacting revenge on them for ever having doubted his fidelity to Jewish virtue.

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The Anne Frank section in The Ghost Writer is titled “Femme ­Fatale.” In it Nathan pictures Anne Frank’s trip to America, much as Roth would later imagine Kafka living in Newark.32 Hers is a remarkable metamorphosis, a journey from hell to childhood purity. She is no longer Anne: “Amy she got from an American book she had sobbed over as a child, Little Women.” She is a bit like the Swede, Ira, and Coleman in her enthusiasm for new identities. She comes to America via England, and in England “she told whoever asked that she had been evacuated from Holland with a group of Jewish schoolchildren the week before the Nazis invaded. Sometimes she did not even say that the school­ children were Jewish, an omission for which she was mildly rebuked by the Jewish families who had accepted responsibility for her and were troubled by her lying.” She is American in America, “exceptional . . . because of what she had made of herself since” the camps, midwife in “the birth of Amy Bellette” and owner of a self no less transformative than that of Coleman Silk. This self feels joy: “She was swimming a mile every morning and playing tennis every afternoon and, all in all, was as fit and energetic as a twenty-year-old could be.” Then into her American idyll comes the diary of Anne Frank. When she handles a copy of her book, the American idyll suddenly recedes. As if unable to balance light and dark, she walks with European book in hand, sitting “first on a bench in the shade, but then got up and walked on until she found a perfect spot in the sunshine.” The American self is a garment that she wears and from which she can be separated: “It seemed to her that [the thing, the book] she had so meticulously removed from the wrappings and placed onto the lap of her clean and pretty American girl’s beige linen skirt was her survival itself.”33 The association of the sainted Anne Frank with sexuality in The Ghost Writer echoes the dream sequence in The Professor of Desire. In Prague, David Kepesh visits “Kafka’s whore,” and it is sexuality that pulls these two ethereal icons of Jewish suffering, Anne Frank and Kafka, in the direction of everyday appetite and therefore of normalcy. Hermione Lee describes the Anne Frank fantasy in The Ghost Writer as “comparable to Kepesh’s dream of Kafka’s whore.”34 Anne’s diaries divide her American self. The diary entries issue in silence, after history had taken over and “the Dutch Green Police ar-

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rived and dissolved forever the secret household still heedful of propriety, obedience, discretion, self-improvement, and mutual respect. The Franks, as a family, came to an end, and, fittingly enough, thought the diarist, so did her chronicle of their effort to go sensibly on as themselves, in spite of everything.” She does not know which history  or which truth to believe, that of the “cattle cars and camps and ovens” or that of the swimming pool and the tennis court. She cannot tolerate the destruction or the self-creation, so “I felt flayed,” as Nathan imagines her thinking. “I felt as though the skin had been peeled away from half my body. Half my face had been peeled away, and everybody would stare in horror for the rest of my life!” The duality itself is tortuous: “‘I was pretty! I was whole! I was a sunny, lively little girl! Look, look at what they did to me!’ But whatever side they looked at, I would always be screaming, ‘Look at the other!’” The diary documents her undivided self, there before the secret household was forcibly dissolved. For its millions of non-Jewish readers, The Diary of Anne Frank can be made to suit a conciliatory end, a comfortable identification with the vibrant Jewish girl, or it can be made to incite suffering, Christian tears, compensation for the persecution and murder of these blameless Jewish victims. Amy Bellette opens the book, “and there it was: my past, myself, my name, my face intact—and all I wanted was revenge. . . . It wasn’t corpses I was avenging—it was the motherless, fatherless, sisterless, hate-filled, venge-filled, shame-filled, half-flayed, seething thing. It was my self. I wanted tears, I wanted their Christian tears to run like Jewish blood, for me. . . . I wanted my fresh life and my fresh body, cleansed and unpolluted.”35 From the melodrama of Anne Frank flayed and effacing ebullient Amy Bellette, Nathan slides into Borscht Belt comedy. Anne Frank met with the worst of persecution, while Nathan is put out by parental disapproval. Anne’s world-historical tragedy undermines Nathan’s problem, to which the solution, as he conjures it, is subversively comic. Fantasizing about Anne Frank, “I [Nathan] kept seeing myself coming back to New Jersey and saying to my family, ‘I met a marvelous young woman while I was up in New England. I love her and she loves me. We are going to be married.’ ‘Married? But so fast? Nathan, is she Jewish?’ ‘Yes, she is.’ ‘But who is she?’ ‘Anne Frank.’” Nathan’s fantasies only flirt with comedy. They yield, finally, a sharp insight, which

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connects literature to history and history to literature. If Anne Frank can enter the comic sensibility of (postwar) Nathan Zuckerman, locked in combat with his old-fashioned Newark parents, Anne Frank could also proceed from the haunted sensibility of (prewar) Franz Kafka, a specialist in flayed selves. In conversation with Lonoff, Nathan voices this insight with precision: “She’s like some impassioned little sister of Kafka’s,” Nathan says of Anne Frank, “his lost little daughter—a kinship is even there in the face. I think Kafka’s garrets and closets, the hidden attics where they hand down the indictments, the camouflaged doors—everything he dreamed in Prague was, to her, real Amsterdam life. What he invented, she suffered.”36 Whether sister or daughter, the word “little” twice repeated; Anne Frank is Kafka’s kin, the kinship even there in her face. The cumulative repetition of secrets, the hidden ­attics, the camouflaged doors, the closed-off garrets and closets, belies the fact that, since the 1920s, Kafka’s morbid inventions were there in plain view. Anne Frank’s suffering had been captured in literature before being lived in historical time. Zuckerman is slow to finish with Anne Frank and her complicated erotic hold on him. After publishing his successful novel, Carnofsky, he dates an Irish movie star who had played “the enchanting Anne Frank” onstage. “That Anne Frank should come to him in this guise,” Nathan muses. “That she should invite him up to her penthouse suite. Yes, he thought, life has its own flippant ideas about how to handle serious fellows like Zuckerman. All you have to do is wait and it teaches you all there is to know about the art of mockery.”37 Zuckerman is slow to finish with Kafka, too. In this he resembles David Kepesh, hero of The Breast (1972), The Professor of Desire (1977), and The Dying Animal (2001). In The Professor of Desire, Kepesh is a professor of literature who regularly lectures on Kafka. When he goes to Prague, he finds that Kafka’s name signifies lived reality, not just for Czech writers but for all Czechs living under communism. A Prague writer tells him that “many of us survive almost solely on Kafka. Including people on the street who have never read a word of his. They look at one another when something happens, and they say, ‘It’s Kafka.’ Meaning, ‘That’s the way it goes here now.’” Kepesh himself comes closer and closer to Kafka; he goes to Kafka’s grave; he turns down an offer to meet Kafka’s barber; he dreams of visiting a prostitute who claims to

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have known Kafka; he pictures himself as the ape in Kafka’s “Report to an Academy,” “the story in which an ape addresses a scientific gathering.” Then, in The Breast, the earlier Kepesh novel set at a later stage than The Professor of Desire, Kepesh is transformed into a female breast. The reason for this transformation is unknowable, of course, but seems connected to Kepesh’s reading of Kafka or to a rivalry between Kepesh and Kafka. “Don’t you see, I have out-Kafkaed Kafka,” Kepesh brags to his therapist, Dr. Klinger. “Klinger laughed, as though I had mean to be amusing. ‘After all,’ I said, ‘who is the greater artist, he who imagines the marvelous transformation, or he who marvelously transforms himself?” What had seemed a circumscribed destiny, confined to those living in the East Bloc, is not so circumscribed—it’s Kafka, so to speak, in Prague and in New York. In a 1974 analysis of the fiction of Milan Kundera, Roth has written about “those humorous stories one hears by the hundreds in Prague these days, stories such as a powerless or oppressed people are often adept at telling about themselves, and in which they seem to take an aesthetic pleasure—what pleasure is there otherwise?— from the very absurdities and paradoxes that characterize their hardship and cause them pain.”38 Roth studied literature in Prague, and in The Prague Orgy, the conclusion to Zuckerman Bound, Zuckerman journeys to Kafka’s Prague. A Czech writer, Sisovsky, comes to Zuckerman, by then a famous literary man, and asks for Zuckerman’s help. Sisovsky’s father had been a writer in Czechoslovakia, whose “last work, ten little stories about Nazis and Jews, the saddest commentary I have ever read about the worst life has to offer,” are lying unpublished in Prague, according to Sisovsky. It is Sisovsky who first brings up Kafka: “Kafka’s homelessness, if I may say so, was nothing beside my father’s. Kafka had at least the nineteenth century in his blood—all those Prague Jews did. Kafka belonged to literature, if nothing else. My father belonged to nothing,” he tells Zuckerman. Sisovsky knows his audience, and Zuckerman cannot resist going in search of the stories. Once he arrives in Prague, Nathan is struck by the degraded status of Czech writers. He visualizes a similar scenario in America: “I imagine Styron washing glasses in a Penn Station barroom, Susan Sontag wrapping buns in a Broadway bakery, Gore Vidal bicycling salamis to school lunchrooms in Queens. I look at the filthy floor and see myself sweeping it.” This last image sends Zuckerman into the

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pages of a Kafka story, a latter-day Gregor Samsa (or David Kepesh): “As Nathan Zuckerman awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a sweeper of floors in a railway café.”39 Predictably perhaps, the voyage to Prague, behind the Iron Curtain and to the place where Kafka lived, reminds Zuckerman of Newark. Zuckerman fails to rescue the ten little stories written by Sisovsky’s father; they are confiscated by the Czech authorities; and Zuckerman has no love affair in libidinous Brezhnev-era Prague. The Prague Orgy is a gray-toned inquiry into missed connections, into literature that is not only lost in translation but simply lost, such that “another Jewish writer [Sisovsky’s father] who might have been is not going to be.” In one remarkable passage, however, the missed connections lapse into grand synthesis, which starts in Newark and blends into Europe. Nathan remembers himself as a nine-year-old boy raising money for the Jewish National Fund. It was at this moment that the past entered his American consciousness, information “from our vague family chronicle, shadowy, cramped streets where the innkeepers and distillery workers who were our Old World forebears had dwelled apart, as strangers, from the notorious Poles.” This information is nothing less than Nathan’s Jewish homeland, his national fund of stories, gathered up by “an impressionable, emotional nine-year-old child, highly susceptible to the emblems of pathos.” The Jewish homeland resides in stories: “the national industry of the Jewish homeland, if not the sole means of production (if not the sole source of satisfaction), the construction of narrative out of the exertions of survival.”40 Narrative derives satisfaction from the exertions of survival, a statement like a mathematical formula. In this way stories are magical, as are jokes. Mired in multiple totalitarian erasures, The Prague Orgy swerves only once into unchecked exuberance, a grandiloquent Fourth of July celebration of Jewish stories and jokes: Because beneath the ideal of perpetual melancholia and the tremendous strain of just getting through, a joke is always lurking somewhere . . . a joke which builds with subtle self-savaging to the uproarious punchline, “And this is what suffering does!” What you smell are centuries and what you hear are voices and what you see are Jews, wild with lament and rippling with amusement, a choral society proclaiming vehemently, “Do you believe it? Can you imagine it?” even as they affirm with every wizardly trick in the book, by a thousand acoustical

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fluctuations of tempo, tone, inflection, and pitch, “Yet this is exactly what happened!” That such things can happen—there’s the moral of the stories—that such things happen to me, to him, to her, to you, to us. That is the national anthem of the Jewish homeland. By all rights, when you hear someone there begin telling a story—when you see the Jewish faces mastering anxiety and feigning innocence and registering astonishment at their own fortitude—you ought to stand and put your hand to your heart.41

Amusement and lament are one, and the punch line is suffering. The joke behind the story, terrible as the story might be, aids in mastering anxiety, no small gift to teller, listener, writer, or reader. The story­telling tricks are wizardly, innocence is something only to be feigned, and the moral of these stories is unlikely to be morally comforting. Never­ theless, stories, and the self-savaging humor on which they subsist, provide genuine comfort and jokes foster genuine joy. This is a EuroAmerican alchemy for Roth: “Shake up Kafka and Bellow together,” he stated in a 1984 interview, and “you get some kind of concoction that is inspiring. The one extreme is ‘Metamorphosis’ and the other is Herzog. They are different kinds of comedies of humiliation. As are my Zuckerman books.”42 Nathan Zuckerman has one more epiphany in Prague, not so much Jewish as universal. We are umbilically attached to our stories. “No,” Zuckerman thinks to himself, “one’s story isn’t a skin to be shed—it’s inescapable, one’s body and blood. You go on pumping it out til you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that’s at once your invention and the invention of you.”43 Zuckerman likens stories to the sacrament of communion, to Christ’s body and blood, a surprisingly non-Jewish metaphor for this particular writer at this particular moment; but emphasis falls here on physicality, not on metaphysics. One’s story goes deeper than one’s skin, into the veins and the bloodstream. It is the story that creates the self. The story is also “your invention,” though one that cannot be shed and an invention not to be rashly multiplied. One has a story, one story indivisible. It bears emphasis that Zuckerman—Newark-born, Kafkaobsessed, Anne Frank–haunted, Prague-educated Zuckerman, carried away by the singular, ever-recurring story at the core of the self—is the primary author of the Newark trilogy. By his modest presence and implied authorship, he unifies the three novels and synchronizes the mas-

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ter story of their three very different protagonists, each of whom treats his life story as a skin to be shed. Nathan had learned in Prague, if not earlier, that this cannot be done. ❊ Twinning Prague and Newark, domesticating Kafka and inhabiting the  Jewish homeland of the story-joke make Nathan Zuckerman into  the writer he is. A Kafkaesque bequest of literary laughter also helps Zuckerman loosen history’s grip. History is absurd; its irrational power is absurd; its never-ending injustice is absurd. It is absurd that Lester Farley kills Coleman Silk, mistaking Silk for a Jew and believing that Silk’s murder is an anti-Semite’s good deed. It is absurd that Merry, the daughter of peace and privilege, bombs a rural post office. It is absurd that Eve Frame writes a book about marrying a communist when Ira’s real crime is his homicidal teenage rage. The absurdities mount and mount, gathering the gravitas of tragedy in the Newark trilogy, and Zuckerman does not confuse his tragedies with jokes. The Newark trilogy pays no tribute to the Marx Brothers; no effusive zaniness figures in its plotting or in its diction. Its narrative voice, Zuckerman’s voice, is impassioned, candid, self-effacing, and eloquent, modulating at the end of I Married a Communist into an elegiac poetry well suited to Ira’s tragic suffering. Zuckerman refers to “the disciplined sadness of stoicism,” and this sadness can be heard in his voice throughout the Newark trilogy. Looking at the stars, “you see the inconceivable,” he muses: “the colossal spectacle of no antagonism. You see with your own eyes the vast brain of time, a galaxy set by no human hand.” These words precede the novel’s laconic last sentence: “The stars are indispensable.”44 “No antagonist” is here a cosmic response to the “no reason” (the inconceivable) of human affairs, antagonism put to rest. The remembered absurdities of human history rise up into the vast brain of time, to the indispensable stars, a territory beyond suffering or laughter, and literature is there to reflect the grave beauty of their ascent. Madcap laughter is antithetical to the Newark trilogy. Yet laughter is as thematically consequential in the trilogy as literacy and muteness. More subdued, laughter in the face of absurdity outshines absurd laughter. After Newark’s collapse the pleasant satirical humor of Roth’s early stories and of Goodbye, Columbus lost its punch: Newark in the

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1970s and 1980s does not signify American exceptionalism with a comic (suburban) Jewish exceptionalism folded into it. Late twentieth-­century Newark is a fine place for tragedy, but not for tragedy without laughter.45 Memory, story, and joke form a triangle, with which trauma cannot fully compete, including the trauma of devastated Newark. Roth itemizes the relevant psychic geometry in Operation Shylock. Worried by the escapades of his vigorous imposter, Roth pictures him as Moishe Pipik, “little Moses the belly button” in Yiddish, a folkloric alter ego to disobedient Jewish children: The delightful playword itself, the sonic prankishness of the two syllabic pops and the closing click encasing these peepishly meekish, unobtrusively schlemielish twin vowels. And all the more rapturously ridiculous for being yoked to Moishe, to Moses, which signaled, even to small and ignorant boys overshadowed by their big wage-earning, wisecracking elders, that in the folk language of our immigrant grandparents and their inconceivable forebears there was a strong predisposition to think of even the supermen of our tribe as all kind of immanently pathetic. The goyim had Paul Bunyan and we had Moishe Pipik.46

The tribulation of supermen figures as a Jewish image, played against the simple (goyish) heroism of Paul Bunyan. On the one hand, Moishe Pipik mutes the authority of parents by attributing a comic double to Moses, and on the other, the elders’ wisecracking and ridicule are a pretext for rapture, an avenue running through prankishness to the promised land of delight. This is a laughter other than madcap laughter. It could be termed Jewish laughter. The word “schlemiel” here deserves a brief digression. In 1971, Ruth Wisse published The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, a literary study that starts with the schlemiel’s nineteenth-century Eastern European origins. This book concludes with the fiction of Philip Roth. If the folklore schlemiel began as a figure of fun, a hapless fool, he became a figure of more serious fun in the 1880s, a time of mounting difficulty for Eastern European Jews. The schlemiel was the “loser-as-winner,” triumphing—verbally, morally, humanly—over an adversity that has already triumphed over him. Failure might be second nature to the schlemiel, but he “never fails in his self-acceptance.” In Sholom Aleichem’s fiction the schlemiel has his own brand of heroism. For Wisse, “the schlemiel

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[in Sholom Aleichem] represents the triumph of identity despite the failure of circumstance.” Kafka’s heroes are schlemiels without heroism, losers-as-losers. They “accept, or internalize, the hostile outside order,” Wisse writes. Roth built upon this emptied-out notion, writing a repudiation of the schlemiel in Portnoy’s Complaint, however self-consciously schlemielish Portnoy happens to be. “The Jewish joke was conceived as an instrument for turning pain into laughter,” Wisse argues, and “Portnoy’s Complaint reverses the process to expose the full measure of pain lurking beneath the laughter, suggesting that the technique of adjustment may be worse than the situation it was intended to alleviate.”47 As history became a heavier presence in Roth’s writing, in the years after Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth’s inversion of the schlemiel grew weaker and weaker. Roth did not go back to Sholom Aleichem and his Yiddishlanguage affirmation of Jewish identity. If the vaguely Jewish and strikingly schlemiel-heroes of Operation Shylock and Sabbath’s Theater affirm little that is Jewish, the absence of irony and the absence of identity are devastating for the deracinated anti-schlemiels of the Newark trilogy. The failure of circumstance is their exact problem, yet the Swede, Ira, and Coleman have no technique of adjustment for living in American history, not to mention Jewish history. As literature makes apparent, the schlemiel changes form as history changes its colors. The schlemiel salvages joy from the imperative of suffering. Moishe Pipik prankishly shadows the harsh, bitter absurdities of Operation Shylock, and Pipik is a schlemiel ex machina for Roth. Thinking about him generates “the simple obviousness of the discovery that had turned a burden into a joke.”48 Humor of a certain specific kind is calamity’s enemy and an aid to wholeness when so much conspires to divide, double, and thereby to corrupt. The joke emancipates Roth from his suffering, uniting him with a distant childhood happiness. He describes the feeling as all at once the return of my force . . . of the gusto that was mine before I’d ever been poleaxed by any calamity at all, back before I had ever heard of contradiction or rejection or remorse. I felt what I’d felt way, way back, when, because of the lucky accident of a happy childhood, I didn’t know I could be overcome by anything—all the endowment that was originally mine before I was ever impeded by guilt, a full human being strong in the magic.49

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Poleaxed by calamity, Roth and his double are still one step removed from the whole-scale calamities imposed upon Aharon Appelfeld, Anne Frank, and Leon Klinghoffer. In the Newark trilogy, Nathan Zuckerman is one step removed from disaster as well. Living in his New England solitude, he seems many steps removed from calamity’s reach, while his protagonists are in the thick of things. It is not calamities that separate them from their full humanity, though, but a clenched humorlessness, which grants calamity an almost total power over them. In their eagerness to be Paul Bunyan, to achieve what the heroic (American or Western) hero achieves, they lose sight of the schlemielish truths and the schlemielish dilemmas of destiny, cutting themselves off from the restorative power of jokes as well as stories. In the Newark trilogy, Zuckerman adds two other restorative entities to laughter—music and dance. The dense tragic story of Ira Ringold finishes, for Murray and Nathan alike, in laughter. Toward the end of I Married a Communist, Nathan says goodbye to Murray for the last time: “Having let me [Nathan] hold on to him for close to a minute, Murray suddenly slapped my back. He was laughing at me. ‘The emotional demands,’ he said, ‘of leaving a ninety-year-old.’” Their common sadness is not so deep that it cannot grow into laughter. Or it is so deep that it must grow into laughter: “Now I [Nathan] laughed at him [Murray], a laugh that allowed me to feel substantial again, charged up with my independence of everything, a recluse to be conjured with.”50 When Nathan contemplates Coleman’s story, he finds no helpful laughter in it, although its comedy, the comedy of a black man passing for white, is aligned with the life force. “What sublimely earthly mischief,” Nathan concludes. About this Ernestine, Coleman’s sister, agrees, detecting a hint of the ridiculous in Coleman’s Jewish funeral: “‘Even to be buried as a Jew. Oh, Coleman,’ she said sadly, ‘so determined. Mr. Determined,’ and in that moment, she was closer to laughter than to tears.” Music and laughter play similar roles. American Pastoral takes a 1940s song lyric as one of its epigraphs, and I Married a Communist uses lyrics from “­Dubinushka,” a Russian song, as its epigraph: “Many songs have I heard in my native land—songs of joy and sorrow.” Music envelops The Human Stain, the swing Coleman and Nathan listen to on the radio, the Mahler played at Coleman’s funeral, which reduces everyone to tears, and the performance Nathan, Coleman, and Faunia at-

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tend at Tanglewood. There Yefim Bronfman plays the piano with terrific abandon: “Whatever’s in there is going to come out, and come with its hands in the air. And when it does, everything there out in the open, the last of the last pulsation, he [Bronfman] himself gets up and goes, leaving behind him our redemption.”51 Bronfman redeems his audience by placing the inner agents of suffering, whatever’s in there, under arrest. Dance is a theme only in The Human Stain. In one scene, Nathan and Coleman dance, with effects similar to the intuited joke in Operation Shylock. Dancing unlocks a primal joy: “a thoughtless delight in just being alive, accidentally and clownishly and for no reason alive—the kind of delight you take as a child when you first learn to play a tune with a comb and toilet paper.” Once again the phrase “no reason” appears, though this is not the “no reason” of bloodthirsty anarchic history: here “no reason” and accident raise childlike clowning to the high plane of delight. If a joke can re-create childhood happiness, the vitalism of dancing can, too—in this case the happiness of a child learning to make music with sundry instruments, comb and toilet paper, and tapping nevertheless into the sources of high art. Dancing also intimates sex in The Human Stain. Coleman recalls his girlfriend, Steena, dancing nude for him in his Greenwich Village apartment, the picture of youth and beauty. Later, he dances with Faunia, and improbable as the pairing is, the slightly Lear-like Coleman with angry, damaged ­Faunia, it is a picture of beauty. Perhaps the improbable pairing gives the beauty its savor, associated as in so many descriptions of Newark with the leitmotif of detail: “The sensory fullness, the copiousness, the abundant—superabundant—detail of life, which is the rhapsody. And Coleman and Faunia . . . deep in the flow of the unexpected, day by day, minute by minute, themselves details in that superabundance.”52 Sex is not redemption for any of the Newark trilogy protagonists, young or old, though it is, like music and laughter, a part of the rhapsody. While Nathan Zuckerman can laugh at the degradations of history/ destiny, his heroes cannot. Absent laughter indicates a determining emptiness in the Swede, Ira, and Coleman and in many of the characters around them. They make their destinies, they are made by their destinies, they wrestle with their destinies, they suffer because of their destinies, they brood about their destinies, and they try to tell the story of their destinies, failing decisively at the task. At the same time, they forgo

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the one thing that might have helped them: they never submit their destiny to laughter’s magical redaction. History makes schlemiels of the Swede, Ira, and Coleman, and since their massive efforts at self-creation were the inverse of schlemielish, they do not have the schlemiel’s resources and skills in their hour of need. Coleman keeps up his Jewish disguise through his funeral but not because he is interested in such Jewish archetypes as the schlemiel. The Jewish disguise is useful without being important to him. Coleman also cuts himself off from the ironichumorous resources of his family’s culture and from the Shakespearean grandeur of his father’s African American voice. Ira and the Swede have no interest in Jewish archetypes. Theirs are not Jewish voices; theirs are not even Newark voices. The Swede has an unfailingly American voice—tolerant, polite, and a bit bland. His voice lacks the ironic timing and twists audible when his brother, Jerry, fulminates, and his father’s unmistakably Jewish voice has a cadence of pugnacity, regret, and humorous perseverance unavailable to the Scandinavian son. Ira resists his father, who did not live long enough to dominate his speech, and Ira chooses for himself the voice of Abraham Lincoln, the stage voice of republican probity, or he speaks out a rote vocalization of communist outrage. Neither Lincoln nor the communists allow Ira many jokes. The Swede, Ira, and Coleman have voices unsuited to irony and humor, and unsuited therefore to their supremely ironic destinies. These are three rigorously humorless heroes. Irony was useless to the Swede, when he was a boy, as was the penchant to joke: “Wit or irony is like a hitch in his swing for a kid like the Swede, irony being a human consolation and beside the point if you’re getting your way as a god.” One of the sections in Operation Shylock is called “Jewish mischief,” a phrase that comes to mind in the following set of questions regarding the Swede: “Where was the irrationality in him? Where was the crybaby in him? Where were the wayward temptations? No guile. No artifice. No mischief. All that he had eliminated to achieve his perfection.” The humorless boy evolves into the humorless man—“not a humorous guy,” as Jerry observes of the Swede. The Swede’s daughter, Merry, who has the Swede’s perfectionist streak, takes her father’s absence of humor to an extreme. When she returns to Newark, destitute and destroyed from her years in the underground, she lives as a Jain, an Eastern ascetic, and pins to her wall the following slogan: “I renounce all vices of lying

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speech arising from anger, or greed, or fear, or mirth.”53 She not only abandons mirth but, having deemed it a vice, she renounces it. Faunia Farley is likewise free of humor. She wears this stoniness on her face, as if preordained by the New England history to which her family belongs. The first paragraph of The Human Stain evokes a mythic Puritan sobriety etched into Faunia’s “severely sculpted features,” which are “customarily associated with the church-ruled, hardworking goodwives who suffered through New England’s harsh beginnings, stern colonial women locked up within the reigning morality and obedient to it.”54 This is the renunciation of mirth writ large in early American history. Ira’s fury originates in an inability to laugh. “Ordinarily he is a little short on humor,” Murray notes of the adult Ira, associating this with the canary funeral in Newark. Ira looks at the funeral, a spectacle of public hilarity, and thinks of his deceased mother. He cannot see the joke in a procession solemnly mounted for a dead bird. “When I started to laugh—because it was funny, Nathan, very funny,” Murray remembers, “Ira lost control completely. . . . He started swinging his fists and screaming at me. . . . That’s when his extremism began.” The renunciation of mirth boils over into rage, with Ira as with Merry. Murray locates the seeds of Ira’s extremism, of the error that would undo his life, in his refusal to laugh at the canary funeral: “Maybe he simply was not born with the mentality of the carnival—maybe utopianists aren’t.”55 This point applies to the Swede and Coleman as well. They reject the carnivalesque, though they join themselves to it with their ethnic and ­racial striving, and they are utopianists in the technical sense of the word. Their pursuit of perfection, the perfection available only to those who leave Newark, takes them to utopia, to no place, to the Greenwich Village townhouse that is no home to Ira, to the Old Rimrock house that the Swede’s family will flee, and to the Athena residence from which Coleman’s mother, sister, and brother have been banished. Wit and irony would force these utopianists to recognize the distance between Newark and their respective utopias, the existential joke on which they have been traveling, and without wit and irony their utopias are weak and unstable. History’s light touch—no world war, no revolution, no tyrant on the throne—destroys these utopias in no time. These heroes can live without laughter as long their utopias endure. On the historical playing field, no utopia of rational existence, it is much more difficult.

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History’s grip has many Kafkaesque dimensions in the Newark trilogy. The trilogy has so little of Kafka, so little of the avant-garde and of modernism in its immediate style, that its Kafkaesque momentum can only be implicit. Kafka is felt more than he is seen in these books. The Swede (of all people) resembles Gregor Samsa, the anguished organization man, familiar mostly with failure, who awakens one morning and finds himself an insect. The Swede, familiar mostly with success, the serene head of a booming business, the son of adoring parents, is a “man whose discontents were barely known to himself, awakening in middle age to the horror of self-reflection.” This is Gregor Samsa’s horror exactly, what Gregor experiences when he cannot go to work and must examine the adversity in and around him. Metamorphosis runs on two tracks in the Newark trilogy. It has a utopian side, the willed transformation from Newark son to American citizen, from black to white or from Jewish to something else. Then there is the awful metamorphosis decreed by history, which changes Ira from a married celebrity to a divorced neurotic; Coleman from respected professor to reviled racist and outlaw; and the Swede from an American patriarch, exalted by life’s blessings, to a man without a family, his one daughter an outlaw by choice. This second historically induced metamorphosis is no less overwhelming than Gregor Samsa’s, no less disorienting: the Swede, for example, “as he had always known himself—well-meaning, well-behaved, well-ordered Seymour Levov—evaporated, leaving only self-examination in his place.”56 Ira, Coleman, and the Swede are confronted with an inhumanity that lurks, shockingly, at the very center of their lives, an ugliness to which they, like Gregor Samsa, are party. The Swede shares even more with Josef K. than with Gregor. In The Trial, K. is not from the lower depths; he is the chief financial officer of a bank; his social status is higher than that of many of those who persecute him; and like K. the Swede is gradually put on trial by everyone around him. First, his daughter knowingly puts him on trial, for it is he, not she, who bears the guilt of her terrorism. About Merry’s bomb and her Weathermen co-conspirators Jerry says that “it was him [the Swede] they were really out to get.” The Swede studies the Weathermen ideology in search of an answer to “his horrible riddle.” He tortures himself with questions, one of them flawlessly Kafkaesque—“How could he be asked again and again to take seriously things that were not serious?”

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Examining himself with Weathermen eyes, he stands accused, “their villain, who was him.” Unable to laugh, the Swede must listen to others 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.” And again, Merry and her friends “were laughing at him. Life was laughing at him.” Jerry accuses the Swede of being a naïve man and a bad father. His wife accuses him of being the wrong husband and pursues an extramarital affair, “Dawn and Orcutt [her lover]: two predators.” In the novel’s final scene, a professor of literature offers a valedictory indictment: “This large unimpeded social critic in a caftan could not help herself . . . she began to laugh at their obtuseness to the flimsiness of the whole contraption, to laugh and laugh and laugh at them all, pillars of a society that, much to her delight, was rapidly going under.”57 Beneath all this accusatory laughter, American Pastoral resolves into Kafkaesque ambiguity, the trial ongoing and the reason for it maddeningly obscure. Its last paragraph is a meditation on accusation and guilt: “Everything is against them [the Levov family], everyone and every­thing that does not like their life. All the voices from without, condemning and rejecting their life!” Then come the two closing questions, to which the only answer is the blank page on which they are printed, somewhat like the unfinished ending of a Kafka novel, splintering into fragments and editorial confusion: “And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?” Ruth Wisse characterizes these closing questions, in a book that runs from Franz Kafka to Philip Roth, as “an indictment in search of its crime.”58 The Trial frames I Married a Communist and The Human Stain no less than American Pastoral. Ira’s trial is the most formal. His ex-wife attributes crime to the smallest details of their domestic life, and her book invites McCarthyism, a political initiative ostensibly aimed at eradicating Soviet espionage in America. In reality, McCarthyism was Kafkaesque: no clear principle determined guilt or innocence; the trials and the bureaucracy around them were an end unto themselves. Ira has nothing to do with Soviet espionage, and still he is found guilty. Because of his indictment, he is severely punished: “They stripped him of his job, his domestic life, his name, his reputation.”59 Nor is Ira ever exonerated: his sentence never gets commuted. The Human Stain opens

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with memorably comic paragraphs on Bill Clinton, on the pleasures of putting a president on trial and speculating ceaselessly about his guilt.60 Coleman’s trial is more subtle, not the headline news of Senate committees or the Starr report but a venomously genteel investigation into his human decency. His is the most absurd of the crimes committed in the Newark trilogy. Ira was at least a communist married to Eve Frame, and the Swede did in fact raise his criminal daughter. Coleman’s crime is a reality witnessed exclusively in the eyes of his accusers. Yet he is stripped of the same possessions—job, domestic life, name, and reputation—that were taken from Ira. At his funeral a colleague laments the unjust treatment of Coleman, the whole infrastructure of a criminal proceeding when there was no crime to prosecute, “what he was forced to undergo—the accusations, the interviews, the inquiry.”61 The same eulogy could have been given for Josef K. It is terrible what K. is forced to undergo, and it is terrible that K.—like his Newark cousins—is so unprepared for the rigors of his trial, for to be unprepared is almost to be complicit. And there is one final parallel: Josef K. permits himself the odd burst of bitter laughter; but he is too fascinated by his guilt to laugh about it in any restorative or emancipatory way. The Swede, Ira, and Coleman live within the same inhibition. History’s grip does not simply deprive the Swede, Ira, and Coleman of speech. It drives them mad. Even in his rationality, the Swede is like Josef K., who, by failing to register the madness behind his trial, by affirming its pseudo-logic with the pliable tool of his rational intellect, assists in the construction of his labyrinth. In American Pastoral, the Swede’s rationality drives his daughter mad. To this extent he is complicit in his and her destiny. As Zuckerman notes, “This being reasonable with her [Merry] was his [the Swede’s] madness.” “It’s driven you mad,” Jerry tells the Swede about the trial his daughter has forced upon him. When Nathan dines with the Swede at Vincent’s, his last glimpse of the Swede, Nathan has a “sense of someone who was not mentally sound.” He does not know the Swede’s story yet; he can only pay heed to the madness this story has deposited in the Swede. American Pastoral concludes with a dinner party, in a lovely home, with candles and an aura of civility, and it is a portrait of collective madness. Husband and wife are about to separate; the grandparents are deluding themselves about a family that is unhinged. Jessie Orcutt, a WASP neighbor, is an

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alcoholic, and it is her gesture that ends the novel. Drunk, she stabs the Swede’s father with a fork, her violence a reflection of the Swede’s madness after learning about his crazy daughter. Jessie inspires a generalization biased against sanity: “It was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn’t wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self, who was a wholly deluded fuckup,” Nathan thinks. “It was as though being in tune with life was an accident that might sometimes befall the fortunate young but was otherwise something for which human beings lacked any real affinity.” It is the robust affinity for madness, and the terrifying fragility of health and sanity, that surprises, a grouping of themes that appears in Roth’s autobiography, The Facts. In it Nathan Zuckerman writes a letter to Roth with the following observation: “Fanatical security, fanatical insecurity—this dramatic duality that you see embodied in the Jews, Josie [Roth’s first wife] unearthed in her Jew [Philip Roth] and beautifully exploited. And with you, as with the other Jews, that is not merely where the drama is rooted, that’s where the madness begins.”62 Ira’s trial drives him mad. He was an unstable young man: Murray can remember Ira’s “cackling crazy-kid laugh.” Ira hands his moral education over to Johnny O’Day, a fanatic with “the speech of someone in whom nothing ever laughed . . . with the result that there was a kind of madness to his [O’Day’s] singleness of purpose.” The speech melts away, for Ira, leaving him in silent fury. He lives for long stretches literally “in the hospital, when he had cracked up.”63 As ever, Coleman is the more complicated example. He goes through a similar cycle of suffering, rage, and madness. There is “that April day when . . . the insanity took hold of Coleman,” just as “there is something fascinating by what moral suffering can do to someone who is no obvious way a weak or feeble person. . . . Once you’re in its grip, it’s as though it will have to kill you to be free of it. Its raw realism is like nothing else.” Coleman stands face-to-face with “the near impossibility of his tearing himself free of his bitterness.” Favored by fortune for so long, a connoisseur of its astonishing variety, he comes to know “the galling monotony of bad luck.” He lives, finally, in “the ever-narrowing prison of his rage.” (Anatole Broyard, Coleman’s historical alter ego, titled his memoir Kafka Was the Rage, noting of the late 1940s and early 1950s that “Kafka was

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as popular in the Village at that time as Dickens had been in Victorian London.”)64 Coleman never laughs and has no interest in jokes. Yet, as with the Swede, who founds a new family after the collapse of his first one, calamity does not close off all Coleman’s options. Coleman does not succumb to madness; he tempers it with an amour fou; he listens often to music. His awakening, in old age, is partially Gregor Samsa’s awakening to a negative metamorphosis, but it is not only this. Coleman seems to awaken from the dream of his adult life with eyes better attuned to beauty and sensuality, a man so skilled at self-making that his mercurial, forward-moving self cannot be flayed. What Harold Bloom writes of Mickey Sabbath applies to Coleman Silk as well: “Sabbath’s grinding vitalism carries him past the edge of madness.”65 None of this vitality saves Coleman from being murdered, like K. or like Leon Klinghoffer. All of the trilogy’s themes meet in Lester Farley, Coleman’s killer. He has felt history’s grip in Vietnam, felt it to such a degree that he stands before Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial “altogether dead and not merely inside.” An American not granted an exemption from history, he broods on the subject of historical injustice, encapsulated for him in the person of Bill Clinton, the president whose spirit hovers over The Human Stain. Clinton refused his military trial, and he would later slip through other trials: this was the foundation of his success in life. “I was thinking about Slick Willie,” Lester tells Nathan out on the New England ice. “I was thinking about our president—his freakin’ luck. I was thinkin’ about this guy who gets off everything and I was thinkin’ about the guys who didn’t get off nothin’. Who didn’t dodge the draft and didn’t get off. It doesn’t seem right.” Lester’s resentful logic is impeccable. The injustice he laments is not right, it is wrong, and it makes Lester maniacally grim: “I couldn’t see where there was any humor in this man [Lester],” Nathan thinks. Although Lester likes to laugh, his laughter is anything but restorative. His is a laughter without humor, and it is frightening: “Comical [Lester’s laughter]? Intended to be comical? No, more a happy-go-lucky strain of sinisterness,” Nathan thinks to himself, realizing that “it’s easier for him [Lester] to kill somebody than to cut loose with real amusement.”66 Lester’s inability to laugh humanely is at the root of his pathology, a pathology common to the Swede, Ira, and Coleman. It is K.’s pathology and the tragic-comic pathology in which

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Kafka traps his readers, pushed to contemplate serious absurdity and hard pressed to laugh about a Kafkaesque world, literary or otherwise. The worst tragedies involve the negation of laughter. In its tribute to humor as tragedy’s fellow traveler, the Newark trilogy is an act of translation. From the beginning, Roth absorbed the “strange grave comedy” he found in Kafka and let it structure his literary art. He first found private value in Kafka, by reading Kafka in translation. Later, Roth looked up the words for Kafka’s European comedies in the dictionary of twentieth-century American history. He then used the smaller but no less precious dictionary of Newark history to find the proper tones, pitch, and melody for his native flights of fancy.67 Roth made telling modifications along the way. He downplayed Kafka’s theological hunger, the allegorical impulse, the metaphysics of person and place in Kafka, the way in which the law becomes the Law and the trial the Trial, and the way in which K. could be from anywhere or the Castle could be anywhere. For theology Roth substituted history. Roth’s mind, “with its resistance to plaintive metaphor and poeticized analogy,” in his own words, rejected allegory for the specificities of Newark, for the details of place and the physics of historical experience.68 McCarthyism remains McCarthyism in his hands, as does the Great Depression or the 1960s: they cannot effectively be read as parables. Kafka’s protagonists are in the grip of something, one never knows quite what, and they never know quite what. Roth’s protagonists, in the Newark trilogy, are emphatically in the grip of American history. In a second modification, Roth translated the pure Kafkaesque language, the alienated Kafkaesque language, the German that was as much vacancy as vehicle for Kafka, into the least alienated American prose, impure and colloquial and the literary equivalent of Roth’s American citizenship. For Roth, Kafka is anything but a citizen-writer. Kafka is a writer without a nation, whose parents had pulled their son out from his linguistic roots. Roth’s father gave him, and through him Zuckerman, the only vernacular he has ever wanted to possess. Kafka in Newark is alienation by another name. Roth in Newark is a writer at home.69 ❊ Since its completion, the Newark trilogy has acquired a rich irony of timing. The Human Stain, its final installment, was published in

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2000. This venture in civic literature appeared at the end of the Clinton presidency, a period stereotypically viewed as a vacation from history.70 A few months later, on September 11, 2001, the historical bell tolled, and an edge of prophecy was there to be unveiled in these Clinton-era novels. Each Newark trilogy protagonist has his personal September 11, and in each case the attack is reminiscent of that fall day when nothing was as unlikely as the hijacking of commercial planes and the perpetration of mass murder in Washington and New York. The opening sequence of the 9/11 Commission Report begins with the motions of normal American life—and the meaningful beauty of that September day—only to continue with the insinuation of terrorism into the American garden: Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States. Millions of men and women readied themselves for work. Some made their way to the Twin Towers, the signature structures of the World Trade Center complex in New York City. Others went to Arlington, Virginia, to the Pentagon. Across the Potomac River, the United States Congress was back in session. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, people began to line up for a White House tour. In Sarasota, Florida, President George W. Bush went for an early morning run.71

This is the report’s first paragraph, a composite image of civilization, labor, leisure, and nature (the dawn, the cloudless sky, and the river). The president is concerned with exercise and not with the burdens of power. The White House is about to welcome tourists. The nation is at ease, and the pastoral undercurrents of this description heighten the roughness of “history,” poised to interrupt America’s peacetime pleasure: “For those heading to an airport, weather conditions could not have been better for a safe and pleasant journey,” the report continues in a feint toward false reassurance. “Among the travelers were Mohammed Atta and Abdul Azziz al Omari, who arrived at the airport in Portland, Maine.”72 With their arrival, the horror begins. On September 11, the fabric of American life was ruptured, just as— for the Swede, Ira, and Coleman—the fabric of their lives is ruptured suddenly, disturbingly, irreversibly. Coleman is undone by an offhand remark; the Swede’s normally rebellious daughter becomes abnormally

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rebellious; Ira’s parlor radicalism is a trifle until McCarthyism makes him vulnerable to persecution and self-destruction. History can begin in a place as calm as the airport in Portland, Maine, usually the point of departure for a safe and pleasant journey. On closer inspection, what is sudden appears less sudden, less superficial: the menace had been there all along, implicit to some unknowable pattern, waiting to shatter the peace in an explosive burst of malice. The second surprise of September 11 was that it was not a sudden attack. It had been laboriously planned, and its willing executioners had been in America for months, joining themselves to quotidian American life. History did not happen to America on September 11: it happened in America, emanating out from its airports, its planes, and its daily life. After distancing peaceful, bucolic America from its violent foreign attackers, the 9/11 Commission Report goes on to detail the attackers’ movements in America, their time spent at American schools, in American cities, among Americans. If the attackers were not Americans, the skills they needed to steer their planes were acquired in America. Likewise, for the Newark trilogy’s protagonists, history does not take the form of a natural disaster, devoid of human agency, dropped upon them from without. It is inseparable from their American lives, from family and career, from the seemingly benign web of private emotions and semiprivate occupations, which they enjoy for years before anything ominous follows from them. In American Pastoral, Nathan Zuckerman refers to the “indigenous American berserk,” three words that express the soul, if not the totality, of the Newark trilogy.73 Bound to an indigenous American berserk, the protagonists of the Newark trilogy do not resemble the family at the heart of In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s 1966 essay on American evil. This family lives out its midwestern decency, its ordered and virtuous domestic life, until anarchy appears where it has no place to be. Capote documents an exceptional instance, an invasion of the American pastoral, the inner sanctum of domestic life upended by a violence with “no reason” at its murderous core. Lawless malevolence causes the death of innocent people. In Cold Blood is built around two Americas: one is stable and humane, while the other is mobile and criminal, like the Arab terrorists boarding the plane in the second paragraph of the 9/11 Commission Report. As Capote’s book proceeds, the two Americas come closer and closer

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until they converge in an orgy of blood-letting. By contrast, the Swede, Ira, and Coleman do not act in cold blood. With the exception of Ira, they are not murderers, though their American lives are fully intertwined with anarchy. No border keeps them from the indigenous anarchy, no special American dispensation; there is no one moment when anarchy and its opposite meet; the borders are porous, the moments continuous. In the Newark trilogy, Capote’s two Americas are fused into a single nation, a single ship floating on the rough waters of history. This is a ship very much like the Pequod. Both Roth and Melville are concerned with the American capacity for anarchy and with the international proximity of disaster; both Moby-Dick and the Newark trilogy make disaster legible through the gift of literacy and the grace of literature.74 Published in 1852, Melville’s Moby-Dick is a book of catastrophes. Ahab pursues a talismanic purity, a surreal figment of whiteness, driven forward by his wound and by a “monomaniacal” zeal to exact revenge. Ahab’s rage is unstoppable, and his crew falls into the grip of a madman’s fevered history. The Pequod is the ship of state, diverse as America is diverse. It is not a democracy, though each individual on it is empowered by agency and choice—making it all the more disconcerting that they ratify their catastrophe, goaded on by the charismatic Ahab. The virtuous ship captain, Bulkington, appears briefly at the novel’s beginning and then disappears. Under Ahab’s guidance, the Pequod sinks, yet the novel is written by Ishmael, who has managed to survive. He writes with humor and profundity, capturing the many meanings of the journey, telling his story in a voice that knows tragedy and relishes wit, knowing that tragedy does not have to culminate in silence. He has no reason to be mute about the Pequod and its destiny, no reason to jettison literacy or literature or jokes, and in the end Ishmael triumphs over Ahab. In an essay on Moby-Dick in its historical context, Alan Heimert cites “the nation’s fears of beholding the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious union. But the shipwreck in Moby-Dick, followed as it is by Ishmael’s salvation, emerges as a symbol of hope.”75 Stories can assimilate and transform the acid of disaster. Ishmael’s salvation and narrative genius crown his tragedy-filled epic; his authorship has political meaning. As in Moby-Dick, the American ship of state can find no quiet harbor in the Newark trilogy. At times the seas are wild, and at times captain

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and crew let the ship be steered toward the storm, but disaster does not silence Nathan Zuckerman any more than it silences Ishmael. To the contrary: a reckoning with disaster inspires Nathan to shape his New Jersey vernacular into the well-wrought urn of literature. Unmitigated disaster is antithetical to literature and politics alike. In MobyDick, Ahab and his first mate Starbuck reflect frequently on the allure of apocalypse, on the closeness of their doom. Their brooding prevents them from altering the Pequod’s course and from staving off a manmade disaster. If politics is a matter of managing apocalypse, then one must cede all power to the ship’s captain, whether Ahab or Bulkington, and hope for the best. Disaster is as ubiquitous as it is inconclusive. Disaster is weak enough to be contained in art, which is why literature can instruct a civic culture. In twisting, exalted prose, Ishmael offers political pedagogy learned from his time on the Pequod: Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for a time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.76

Having freely left Manhattan, Ishmael has singed himself in the fire of his journey, in the maelstrom of Ahab’s making, and long after his journey Ishmael has traveled to an enlivening distinction between the “woe that is madness” and “the wisdom that is woe.” Ishmael’s Catskill eagle may well be America itself, or it could be the good country par excellence, deep-souled enough to “dive down into the blackest gorges” and strong enough to “soar out of them again,” blending into the “sunny spaces.” The thought’s final image is one intersecting contrasts. The eagle must fly in the blackest gorge, yet the gorge is elevated among mountains, the eagle a mountain eagle made shrewd by knowledge of multiple elevations, high and low, secure and dangerous, light and dark. Despite Melville’s “personal and intellectual engagement in the fortunes of Democracy,” Alan Heimert points out, Moby-Dick did not prevent the Civil War or do anything to make sense of the war ­after

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it was fought.77 Moby-Dick was hardly read until the 1920s; nor was Philip Roth’s Newark trilogy studied for civic instruction after September 11. Literature is a David to the Goliath of the present moment, and authors who entertain large civic ambitions must be ready for failure or for the indifference of the culture around them, which is the same as failure. Still, theirs is a laudable ambition. Roth’s detailed scrutiny of Newark, New Jersey—an obscure point on the map of the twentieth century—could help to educate a Catskill eagle or at least to broadcast the distinction separating an anarchy-addled “woe that is madness” from the historically minded “wisdom that is woe,” and not just woe.

Notes

Introduction Chapter epigraph: Philip Roth, The Human Stain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 335–336. The phrase “historical lock” in The Human Stain evokes To the Finland Station, Edmund Wilson’s book on the Russian Revolution and his image of Vladimir Lenin en route to Russia from Switzerland, in hopes of beginning the communist era, “not so sure of the controls of society as the engineer was of the engine that was taking him to Petrograd, yet in a position to calculate the chances with closer accuracy than a hundred to one, stood on the eve of the moment when for the first time in the human exploit the key of a philosophy of history was fit in a historical lock.” To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 546. 1.  Philip Roth, Indignation (London: Vintage Books, 2009), 86. 2.  Brad Tuttle, How Newark Became Newark: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of an American City (New Brunswick, NJ: Rivergate Books, 2009), 215. 3.  Whatever Newark’s future, its recent past has been harrowing. By 1997, “Newark consistently led the nation in the indices of social distress.” Kevin Mumford, Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 214. It could credibly be described as “the most violent city in America.” Tuttle, How Newark Became Newark, 236. 4.  Leslie Fiedler, “The Image of Newark and the Indignities of Love: Notes on Philip Roth,” in Critical Essays on Philip Roth, ed. Sanford Pinsker (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 23. 5.  Ibid., 24, 24, 26. When Roth was at college, his sense of Newark was similar to Fiedler’s. Roth asked himself how could art “be rooted in a parochial Jewish Newark neighborhood having nothing to do with the enigma of time and space or good and evil or appearances and reality?” Philip Roth, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 59. 6.  New Jersey is by no means a forgotten place in American literary culture. Amiri Baraka has lived in and written about Newark for decades. In In the Beauty

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Notes to Introduction of the ­Lilies, published one year before American Pastoral, John Updike set a ­Buddenbrooks-type family history in Paterson, New Jersey, before moving on to Delaware and California. In the Beauty of the Lilies (New York: Knopf, 1996). By the time Roth finished the Newark trilogy in 2000, a remarkable television series had begun on HBO, The Sopranos, which is set around Newark in northern New Jersey. The Soprano family is from Newark, though it has moved out to the suburbs. The eighty-six episodes of The Sopranos, running “live” from 1999 to 2008, complement the Newark trilogy in many ways. In The Sopranos, the generational patterns encapsulate Newark’s twentieth-century history, and as much as Newark is left, by the Soprano family, the city remains a focal point in this family’s self-conception. David Chase, the writer for The Sopranos, “loosely based the show’s fictional suburban gangster family on the Boiardos,” a historic Newark family. Tuttle, How Newark Became Newark, 112. 7.  Philip Roth, “Rereading Saul Bellow,” in Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 140. 8.  In this Roth and Zuckerman resemble one another. As Roth, who now lives in New England, has said in an interview: “I myself am surprised I’m so mesmerized by this place [Newark], because I left younger than any of my friends. I was sixteen or so when I went off to college, just seventeen. And I never went back. And many of my high school friends went back after college, were professionals, doctors, lawyers in Newark, hung on until they couldn’t any longer and then moved to the suburbs. But close to Newark, when I lived all over.” http://www.houghtonmiff linbooks.com/authors/roth/conversation.shtml. 9.  Philip Roth, Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (New York: Vintage, 2002), 159; Greil Marcus, Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 69. 10.  Hermione Lee, Philip Roth (London: Methuen, 1982), 29. 11.  Ross Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 187. Already in The Anatomy Lesson (1983) Newark history and Eastern European history can be cognates. As a character named Dr. Kotler tells Nathan Zuckerman about Newark, “Vanished now. Everything that mattered to me down the twentieth-century drain. My birthplace, Vilna, decimated by Hitler, then stolen by Stalin. Newark, my America, abandoned by the whites and destroyed by the colored. That’s what I thought the night they set the fires in 1968. First the Second World War, then the Iron Curtain, now the Newark fire.” Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson, in Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue, 1979–1985 (New York: Library of America, 2007), 336–337. 12.  Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others (New York: Vintage International, 2001), 202. Roth has not refused to write about the Holocaust. The Holocaust surfaces, often indirectly, in The Professor of Desire, The Ghost Writer, Operation Shylock, and The Anatomy Lesson. 13.  Philip Roth, I Married a Communist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 139. 14.  Philip Roth, Operation Shylock: A Confession (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 264.

Notes to Introduction 15.  Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” in War and the “Iliad,” trans. Mary McCarthy (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), 311; Fiedler, “Image of Newark,” 24. 16.  Philip Roth, American Pastoral (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 336. 17.  George J. Searles writes that “Roth is himself essentially a social realist.” Conversations with Philip Roth (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), xi. In a similar vein, Elaine B. Safer calls the Newark trilogy “Roth’s social history trilogy.” Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 117. 18.  See Philip Roth, “The Story behind ‘The Plot against America,’” New York Times, September 19, 2004, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9500 E7DB1338F93AA2575AC0A9629C8B63; see also Arthur Schlesinger Jr., A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). Coleman is loosely based on Anatole Broyard, whose extraordinary life has been described by Henry Louis Gates in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (New York: Random House, 1997), 180–214. Gates first published his essay on Broyard in the New Yorker in June 1996. The Swede is based upon Seymour Masin, who, after glancing at American Pastoral in a bookstore, realized that he had “been Rothed.” Masin praised the integrity of Roth’s fiction by saying that “it’s amazing but almost everything in the book I would have done if I’d been in those situations.” Tad Friend, “The Talk of the Town: ‘Ink,’” New Yorker, May 26, 1997, 29. ­Masin’s son, George, has written a book about his father that is also a history of Jewish Newark. See Robert G. Masin, Swede: Weequahic’s Gentle Giant (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2009). 19.  Lizabeth Cohen, Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003), 224. 20.  Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Hartford, CT: American Publishing, 1899), 375. 21.  Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Inter­racial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 250. 22.  Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 77. 23.  Ibid., 207. 24.  Ibid., 210. 25.  Philip Roth, Patrimony: A True Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 125. 26.  Roth, American Pastoral, 236. 27.  Roth, Patrimony, 190; Philip Roth, “The Story of Three Stories,” in Reading Myself and Others, 173. In The Counterlife, Nathan Zuckerman easily supplants the Bible with American popular culture, of the kind popular in his Newark childhood: “The fact remains that in our family the collective memory doesn’t go back to the golden calf and the burning bush, but to ‘Duffy’s Tavern’ and ‘Can You Top This?’” Philip Roth, The Counterlife (New York: Vintage, 1996), 133.

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Notes to Introduction 28.  Roth, Patrimony,110. 29.  Ibid., 70–71. Philip Roth’s father illustrates a claim of the philosopher Charles Taylor that “what counts as a unit will be defined by the scope of the concern, by just what is in question. And what is in question is, generally and characteristically, the shape of my life as a whole. It is not something up for arbitrary determination.” Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 50. Roth’s father delineates the shape of his life as a whole by telling stories. Newark is the scope of his concern, its bounded physical geography not up for arbitrary determination, exactly like the shape of an individual life as a whole. 30.  Roth, Patrimony, 124; Alan Cooper, Philip Roth and the Jews (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 251. 31.  Roth, Patrimony, 71, 181. This commitment to the New Jersey vernacular has two sources in Roth’s childhood, the father’s voice and adolescent talk, which Roth has described as “something like the folk narrative of a tribe passing from one stage of human development to the next.” Reading Myself and Others, 5. 32.  Roth, I Married a Communist, 321. Alan Cooper writes that “the major orifice in Roth’s work is the mouth, locus of ingestion but also of speech, of saying, of storytelling, of wisecracking, of complaining, of informing, of declaring, of responding.” Philip Roth and the Jews, 20. One might say that every speaking mouth seeks a listening ear. Literature must encompass both mouth and ear: mouth and ear together constitute the limitless globe of literature—voice, story, ear, cranium, stage, and globe, a linear progression from the individual to the cosmos. As Roth has written of Portnoy’s Complaint, its composition “began with discovering Portnoy’s voice—more accurately, his mouth—and discovering along with it, the listening ear: the silent Dr. Spielvogel.” Reading Myself and Others, 41. 33.  Roth, I Married a Communist, 321. Ross Posnock locates Roth’s earthy and often vulgar sensuality as much in New Jersey as in a particular strain of world literature: “in his porous, lustful self, holy man Sabbath [the protagonist of Roth’s 1995 novel, Sabbath’s Theater] is soul mate to another New Jersey wanderer— [Walt] Whitman.” Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, 159. In Operation Shylock, a character named Philip Roth praises the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine for associating vulgar, comic Aristophanes with divinity: “Know what Heine liked to say? There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes. . . . It’s Aristophanes they should be worshiping over at the wailing wall—if he were the God of Israel, I’d be in shul three times a day” (204). 34.  Philip Roth, My Life as a Man (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), 231; Roth, Operation Shylock, 231. 35.  Roth, I Married a Communist, 284; Roth, The Human Stain, 329, 192. 36.  Philip Roth in Searles, Conversations with Philip Roth, 249. Roth has termed commercial television “the pervasive, all-powerful archenemy of literature, literacy, and language . . . [bringing] the fatuity into which this adversary [television] reduces virtually all of human discourse . . . a dozen or two channels of boring clichéd

Notes to Introduction television that most everybody watches all the time because it is entertaining.” Roth, Shop Talk, 75. He must see the Internet as a related archenemy. 37.  Philip Roth, Zuckerman Unbound, in Zuckerman Bound, 268. 38.  Roth, The Anatomy Lesson, 414, 445, 446. 39.  For a brilliant study of Zuckerman and his place in Roth’s fiction, see Pia Masiero, Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books: The Making of a Story World (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2011). For a review of recent scholarly work on Roth’s fiction, see the introduction to David Brauner, Philip Roth (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007). 40.  Marcus, Shape of Things to Come, 100. 41.  Quoted in Hermione Lee, “Age Makes a Difference,” New Yorker, October 1, 2007, 58. 42.  Irving Howe, “Philip Roth Reconsidered,” Commentary (1972): 70. Irving Feldman also noted missing social or historical dimension in Roth’s fiction: “It is a sad sad fact, Roth’s young men have only private lives,” he writes. “A Sentimental Education circa 1956,” in Reading Philip Roth, ed. Asher Z. Milbauer and Donald G. Watson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 34. Ruth Wisse places Alexander Portnoy “in the bright ahistoric present.” The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 119. 43.  See Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2002). Politics and the Novel was first published in 1957, just when Roth was beginning to write fiction. The ideological tumult that marked Howe’s generation, the path from communism to anticommunism, was far more interesting, in literary terms, than was Roth’s political evolution in postwar America. “My entire clan—parents, aunts, uncles, cousins—were devout New Deal Democrats,” Roth has explained, and he has never strayed very far from this political inheritance. Searles, Conversations with Philip Roth, 87. In the 1960s, when ideological strife touched him more directly, Roth began to write more about politics. 44.  Roth, My Life as a Man, 268, 273. 45.  Roth, The Counterlife, 140; Roth, The Anatomy Lesson, 355. 46.  Roth, Indignation, 32. 47.  Ibid., 32, 223, 223, 232. The dichotomy of Indignation is peaceful Midwest vs. the battlefields of Korea, or it is bloody Korea vs. posthistorical Newark. The novel’s first sentence contrasts the ferocity of history in Korea with its tameness in Newark: “About two and a half months after the well-trained divisions of North Korea, armed by the Soviets and Chinese Communists, crossed the 38th Parallel into South Korea on June 25, 1950, and the agonies of the Korean War began, I entered Robert Treat, a small college in downtown Newark named for the city’s seventeenth-century founder” (1). 48.  A conspicuous exception to this is Our Gang (Starring Tricky and His Friends) (New York: Random House, 1971). It is about Richard Nixon, and it is not one of Roth’s best books. 49.  Roth, Reading Myself and Others, 78.

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Notes to Introduction and Chapter One 50.  Quoted in Paul Gray, “Philip Roth: Novelist,” in Turning up the Flame: Philip Roth’s Later Novels, ed. Jay L. Halio and Ben Siegel (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 28. 51.  Roth, in Searles, Conversations with Philip Roth, 102. 52.  Roth, American Pastoral, 336. 53.  Marcus, Shape of Things to Come, 43. 54.  Alan Heimert, “Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism,” American Quarterly 15, no. 4 (Winter 1963): 533. 55.  Quoted in Tuttle, How Newark Became Newark, 30. 56.  Roth, Reading Myself and Others, 190, 20; New York Times interview, quoted in Conversations with Philip Roth, 278. 57.  Philip Roth, “I Married a Communist Interview,” http://www.houghtonmiff linbooks.com/authors/roth/conversation.shtml. Roth, mesmerized by Newark’s decline, is reminiscent of William Faulkner, mesmerized by the history of Lafayette County, Mississippi, which would become Yoknapatawpha County in his novels. Don Doyle writes that “Lafayette County was part of a nation that congratulated itself on a history of triumph, prosperity, opportunity, tolerance and progress. In this part of America, though, a history of defeat, poverty, racism and fatalism, a fatalistic despair cast a deep shadow across the land. . . . It was toward the end of [a] prolonged era of gloom that William Faulkner, a fourth-generation Mississippian, began writing about his native land and the history that haunted it.” Faulkner’s County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 2–3. 58.  Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and ­Giroux, 1975), 176, 176, 177, 177. 59.  Roth, in Searles, Conversations with Philip Roth, 139, 127, 130, 130. 60.  Roth, Operation Shylock, 29; Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 352. 61.  Tuttle, How Newark Became Newark, 11.

Chapter One Chapter epigraph: Homer, The Odyssey, 292–293. 1.  John T. Cunningham, Newark (Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1966), 23. Brad Tuttle endorses the Newark-on-Trent thesis. How Newark Became Newark, 16. 2.  The Newark-born protagonist of Goodbye, Columbus associates the following historical emotions with the Newark Museum: “The annex was a brick building, old and vine-covered, and always reminded me of New Jersey’s link with the beginning of the country, with George Washington, who had trained his scrappy army— a little bronze tablet informed us children—in the very park where I now sat.” Philip Roth, “Goodbye, Columbus” and Five Short Stories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 30. Newark and New Jersey have their place in the founding of the republic. 3.  Quoted in Cunningham, Newark, 103.

Notes to Chapter One 4.  Cunningham, Newark, 201; Tuttle, How Newark Became Newark, 63, 148. 5.  Social worker quoted in Tuttle, How Newark Became Newark, 148. 6.  Roth, in Searles, Conversations with Philip Roth, 127. 7.  Roth, Indignation, 199. 8.  Tuttle, How Newark Became Newark, 11, 103, 140, 209. 9.  Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer, in Zuckerman Bound, 13. 10.  Roth, American Pastoral, 40–41, 42. Sherry Ortner has written an anthropological study of Newark focused on Weequahic High School and its class of 1958: New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ’58 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Nathan Zuckerman graduated from Weequahic High in the early 1950s. For a history of Jewish Newark, see William Helmreich, Enduring Community: The Jews of Newark and MetroWest (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999). 11.  Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 25, 87, 114. 12.  Ibid., 174, 172. This lyrical passage in Portnoy’s Complaint—which transpires above Israel, as it were—confirms Alan Cooper’s judgment that “to Roth ­Weequahic answered any longings that Zionists would associate with Israel.” Cooper deems Newark baseball “the perfect Jewish homeland” for Roth. Philip Roth and the Jews, 71, 102. 13.  Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 274–275. 14.  Ibid., 173. 15.  Roth, “Goodbye, Columbus” and Five Short Stories, 90. 16.  Ibid., 91. 17.  Roth, Operation Shylock, 132. 18.  Roth, American Pastoral, 163. 19.  Businesses had begun to leave Newark before the Second World War because tax rates were raised between 1938 and 1944. After the war, “young Newarkers started moving westward,” with “the booming suburban populations . . . based almost completely on segregation.” Cunningham, Newark, 312. The 1967 riots came at the end of a historical epoch. 20.  Roth, American Pastoral, 219, 219, 345. 21.  For Portnoy, a Newark son like the Swede or Ira, America seems to recede the closer one gets to it, as if assimilation is a project without end: “Why then can’t I believe that I am eating my dinner in America, that America is where I am, instead of some other place to which I will one day travel, as my father and I must travel every November out to that hayseed and his wife in Union, New Jersey (the two of them in overalls) for real Thanksgiving apple cider.” Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 161–162. 22.  Quoted in Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, 224. 23.  Roth, I Married a Communist, 61, 61–62, 62. Many of these details are not invented. The funeral for Emidio Russomanno’s canary took place in August 1920, drawing a crowd estimated at ten thousand people. According to the Star-Eagle, “The undertaker held his sides. The coach drivers had tears in their eyes from laugh-

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Notes to Chapter One ter. The pallbearers shook with merriment and almost upset the coffin.” Quoted in Michael Immerso, Newark’s Little Italy: The Vanished First Ward (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 105. 24.  Philip Roth, Zuckerman Unbound, in Zuckerman Bound, 218. 25.  Roth, I Married a Communist, 62. In harmony with the pattern of the Newark trilogy, Newark’s Italian American community was complicit in its own destruction, in its own banishment from the historic city. After World War II, young families “sought better quarters outside the Ward,” and the high-rise housing plan “was supported by most of the leading figures of Newark’s Italian-American community.” None of this lessened the sensation of loss, the feeling that “it would never be the same . . . [and that] everything came to an end,” in the words of one resident. Immerso, Newark’s Little Italy, 139, 140, 141. Brad Tuttle argues that “post-WWII Newark aggressively and wholeheartedly embraced public housing.” How Newark Became Newark, 127. 26.  Roth, American Pastoral, 42–43. 27.  Roth, The Human Stain, 331. 28.  Roth, Operation Shylock, 378–379. 29.  Ibid., 379. In an unpublished senior thesis on Jewish life in Newark, Natalie Lazaroff neatly describes the amalgam of loss, memory, and affiliation among Jews who grew up in Newark: “Although they chose to abandon the physical aspects of the city and the Jewish community, meaning their homes, schools, and other edifices, in no way did they choose to abandon their memories and connection with Weequahic.” “The Weequahic Indians: An Everlasting Tribe,” senior thesis, George Washington University, submitted May 5, 2011, page 61. 30.  Roth, I Married a Communist, 34. 31.  Roth, American Pastoral, 122. The same image of levitation appears in Portnoy’s Complaint: “Where he [Portnoy’s father] had been imprisoned, I could fly: that was his dream. Mine was its corollary: in my liberation would be his—from ignorance, from exploitation, from anonymity” (5). 32.  Roth, The Human Stain, 99. In a study of ethnic literature, Werner Sollors argues that “generational rhetoric . . . perpetrates one cultural moment, freezes the historical process into ahistorical conceptions and into metaphors of timeless identity as sameness.” Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 234. Roth employs generational rhetoric, but his focus on the city of Newark, and its history, unfreezes the historical process. The Newark trilogy is a study of time-bound identity. 33.  Roth, American Pastoral, 11, 11, 11; Roth, The Anatomy Lesson, 288–289. 34.  Roth, Operation Shylock, 312, 312, 312. 35.  Roth, American Pastoral, 122–123, 10. 36.  Roth, Patrimony, 159. 37.  Roth, The Human Stain, 93, 341–342. 38.  Lizabeth Cohen writes that “during the Great Depression, when Newark’s black residents suffered so terribly that at one point they made up almost a third

Notes to Chapter One of all relief cases, though only a tenth of the population, private charities like the Salvation Army, the Goodwill Mission, and the local Red Cross refused them help.” Consumers’ Republic, 177. One should see Mr. Silk’s career in this historical context. 39.  Roth, The Human Stain, 106, 105, 100. 40.  Ibid., 104, 105. 41.  Ibid., 92, 92. 42.  Ibid., 103, 103, 106. 43.  Ibid., 107, 107, 107, 108, 108. 44.  Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Passing of Anatole Broyard,” in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, 182, 194. Anatole Broyard quoted in Gates, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, 214. Ernestine Silk believes that her brother longed for his family and for the chance to return home. 45.  Roth, American Pastoral, 3; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 3; Philip Roth, The Great American Novel (New York: Vintage, 1973), 1. 46.  Roth, American Pastoral, 3. 47.  Ibid., 4, 4, 5–6. 48.  Ibid., 10, 89. 49.  Ibid., 80, 341. 50.  Ibid., 20, 20, 20. 51.  Roth, I Married a Communist, 38, 39, 39. 52.  Roth, The Human Stain, 135. Here Coleman bears a rhetorical resemblance to the Great Gatsby: “The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his conception of himself.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Collier Books, 1992), 104. This sentence establishes a telling complicity between the markers of self (name, place of residence, background) and the conception of self that can spring from them. 53.  Roth, The Human Stain, 114, 117, 121–122. 54.  Ibid., 124. 55.  Roth, American Pastoral, 401, 401, 402. Fathers, in Roth’s fiction, very often have the mind of a historian. In The Professor of Desire, David Kepesh’s father gives “a rapid-fire anecdotal history of his life’s major boulevard, foot by foot, year by year, from Roosevelt’s inauguration right on up through L.B.J. . . . a solemn, disjointed philosophical monologue about the integral relationship of past, present, and future, as though a man who has survived sixty-six must know whereof he speaks, is obliged to be sagacious with those who follow after.” Philip Roth, The Professor of Desire, in Philip Roth: Novels, 1973–1977 (New York: The Library of America, 2006), 854–856. 56.  Roth, American Pastoral, 402, 402, 402. 57.  Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 161. 58.  Roth, American Pastoral, 400. The space between Jews and Christians, upon which Roth so often insists, the “mutual mistrust of Jew and Gentile [that] would

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Notes to Chapters One and Two shade all Roth’s works of the seventies and eighties,” makes the harmonies of this passage all the richer. Cooper, Philip Roth and the Jews, 139. 59.  Roth, American Pastoral, 400, 400.

Chapter Two Chapter epigraphs: Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 160; Roth, The Anatomy Lesson, in Zuckerman Bound, 310. 1.  Roth, The Human Stain, 335. 2.  In an essay titled “Imagining Jews,” Roth notes the “perpetually outward bound” Augie March of Saul Bellow’s 1953 novel, The Adventures of Augie March. At least as far as this phrase is concerned, there is a bit of the venturesome Augie in each of the three Newark trilogy protagonists. Roth, “Imagining Jews,” in Reading Myself and Others, 282. 3.  Melville, Moby-Dick, 3, 3, 4, 3. 4.  In an essay on the Newark trilogy, Greil Marcus reflects on the Pequod, calling it “a mirror of America rushing westward, poisoning itself by eating up a continent.” Shape of Things to Come, 161. 5.  Roth, Sabbath’s Theater, 103. 6.  Ibid., 267. 7.  Ibid., 298, 371, 435, 434. 8.  Roth, Goodbye, Columbus,16, 32, 61, 136. 9.  In an interview, Roth qualifies the scope of Brenda’s flight: “The more I saw of young women who had flown the family nest—just what Brenda Patimkin does not do—the less imperturbable they seemed.” Reading Myself and Others, 97. 10.  One of the joys of Goodbye, Columbus is the Yiddish-inflected English of Neil’s aunt Gladys. This, too, is a slight echo of Fitzgerald’s short story: Dexter Green’s “mother’s name had been Krimslich. She was a Bohemian of the peasant class and she had talked broken English to the end of her days.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Winter Dreams,” in The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Scribner’s, 1951), 135. 11.  Roth, Goodbye, Columbus, 8, 9. Leslie Fiedler offers the following historical commentary on Goodbye, Columbus and its poetry of leaving: “A prosperity more final than death had translated the very yentes from the brick stoops to the Beach Clubs of Livingston and even more unimaginable suburbs; had removed the sons of leatherworker and the owners of candystores to Bucknell and Ohio State or (God forbid!) Princeton!” “The Image of Newark,” 24. 12.  Roth, Goodbye, Columbus,14, 37, 14–15, 11, 31, 94. Brenda’s mother agrees with her husband about the Jewish void in Brenda. “‘My husband is conservative,’” Brenda’s mother tells Neil, “which meant, I took it, that he didn’t care. ‘Brenda is nothing, as you probably know’” (ibid., 89). 13.  Ibid., 26, 118–119, 52. 14.  Ibid., 77, 119, 134, 33. Leaving—the theme and the word—is as central to “Winter Dreams” as it is to Goodbye, Columbus or to the Newark trilogy, and not

Notes to Chapter Two just the leaving but the things left behind. As Fitzgerald writes of Dexter Green, “He had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down. . . . Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusions, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.” “Winter Dreams,” 145. 15.  Taylor, Sources of the Self, 39; Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 43. 16.  Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, 139. 17.  Roth, Operation Shylock, 218, 219. 18.  Kevin Mumford, Newark, 215. 19.  Weil, “The Iliad, or a Poem of Force,” 21. 20.  In conversation with the literary scholar Hermione Lee, Roth has likened the act of writing to transformation: “I am like somebody who is trying vividly to transform himself out of himself and into his vividly transforming heroes.” Searles, Conversations with Philip Roth, 187. 21.  Roth, I Married a Communist, 216. 22.  Ibid., 295. 23.  Ibid., 294. 24.  Ibid., 69. 25.  On Abraham Lincoln as a self-made man, see Daniel Walker Howe, “SelfMade Men: Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass,” in Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 136–156; and John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (New York: Hachette, 2008). 26.  Roth, The Human Stain, 342, 342, 131, 132, 334. Coleman’s passing is both an American and a historic phenomenon. Emphasizing the social fact of mobility, Werner Sollors writes that racial passing is “particularly a phenomenon of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. It thrived in modern social systems in which, as a primary condition, social and geographic mobility prevailed, especially in environments such as cities or crowds that provided anonymity to individuals, permitting them to resort to imaginative role-playing in their self-representation.” Neither Black nor White yet Both, 248–249. Newark grants Coleman no anonymity; New York does. 27.  Roth, American Pastoral, 197. 28.  Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 159. 29.  Roth, American Pastoral, 208. 30.  Ibid., 314–315, 206, 213. 31.  Ibid., 314, 389, 412. In The Counterlife, Zuckerman’s brother Henry associates the allure of non-Jewish women, for Jewish men, with the allure of leaving: “The Jewish male’s idolatry—worship of the shiksa. . . . The original Jewish dream of escape” (111). 32.  Roth, I Married a Communist, 105, 244. 33.  Ibid., 74–75. 34.  Ibid., 235, 301.

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Notes to Chapter Two 35.  Ibid., 179, 158, 80. 36.  Ibid., 56, 52. 37.  Ibid., 157. 38.  Ibid., 253, 253, 111. 39.  Roth, The Counterlife, 322. 40.  Roth, The Facts, 173. 41.  Roth, American Pastoral, 189; Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 156. Melvyn Dubofsky refers to the Swede as a “Jewish Jay Gatsby.” “Philip Roth’s ‘America’ and Mine,” Journal of the Historical Society 10, no. 4 (December 2010): 400. 42.  Roth, American Pastoral, 189, 190. 43.  Ibid., 192, 310, 399, 309, 307, 310, 310. 44.  Ibid., 308, 204. 45.  Ibid., 318, 316. Greil Marcus offers a useful comparison of the Swede with John Chapman, the prototype for Johnny Appleseed, who “traveled West from his native Massachusetts into the Ohio River Valley, giving away apple seeds and seedlings to pioneers along the way . . . so the Swede wants only to scatter the fruits of his good fortune, the American promise both made and kept, to scatter his blessings all around himself, so that he is both benefactor and recipient.” Shape of Things to Come, 167. 46.  Roth, American Pastoral, 321, 323, 302, 300, 301. 47.  Ibid., 302, 303, 306, 306. 48.  Ibid., 304, 304–305. 49.  Ibid., 176, 298, 188, 410. 50.  Roth, The Human Stain, 129, 136, 139, 139, 140. 51.  Ibid., 335. 52.  Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, 208, 209. 53.  Roth, The Human Stain, 144, 144. 54.  Ibid., 199, 275, 277, 270. Alan Heimert describes Pip as “the ‘Alabama Boy’ whose plight is made more pathetic by being somehow originally from Connecticut.” “Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism,” 513. 55.  Roth, I Married a Communist, 132, 133. 56.  Ibid., 144. One might compare this statement of Nathan’s with the far more conscious game Odysseus plays with the Cyclops. The Cyclops wishes to know Odysseus’s name, and Odysseus tells him, “Nobody—that’s my name. Nobody— so my mother and father call me, all my friends.” Odysseus is more like Coleman, who finds disguises thrilling. When Odysseus succeeds, laughter fills his “heart / to think how nobody’s name—my great cunning stroke—had duped them one and all.” Homer, The Odyssey, 221, 222. 57.  Philip Roth, Zuckerman Unbound, in Zuckerman Bound, 261, 262, 262. This scene bears some resemblance to the scene in Kafka’s Amerika when Karl Rossmann, a European who knows his name, is asked to sign his name, and “as no other name occurred to him at the moment, he gave the nickname he had had in his last post: ‘Negro.’” Franz Kafka, Amerika (New York: Schocken Books, 1946), 286.

Notes to Chapters Two and Three 58.  Roth, I Married a Communist, 144. 59.  William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 1997), 1538. 60.  Ibid., 1546. 61.  Given that Coleman is named after Brutus, it is especially interesting that Cassius asks Brutus, “Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?,” to which ­Brutus responds in the negative: “No, Cassius, for the eye sees not itself / But by reflection, by some other things” (1536). 62.  Ibid., 1542. 63.  Ibid., 1561.

Chapter Three Chapter epigraph: Andrew Bacevitch, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 33. 1.  Ross Posnock alludes to The Scarlet Letter as a forerunner to The Human Stain. He argues that The Human Stain links “Puritan censoriousness with its contemporary resurgence during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandals.” Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, 200. 2.  Marcus, Shape of Things of Come, 100. 3.  The Newark riots have been described by Lizabeth Cohen as “one of the nation’s worst [riots] in terms of bodily injury, death, and property loss.” Consumers’ Republic, 374. For narratives of the riots, see Mumford, Newark, 125–148; and Tuttle, How Newark Became Newark, chap. 6. 4.  Immerso, Newark’s Little Italy, 142. It is easy to find such examples of destruction, followed by examples of ruin. Brad Tuttle writes of the “thousands of homes . . . destroyed to make way for I-78 and various urban-renewal projects.” How Newark Became Newark, 213. 5.  Roth, American Pastoral, 268; Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 77. 6.  Roth, American Pastoral, 268. 7.  Roth, I Married a Communist, 317, 316, 316, 319, 318. Murray Ringold’s will to stay in Newark resembles that of Walter Silk, Coleman’s brother, who stays in Newark, believing, in his sister Ernestine’s words, that “what you do, you do to advance the race.” Roth, The Human Stain, 327. Nevertheless, destruction is visited upon South Orange, home of the Silk family, no less than it is upon Newark. 8.  Roth, American Pastoral, 345. 9.  Ibid., 69, 68, 275, 277, 281. 10.  Ibid., 152, 153, 153. 11.  Ibid., 155, 155, 156, 248, 248. 12.  Ibid., 242, 74, 242; Roth, The Human Stain, 74, 64. The powerful Swede fails to learn what the weak Alexander Portnoy figures out, to his own surprise. A flawless assimilation can detract from one’s character and diminish the bonds of attraction: “Who knew that the secret to a shikse’s heart (and box) was not to

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Notes to Chapter Three pretend to be some hook-nosed variety of goy, as boring and vacuous as her own brother, but to be what one’s uncle was, to be whatever one was oneself, instead of doing some pathetic little Jewish imitation of one of those half-dead, ice-cold ­shaygets pricks, Jimmy or Johnny or Tod, who look, who think, who feel, who talk like fighter-bomber pilots!” Portnoy’s Complaint, 108. 13.  Roth, American Pastoral, 261, 113, 113, 262. 14.  Ibid., 219, 225, 237, 242. 15.  Ibid., 81, 81, 247. 16.  Ibid., 87. 17.  Ibid., 256, 83. In The Ghost Writer, Nathan Zuckerman associates JFK’s assassination with a transformation of America, the moment “when Oswald shot Kennedy and the straitlaced bulwark gave way to the gargantuan banana republic.” Zuckerman Bound, 14. In a nonfiction essay, Roth has referred to the “‘demythologizing’ of John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald. . . . It remained for Sirhan Sirhan to demythologize Bobby Kennedy and for the lesser characters like Jackie and Teddy Kennedy to demythologize themselves . . . for the decade to turn completely inside out that legend of glamour, power, and righteousness.” Reading Myself and Others, 88. 18.  Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, 375. False rumors that the taxi driver had been killed helped to ignite the riots. See Mumford, Newark, 98. 19.  Roth, American Pastoral, 256. 20.  Ibid., 329, 257, 421. 21.  Ibid., 160, 166, 173, 206. 22.  Ibid., 71, 18. 23.  Roth, I Married a Communist, 264, 264, 276, 305. 24.  Ibid., 277, 276–277, 277, 309, 309. 25.  Ibid., 268, 271, 123, 123. 26.  Ibid., 292–293, 319, 123. 27.  Ibid., 185. Muteness, as theme, inverts the dynamics of Portnoy’s Complaint. As Ruth Wisse writes of Alexander Portnoy: “To his real malady, and most significant inheritance, Portnoy makes no reference: he is a verbalizer whose essential experience is linguistic.” The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, 119. 28.  In his study of the modern self, Charles Taylor writes that “one cannot be a self on one’s own. I am a self only in relation to certain interlocutors: in one way in relation to those conversation partners who are essential to my achieving selfdefinition; in another in relation to those who are now crucial to my continuing grasp of languages of self-definition. . . . A self exists only within what I call ‘webs of interlocution.’” Sources of the Self, 36. By the standards of Taylor’s argument, the Swede and Ira do not truly exist, or they do not fully exist. 29.  Cooper, Philip Roth and the Jews, 137. Roth’s concern with the perversion of literacy may come from his own expertise in the literature of Eastern Europe and Russia. Referring to two persecuted Soviet writers, Roth writes that he is “wholly in awe of writers like [Andrei] Sinyavsky and [Yuli] Daniel, of their personal brav-

Notes to Chapter Three ery and their uncompromising devotion and dedication to literature . . . [their persecution] an extreme and horrifying example of the kind of ‘misunderstanding’ one’s adversaries might wish to encourage in order to defame a work that makes fun of them.” Reading Myself and Others, 55. The Soviet Union has no monopoly on political misunderstanding and the misuse of language. In an essay, Roth has decried “the kind of language our [the US] government used when they spoke of ‘saving’ the Vietnamese by means of systematic annihilation.” In the Vietnam era, “reading the morning New York Times and afternoon New York Post, watching the seven and then the ten o’clock TV news became for me like living on a steady diet of Dostoevsky.” Reading Myself and Others, 11, 11. 30.  Elaine B. Safer notes an ironic similarity in name between Delphine Roux and the Delphic Oracle. Mocking the Age, 8. 31.  Roth, The Human Stain, 73, 73, 73. 32.  Greil Marcus writes that, in the Newark trilogy, Zuckerman “is telling stories of the republic each is carrying within themselves.” Shape of Things to Come, 99. Tim O’Brien puts this sentiment into the title of his book on the Vietnam War, a book as much about telling stories as it is about war: The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990). 33.  Roth, The Human Stain, 251–252, 252. 34.  Weil, “The Iliad, or Poem of Force,” 26. 35.  Roth, The Human Stain, 253, 256, 222, 216, 223. 36.  Ibid., 161, 299. 37.  Roth, The Human Stain, 27, 163–164, 29; Weil, “The Iliad, or a Poem of Force,” 27. 38.  Roth, The Human Stain, 169, 168, 170. 39.  Ibid., 164, 171, 170, 171, 203, 229. The Swede also feels that he has fallen out of time, though he has fallen into a sea of misery and not into erotic bliss. American Pastoral ends with a dinner party, held at the time of the Watergate hearings in 1974, and “the evening seemed to the Swede stalled, stopped, suspended, provoking in him a distressing sense of nothing more to follow, of nothing ever to happen again, of having entered a coffin carved out of time from which he would never be extricated.” A man once defined by his “hyperoptimism” has entered “a futureless box” (337). 40.  Roth, The Human Stain, 230, 242, 235, 240. 41.  Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, 230. 42.  Roth, The Human Stain, 320. 43.  Ibid., 81, 82. 44.  Ibid., 315, 314–315. 45.  Roth, American Pastoral, 206. 46.  Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1588. 47.  Marcus, Shape of Things to Come, 99. 48.  The intricacy of the relationship between Coleman and Faunia is contrasted in The Human Stain with the simplicity that Americans sought from the White

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Notes to Chapter Three and Conclusion House in the summer of 1998, after Clinton had conducted and then lied about an extramarital affair. Zuckerman polemicizes comically against this ruthless hunger for simplicity: “It was the summer in America when the nausea returned . . . when the moral obligation to explain to one’s children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life. . . . It was the summer when—for the billionth time—the jumble, the mayhem, the mess proved itself more subtle than this one’s ideology and that one’s morality. It was a summer when a president’s penis was on everyone’s mind, and life, in all its shameless impurity, once again confounded America.” Roth, The Human Stain, 3. 49.  Ibid., 246, 286, 296, 296. 50.  Melville, Moby-Dick, 212. Melville asks why it is that we fear the color white: “Is it that by its indefiniteness it [white] shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?” (ibid.). 51.  Roth, The Human Stain, 347–348, 352. 52.  Shakespeare, Macbeth, in The Norton Shakespeare, 2579. 53.  Roth, The Human Stain, 357. 54.  Ibid., 361, 348, 361. 55.  Roth, Zuckerman Bound, 24. 56.  Roth, American Pastoral, 345. 57.  Writing about Homer, Simone Weil could be describing the precise and fraudulent nature of the Swede’s heroism: “The only people who can give the impression of having risen to a higher plane, who seem superior to ordinary human misery, are the people who resort to the aids of illusion, exaltation, fanaticism, to conceal the harshness of destiny from their own eyes.” “The Iliad, or a Poem of Force,” 37. 58.  Roth, The Ghost Writer, 72. 59.  Roth, The Human Stain, 325.

Conclusion Chapter epigraphs: Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (New York: Carol Southern Books, 1993), 111; Philip Roth, “In Search of Kafka and Other Answers,” New York Times, February 15, 1976. 1.  Philip Roth, “‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka,” in Reading Myself and Others, 258, 259, 258, 259, 264, 264, 264, 269. In my understanding of the relationship between Roth and Kafka, I am indebted to Roman Halfmann’s unpublished 2002 master’s thesis, “Ph. Roths Kafka—­Rezeption [Philip Roth’s Kafka: Reception],” University of Mainz. Roman Halfmann kindly shared this work with me.

Notes to Conclusion 2.  Roth, “Looking at Kafka,” 269, 270. 3.  Ibid., 248, 248. 4.  Daniel Medin, Three Sons: Franz Kafka and the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, and W. G. Sebald (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 39. Medin notes “a filial relationship to Kafka” on Roth’s part (38). 5.  Roth, in Searles, Conversations with Philip Roth, 86. Bernard Rodgers has detected a parallel between Kafka’s “Letter to His Father” and Portnoy’s ravings about his parents. Philip Roth (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 124. Daniel Medin sees Portnoy’s Complaint as a turning point in Roth’s relationship to Kafka: “While Mann, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, and Henry James have all been featured prominently in Roth’s work, Kafka alone has surfaced with obstinate regularity since the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969.” “Liebliche Lüge?: Philip Roth’s ‘Looking at Kafka,’” Comparative Literature Studies 44, no. 1–2 (2007): 39. 6.  In an interview Roth has spoken of the foreign country America was to him in his younger years: “It [America] was very nearly as mythical to me as it had been to Franz Kafka.” Roth, in Searles, Conversations with Philip Roth, 114. In conversation with Alain Finkielkraut Roth has referred to “‘America’ in quotes—because it was almost as much of an idea in my mind as it had been in Franz Kafka’s” (125). Kafka wrote his novel about America, a mythic constellation, without ever visiting the country. 7.  Hana Wirth-Nesher, “From Newark to Prague: Roth’s Place in the AmericanJewish Literary Tradition,” in Reading Philip Roth, ed. Asher Milbauer and Donald Watson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 31. Alan Cooper emphasizes the early distance between Kafka and Roth: “The happy child . . . that had been Philip Roth had little in common with the frightened child that had been Franz Kafka.” Philip Roth and the Jews, 18. Daniel Medin analyzes an Oedipal pattern in Roth’s relationship to Kafka: “As his [Roth’s] work matures, Kafka’s influence ripens from inspiring burden to rich patrimony and contributes significantly to the ambitious scope of Zuckerman Bound and many of the novels that followed.” “Liebliche Lüge?,” 47. 8.  Philip Roth, “Some New Jewish Stereotypes,” in Reading Myself and Others, 221; Roth, The Facts, 30; Philip Roth, “The Story of Three Sisters,” in Reading Myself and Others, 174. 9.  Roth, The Facts, 122. 10.  Roth, in Searles, Conversations with Philip Roth, 128. This was a discrepancy felt not only in Newark but also in Roth’s years as a graduate student in Chicago: “The intellectually experimental, securely academic environs of Chicago’s Hyde Park were as far as you could hope to get from the fears of Jewish Galicia.” Roth, The Facts, 84. 11.  In The Anatomy Lesson, Nathan Zuckerman is surprised by the aggressive presence of the Holocaust in the mind of American Jews, even those who seem divorced from history. Shortly before dying, Nathan’s mother “took the pen from his [a doctor’s] hand and instead of ‘Selma’ [her name] wrote the word ‘Holocaust,’ perfectly spelled. This was in Miami Beach in 1970, inscribed by a woman whose

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Notes to Conclusion writings otherwise consisted of recipes on index cards, several thousand thank-you notes, and a voluminous file of knitting instructions. Zuckerman was pretty sure that before that morning she’d never even spoken the word aloud. . . . But she had a tumor in her head the size of a lemon, and it seemed to have forced out everything except the one word. That it couldn’t dislodge. It must have been there all the time without their even knowing” (289). 12.  Philip Roth, “Our Castle,” in Reading Myself and Others, 192, 192, 193. The Trial was not set in a totalitarian state, though this connotation can get attached to Kafka’s novel. Indeed, K. is perplexed by the liberalism of the state in which he lives: “After all, K. lived in a state governed by law, there was universal peace, all statutes were in force; who dared assault him in his own lodgings?” Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 6. 13.  Roth, “In Search of Kafka.” Roth’s references to his family’s European roots are especially important in light of “the willful amnesia that I [Philip Roth] generally came up against whenever I tried as a child to establish the details of our preAmerican existence,” an amnesia that “was not unique to our family.” Roth, The Facts, 123. 14.  Milan Kundera, in “Some Notes on Roth’s My Life as a Man and The Professor of Desire,” in Reading Philip Roth, 160. 15.  Roth, Shop Talk, 64; Roth, Reading Myself and Others, 76, 22. 16.  Roth, Reading Myself and Others, 76, 22, 21. 17.  Ibid., 21, 21; Roth, in Searles, Conversations with Philip Roth, 40. Walter Benjamin, for one, felt that “humor is the ultimate secret of Kafka’s tradition-obsessed modernist fiction.” Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin and Scholem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 21. 18.  Roth, Operation Shylock, 18. The Philip Roth character in Operation Shylock laments getting caught up in “a plot for a Marx Brothers movie” (221). As Elaine Safer reads Operation Shylock, the novel’s “Philip Roth” character grows to resemble Kafka’s K.: “In The Trial . . . man is in a universe he does not comprehend, his fate is ruled by powers that he does not know and by forces he does not understand. Here, in Operation Shylock, is Philip, the Jewish ‘K.’” Mocking the Age, 53. 19.  Roth, Operation Shylock, 84. 20.  Ibid. 21.  Ibid., 111. 22.  Ibid., 201. 23.  S. Lillian Kremer, “Mentoring American Jews in Fiction by Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth,” Philip Roth Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 16. 24.  Roth, Operation Shylock, 328, 327, 328. 25.  Ibid., 328. 26.  Ibid., 329. 27.  This paragraph reads: “But the hands of one man were right at K.’s throat, while the other thrust the knife into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing sight K. saw how the men drew near his face, leaning cheek-to-cheek to observe the

Notes to Conclusion verdict. ‘Like a dog!’ he said; it seemed as though the shame was to outlive him.” Kafka, The Trial, 231. 28.  Roth, Shop Talk, 64. The letter “K.” in Operation Shylock recalls the profusion of “K.’s” in The Breast. David Kepesh, a literary professor transformed into a breast, says to his therapist, Dr. Klinger: “Have you noticed, Doctor, that all our names begin with K., yours and mine and Kafka’s?” Philip Roth, The Breast, in Philip Roth: Novels, 1967–1972, 633. 29.  Roth, The Ghost Writer, 33, 57. 30.  Ibid., 59, 60. 31.  Ibid., 64. Roth has written about Zuckerman as a representative American Jew: Zuckerman “is carrying it [the Holocaust] with him all the time, whether he knows it or not. Without this word there could be no Nathan Zuckerman, not in Nathan’s fix. . . . Zuckerman wouldn’t be in his cage. If you take away that word— and with it the fact—none of these Zuckerman books would exist. . . . For most reflective American Jews, I would think, it is simply there, hidden, submerged, disappearing, unforgotten. You don’t make use of it—it makes use of you. It certainly makes use of Zuckerman.” Reading Myself and Others, 136–137. 32.  S. Lilian Kremer draws the same comparison between The Ghost Writer and “Looking at Kafka”: “As Roth had earlier metamorphosed Franz Kafka into a Newark Hebrew School teacher, [Judge] Wapter’s suggestion [that Nathan Zuckerman go see The Diary of Anne Frank on Broadway] becomes the catalyst for Zuckerman’s metamorphosis of Lonoff ’s refugee-protégé, Amy Bellette, as Anne Frank.” “Mentoring American Jews,” 14. 33.  Roth, The Ghost Writer, 81, 85, 85, 87, 86, 86, 86. 34.  Roth, The Professor of Desire, in Philip Roth: Novels, 1973–1977, 816; Hermione Lee, Philip Roth (London: Methuen, 1982), 70. 35.  Roth, The Ghost Writer, 90, 93, 99, 99, 98–99. 36.  Ibid.,101–102, 109–110. Regarding this passage, Daniel Medin notes that “in Zuckerman’s portrayal of Kafka and [Anne] Frank as secret sharers we can detect his [Zuckerman’s] recognition of history’s unforeseeable role in shaping the fame of both writers.” Three Sons, 58. With the Newark trilogy, history’s unforeseeable role would be explored as a shaping influence on the main characters, without any explicit reference to Kafka or to Anne Frank. 37.  Roth, Zuckerman Unbound, 176, 176. 38.  Roth, The Professor of Desire, 801, 810; Roth, The Breast, 638; Roth, Reading Myself and Others, 265. 39.  Roth, The Prague Orgy, in Zuckerman Bound, 465, 464–465, 490, 502. Zuckerman had already toyed with this comparison in The Anatomy Lesson: “With Gloria I mostly feel like Gregor Samsa waiting on the floor beneath the cupboard for his sister to bring him a bowl of slops” (362). 40.  Roth, The Prague Orgy, 504, 491, 491, 491. 41.  Ibid., 492. 42.  Roth, in Searles, Conversations with Philip Roth, 191.

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Notes to Conclusion 43.  Roth, The Prague Orgy, 88. Ruth Wisse writes of “Zuckerman’s resistance to the pastoral,” a trait that emerges in the final paragraph of The Counterlife, in which Zuckerman celebrates circumcision for its powers of limitation and definition. Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture (New York: Free Press, 2000), 319. The resistance to the pastoral is connected to the fact that Zuckerman “writes” American Pastoral. 44.  Roth, I Married a Communist, 78, 323. 45.  Jay Halio writes that the Newark trilogy “rarely uses deadly farce,” in stark contrast to the two novels that precede it, Operation Shylock and Sabbath’s Theater. “Deadly Farce in the Comedy of Philip Roth,” in Playful and Serious: Philip Roth as a Comic Writer, ed. Ben Siegel and Jay Halio (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010), 215. 46.  Roth, Operation Shylock, 117, 116–117. Jay Halio writes of Alexander Portnoy and Neil Klugman being “all the more schlemiels precisely because of their education and intelligence, which ironically have not helped them emerge as wellbalanced, successful human beings.” “Deadly Farce,” 211. 47.  Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, 97, 97, 53, 120. Wisse’s point about Portnoy’s Complaint qualifies Hermione Lee’s statement that “of all the contemporary Jewish-American writers, his [Roth’s] incorporation of the Yiddish-American voice into fiction has been the most spectacular.” Philip Roth, 42. 48.  Roth, Operation Shylock, 117. 49.  Ibid. 50.  Ibid., 319, 320. 51.  Roth, The Human Stain, 131, 325, epigraph, 210. 52.  Ibid., 26, 52. Anatole Broyard, on whom Coleman Silk is loosely modeled, writes of his Greenwich Village girlfriends circa 1947 giving “me their secret literature, their repressed poems and stories, their dances.” Kafka Was the Rage, 136. 53.  Roth, American Pastoral, 5, 20, 65, 239. 54.  Roth, The Human Stain, 1. 55.  Roth, I Married a Communist, 183, 65–66, 65. 56.  Roth, American Pastoral, 85, 93. Ranen Omer-Sherman finds another Kafka­ esque comparison for the Swede and for Coleman: “Like the canine subject of Kafka’s ‘Investigation of a Dog,’ the Swede and Coleman Silk are content to live in the illusory security of forgetfulness.” Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature: Lazarus, Syrkin, Reznikoff, and Roth (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2002), 264. 57.  Roth, American Pastoral, 70, 131, 240, 263, 256–257, 216, 366, 423. 58.  Ibid., 423, 423; Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon, 322. Elaine Safer draws a distinction between Kafka and Roth. In American Pastoral the relevant absurdity “is different from that which exists in the alienated worlds of Kafka, Camus, and Sartre. The novel gives us a sense of a world gone mad. But—in many respects—the personal loss of the Swede is one of his own making, just as the loss of the American

Notes to Conclusion dream can be attributed to the country’s involvement in such follies as the Vietnam War.” Mocking the Age, 94. 59.  Roth, I Married a Communist, 122. 60.  Roth’s descriptions of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal make an important connection between impurity and sanity, on the one hand, and purity and insanity, on the other: “the fantasy of purity” is declared “appalling. It’s insane.” Roth, The Human Stain, 3, 240. 61.  Ibid., 310. 62.  Roth, American Pastoral, 247, 71, 23, 329, 329; Roth, The Facts, 180. 63.  Roth, I Married a Communist, 313, 231–232, 115. 64.  Roth, The Human Stain, 10, 12, 18, 50, 300; Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage, 69. Broyard had no trouble picturing himself as a character in a Kafka fiction: “Sheri [Broyard’s lover] and I were like a short story by a young novelist who had been influenced by Kafka. Everyone was influenced by Kafka in those days. People in the Village used the word Kafkaesque the way my parents used veteran” (31). 65.  Harold Bloom, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (Broomall, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004), 2. 66.  Roth, The Human Stain, 253, 351, 347, 354, 357. 67.  To take the metaphor of translation one step further, one could note Roth’s role in promoting (translating) twentieth-century Eastern European literature in the United States. Ranen Omer-Sherman writes of Roth’s “active role in getting the Soviet-bloc dissident authors (many of them dislocated or exiled writers of Jewish descent) published in the United States and throughout the West.” Diaspora and Zionism, 208. Roth edited the Writers from the Other Europe series for Penguin from 1972 until 1989. 68.  Roth, Patrimony, 237. 69.  In a 1988 letter to the New York Times, Roth vented his outrage at the claim, by a West German book dealer, that Germany deserved to have the manuscript of The Trial. “Kafka wrote in German, of course, but he was not a German in any way,” Roth argued in this letter. “He was, to the core, a German-speaking citizen of Prague and a son of Prague Jews. In the final, ailing years of his life he was, in fact, teaching himself Hebrew, he even occasionally wondered if he might not emigrate to mandate Palestine.” Philip Roth, “Kafka Would Have Savored the Irony of Being a German Treasure,” New York Times, November 27, 1988. 70.  Many have equated the Clinton era in America with a flight from history. In an intellectual history of the 1980s and 1990s, Daniel Rodgers writes that “for over a decade [the 1980s] the idea of penetrating time, folding history over upon itself so that one could slip out of its complexities, had been a powerful intellectual project.” Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 241. Robert Kagan devoted a book to this motif, positing September 11 as commensurate with history per se in The Return of History and the End of Dreams (New York: Vintage, 2009).

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Notes to Conclusion 71.  9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York: Norton, 2004), 1. 72.  Ibid. 73.  Roth, American Pastoral, 86. 74.  When Captain Ahab realizes that Moby-Dick has destroyed the Pequod, he thinks of America: “‘The ship! the hearse!—the second hearse!’ cried Ahab from the boat; ‘its wood could only be American!’” Melville, Moby-Dick, 622. Perhaps this is an example of Ahab’s naïveté, his refusal to believe that American wood could be smashed so easily. Perhaps it is an affirmation, coming from Ahab, that the materials of his terrible story are American. As Alan Heimert writes, Ahab “was taken to his doom, not by the whale alone, not even by the sea that engulfed the Pequod, but . . . by two symbols of the American political system: a ship whose visible wood is American, and a bow-line of Kentucky hemp.” “Moby-Dick and Political Symbolism,” 534. 75.  Heimert, “Moby-Dick and Political Symbolism,” 527. 76.  Melville, Moby-Dick, 465. 77.  Heimert, “Moby-Dick and Political Symbolism,” 533. In The Human Stain, Ernestine Silk implies that Moby-Dick is returning to its original state of civic neglect: “In East Orange High they stopped long ago reading the old classics,” she tells Nathan Zuckerman. “They haven’t even heard of Moby-Dick, much less read it” (329).

Index

Note: Unless otherwise indicated, titles are of works by Philip Roth. Adorno, Theodore, 135 American Pastoral: and Newark history, 46–47, 51–55, 59–62; and the theme of comedy, 160–161; and the theme history’s grip, 98, 99, 104–111; and the theme of leaving, 74–77, 82–89; and the theme of storytelling, 15–16 American Revolution, 1, 13, 70, 84, 97–98 Amis, Kingsley, 117 Anatomy Lesson, The, 19, 20, 22, 45, 63, 174n11, 174n12, 189n11, 191n39 Anderson, Sherwood, 13, 23 Anti-Semitism, 33, 39, 56, 80–81, 82, 85, 133, 137, 138 Appelfeld, Aharon, 6; in Operation Shylock, 142–144, 148 Appleseed, Johnny, 77, 85–86, 87 Arendt, Hannah, 135 Aristophanes, 176n33 Baraka, Amiri, 40 Bellow, Saul, 4, 26; and The Adventures of Augie March, 182n2; and Herzog, 154 Black Panthers, 110 Booker, Corey, 32 Breast, The, 135, 151, 152, 191n28 Brod, Max, 135, 137 Bronfman, Yefim, 159 Broyard, Anatole, 51, 175n18, 192n52, 193n64; and Kafka Was the Rage, 133, 165–166

Bruce, Lenny, 141–142 Bukowski, Charles, 3 Bunyan, Paul, 156, 158 Bush, George W., 168 Capote, Truman, 169–170 Civil War, 1, 31, 98, 119, 171 Clinton, Bill, 5, 98, 127, 164, 166, 168 Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, 97, 102, 123–124, 185n1, 187n48, 193n60 Communism, 11, 72, 73, 77, 78–79, 80, 118, 132, 151, 177n43 Counterlife, The, 5, 19, 20, 22, 81, 175n27, 183n31, 192n43 Davis, Angela, 110 Dickens, Charles, 21, 166 Demjanjuk, John, 142, 144–145 Doctor Zhivago (film), 119 Dostoevsky, Feodor, 21, 186–187n29, 189n5 DuBois, W. E. B., 12 Dying Animal, The, 151 Edison, Thomas, 101 Eisenhower, Dwight, 113, 139 Exit Ghost, 19 Facts, The, 19, 82, 165 Faulkner, William, 4, 26, 29, 178n57 Fanon, Franz, 107

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Index Fiedler, Leslie, 36, 173n5 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 7, 8, 29, 66; The Great Gatsby, 7, 8, 11, 13, 66, 82, 83, 181n52, 184n41; “Winter Dreams,” 66 Ford, Gerald, 136, 139, 140 Frank, Anne, 36, 37, 154, 158; and The Diary of Anne Frank, 146–151, 191n32 Ghost Writer, The, 19, 32, 129, 147, 149, 174n11, 186n17, 191n32 Goldbergs, The, 114 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell), 119 Goodbye, Columbus, 5, 182n10, 192n12; and history, 23, 137, 138, 178n2; Leslie Fiedler’s review of, 2, 3; and Newark, 24, 26, 35–36, 155; and the theme of leaving, 65–68, 182n11, 182n14 Gordimer, Nadine, 21 Gore, Al, 102 Grass, Günter, 21 Great American Novel, The, 52, 141 Great Depression, 24, 31, 33, 47, 48, 167, 180n38 Great Migration, 1, 2, 35, 36, 68 Harding, Warren Gamaliel, 107 Harvard University, 66, 106 Havel, Vaclav, 5 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 29 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, 41 Heine, Heinrich, 176n33 Hepburn, Audrey, 106 History: European, 6, 133, 142, 174n11; Jewish, 42, 45, 46, 52, 55, 81, 138, 142, 157; Newark, 2–4, 29–32, 32–43; and “no reason,” 100–106, 112, 113, 136–137, 142–143, 155, 159, 169 History, American, 83, 84, 167; as imagined by Nathan Zuckerman, 2, 18, 33; as imagined by Philip Roth, 10, 18; as impossible to manipulate, 28, 50, 107, 108–109; as manipulable, 8; and the place of Newark in, 1, 4, 27, 98; as troubled, 110, 137, 142, 145, 157, 161 Hitler, Adolph, 46, 53, 79, 129, 139, 140, 174n11; as author of Mein Kampf, 117

Holocaust, 6, 133, 137, 138, 142–144, 174n12, 189n11, 191n31 Homer, 9, 14, 61, 71, 90, 99 House Committee on Un-American Affairs (HCUA), 119, 120, 188n57 Howard University, 12, 49, 50, 57 Howe, Irving, 21–23, 25, 137, 177n43 Human Stain, The: and the theme of dance, 159; and the theme of leaving Newark, 73–74, 89–92, 94–96; and the theme of Newark history, 41–42, 48–51, 57–59; and the theme of history’s grip, 116–130 “I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting,” 134–136 Iliad, The (Homer), 9–10, 15, 90, 99, 188n57 I Married a Communist: and the theme of comedy, 158–159, 161; and the theme of history’s grip, 100, 111–116, 130–131; and the theme of leaving, 71–73, 77–81, 92–93 and Newark history, 39–41, 56–57, 89–92, 94 Immigration, 1, 2, 8, 9, 136; and the immigrant in American culture, 8, 27, 36, 41, 85, 98, 101; of Jews to America, 12, 16, 43, 140, 156; and Newark, 29, 31, 32, 39, 43, 46, 53, 56, 62; and the theme of leaving, 68, 71, 75, 108. See also the Great Migration In Cold Blood (Capote), 169–170 Indignation, 22–23, 31, 117n47 James, Henry, 24, 189n5 Jefferson, Thomas, 73–74 Johnson, Lyndon, 25, 136, 139, 181n55 Kafka, Franz: and America, 184n57, 189n6, 189n7, 192n58, 193n64; and Amerika, 133, 137, 184n57; and The Castle, 135, 136, 141; and Anne Frank, 149–155, 191n36; and humor, 190n17, 190n18; as inspiration for Roth, 139–144, 162–167; 188n1, 189n4, 189n5, 192n56, 193n69; and liberalism, 190n12; and “Metamophosis,” 135, 141, 142, 154, 162; and Newark, 133–137; and

Index the schlemiel, 157; and the theme of metamorphosis, 27, 79, 191n28, 191n32. See also Trial, The Kennedy, John F., 105, 139; assassination of 109, 186n17 Klima, Ivan, 141, 146 Klinghoffer, Leon, 145–146, 147, 158, 166 Korean War, 23, 177n47 Kundera, Milan, 5, 140, 152 Letting Go, 61 Levi, Primo, 6 Lewinsky, Monica, 5, 123 Liberalism, 11, 15, 28, 73, 80, 190n12 Lin, Maya, 119–120, 166 Lincoln, Abraham, 8, 31, 43, 70, 72, 79, 103, 115, 160, 183n25 Luther, Martin, 133 Mann, Thomas, 135, 189n5; and The Magic Mountain, 129 Marx, Groucho, 141–142 Marx Brothers, 155, 190n18 McCarthy, Joseph, 102 McCarthyism, 92; as history’s vehicle, 24, 97, 102, 103, 112, 169; as phenomenon, 71, 113, 163, 167 Melville, Herman, 10, 27, 64, 97, 128, 143, 170, 171, 188n50, 194n74 Milosz, Czeslaw, 6 Moby-Dick (Melville), 52, 128,188n50; and American politics, 25, 170–172, 194n74, 194n77; and history, 27; and the theme of leaving, 11, 64, 91, 184n54, 194n77 My Life as a Man, 18, 19, 21–22, 23 Newark: and Americanization, 32, 57; and Homer’s Troy, 9–10; and Jewish history, 42, 46–47, 52, 55; leaving of, 57–59, 62, 63–96. See also suburbanization Newark Public Library, 26, 65 Newark riots: as fictionalized history, 37, 40, 98, 131; as history, 25, 26, 32, 109, 139, 179n19, 185n3, 186n18; as metaphor, 37, 40, 98, 131

Newark trilogy; definition of, 4–14, 24–25; in relation to Kafka’s fiction, 162–167; and September 11, 167–169; and the theme of history’s grip, 97–132; and the theme of illiteracy, 116, 121–122, 127–128, 129; and the theme of literacy, 115–128, 155, 170, 176n36, 186n29; and the theme of muteness, 20, 112, 115–129,132, 155, 170, 186n27 Nixon, Richard, 114, 177n48. See also Watergate Odyssey, The (Homer), 14–15, 29, 184n56 Operation Shylock, 18; and American history, 7,36–37, 69; and humor, 56, 157, 159, 160, 176n33, 192n45; and Jewish history, 42, 45, 142, 145, 147, 174n12, 176n33; and the Kafkaesque, 27, 144, 190n18, 191n28; as postmodern novel, 19 Orwell, George, 21, 18 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 186n17 Ovid, 59, 79 Passing, 11–12, 49, 59, 73, 124, 158, 181n44, 183n26 Patrimony, 16, 17, 47 Pearl Harbor, 109 Plot against America, The, 6, 10 Pollock, Jackson, 86 Portnoy’s Complaint: and history (or the lack thereof), 21, 23, 61, 74, 127, 127, 138–139, 177n42; and the Kafkaesque, 136, 140, 141, 189n5; and Newark, 24, 33, 34–35, 134, 143, 179n12; and the schlemiel, 157; and storytelling, 18, 176n31, 185n12; and the theme of leaving, 63, 83, 179n21, 180n31, 185n12 Postmodernism, 18, 19, 91, 118 Prague: as analogue to Newark, 137, 138, 139, 140–141, 142, 149, 152, 153–154, 155, 189n7; as contrast to Newark, 133, 134, 135, 136, 151, 193n69 Prague Orgy, The, 19, 20, 152, 153 Professor of Desire, The, 147, 149, 151, 152, 181n55 Puritans, 30, 97, 161, 185n1

197

198

Index Radcliffe College, 67, 68 Rand, Ayn, 21 Realism, 10, 165 Revolutionary War, 30, 63, 109 Roosevelt, Franklin, 101, 139, 181n55 Rosenbergs, 78 Roth, Philip; as civic writer, 23–27, 168, 171–172; and the figure of Nathan Zuckerman, 19–20, 22, 93–94; and laughter/jokes, 34, 118, 132, 133, 134, 137, 142, 153–154, 155–158, 159, 160, 161, 166– 167, 170; and the motif of the schlemiel, 156–158, 160, 192n46; and reading Kafka, 134–137, 139–142, 144–147, 151–155, 162– 167; and Thanksgiving, 59–62, 179n21; and Weequahic High School, 23–24, 53, 107, 135–136, 175n18, 179n10 Russian Revolution, 119, 173n epigraph Sabbath’s Theater, 157, 176n33, 192n45; and the motif of leaving, 64–65 Sahl, Mort, 141 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 10, 175n18 Schultz, Bruno, 6 September 11: 168, 169 Shakespeare, William, 6, 49, 90, 94, 95, 130, 160; Julius Caesar, 49, 50, 94, 96; Macbeth, 113, 128 Smith, Zadie, 117 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 6, 21 Sopranos, The, 173n6 Stalin, Joseph, 79, 117, 174n11 Stein, Gertrude, 87 Story-telling: and civic or communal life, 102, 153–156, 170; as deception, 70–71, 83, 86–88, 118; and history, 14–15, 21, 73, 97, 98; and literature, 18, 176n32; as neglected art, 93, 111, 112, 115, 116, 159; and Newark, 17, 25, 28, 39, 47, 72, 74; and the Newark trilogy, 4–5, 19–20, 45, 50, 58, 91, 128–132; in relation to place, 11–12; and trauma, 119–126 Suburbanization: as historical process, 32, 131, 174n8, 179n19, 182n11; and literature,

3, 36–37, 156, 173n6; and Newark, 2, 35; and the theme of leaving, 66–67, 84 Taylor, Charles, 68, 176n29, 186n28 Tolstoy, Leo, 6, 116 Trial, The, 135, 141; and American Pastoral, 162, 163; and The Human Stain, 163–164; and I Married a Communist, 163–164; and Operation Shylock, 144, 146, 190; and Portnoy’s Complaint, 136. See also Kafka, Franz Trotsky, Leon, 34 Truman, Harry, 73, 79 University of Chicago, 78, 93 Updike, John, 173n6 Vietnam War: and the American pastoral, 105, 107, 117, 128; and memory, 116, 119, 166, 187n32; and Roth’s reading of U.S. history, 7, 136, 139, 192–193n58; and the theme of history’s grip, 9, 97, 102, 129, 131; and the Vietnam War Memorial, 119–120, 166 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 119 War of 1812, 1, 30 Watergate, 38, 113, 136, 139. See also Richard Nixon Weathermen, 97, 101, 107, 110, 112, 162–163 Weil, Simone, 9, 70, 120, 122 Whitman, Walt, 176n33 Wilson, Edmund, 173n epigraph World War I, 129 World War II: and Newark, 31, 32, 54, 56, 93, 101; and the Newark trilogy, 24, 33, 104–105; and the theme of history’s grip, 65, 131, 137, 143, 174n11; and the theme of leaving/assimilation, 39, 53, 57, 69, 136 Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon), 107 Wright, Richard, 21 Zola, Émile, 152 Zuckerman Bound, 152 Zuckerman Unbound, 19, 40, 93