Reading Myself and Others

by Philip Roth

  Admittedly, it is not safe to indict a man solely on the basis of what Time quotes him as having said; it may even be Time’s pleasure to titillate its readers with a classic stereotype—the Jewish hustler who will sell anything for a price. There was a time when this image was helpful to certain Gentiles in dealing with the Jew. Now there is another way of dealing with him—there is the image that Mr. Uris has sold, the image millions have read about in his book and other millions will see flickering on the screen.

  There is Leon Uris to make the Jew and Jewishness acceptable, appealing, and attractive, and there is that famous optimist and cracker-barrel philosopher, Harry Golden. The image of the Jew that Harry Golden presents has been analyzed to a turn in Theodore Solotaroff’s recent essay in Commentary, “Harry Golden and the American Audience.” Mr. Solotaroff points out that in Golden’s three books, For 2¢ Plain, Only in America, and Enjoy, Enjoy! he “satisfied both Jewish nostalgia and Gentile curiosity,” that “he presents with depressing clarity certain very real problems and conditions of our society in the past decade—a society characterized by its well-intentioned but soft, sloppy, equivocal thinking about itself.… Garnished with a little Manischewitz horseradish the perplexed banalities of the middle class come back to [the reader] as the wisdom of the ages.”

  Solotaroff thinks of horseradish; in matters Goldenian, I am a schmaltz man myself. It is interesting to observe that Golden, in replying to Solotaroff’s comments, manages himself to lay the schmaltz on with one hand while at the same time trying to wipe it away with the other. In his newspaper, The Carolina Israelite, Golden writes that Solotaroff is dead wrong in accusing him of glamorizing life in the New York ghetto. With characteristic restraint and logic, Golden explains: “We Jews … not only had a society, but, quite frankly, a Jewish city, and this sense of community is what lends memories of the old East Side its glamour, and it is for this reason that the bulk of American Jewry up in the middle class lick their fingers over everything I write about the Lower East Side of New York. Sentiment alone could never sustain such amazingly wide-spread interest.” The word is spelled sentimentality, and if it can’t produce widespread interest, what can?

  Popular Jewish interest in Golden and in Uris isn’t hard to understand. For one thing, there is the pleasure of recognition, the plain and simple kick that comes of seeing the words “kugel” and “latkes” in print. Then there is the romance of oneself: The Hebrew Hero on the one hand, the Immigrant Success on the other. Harry Golden, a self-confessed Horatio Alger, furnishes us with the names of the judges, movie stars, scientists, and comedians who have risen from the Jewish Lower East Side to fame and fortune. But what of the Gentile interest? Four million people have bought copies of Exodus; two million, copies of Only in America; they can’t all have been Jews. Why this Gentile interest in Jewish characters, history, manners, and morals? How does Pat Boone come to be singing the “only authorized version” anyway? Why not Moishe Oysher or Eddie Fisher?

  One explanation Solotaroff offers for Golden’s appeal is that, among other things, Golden presents to his readers a world characterized by “vividness, energy, aspiration, discipline, and finally the warmth of life—that is, precisely those qualities which are said to be declining in the modern middle-class family and suburb.” And there does seem to be fascination these days with the idea of Jewish emotionalism. People who have more sense than to go up to Negroes and engage them in conversation about “rhythm” have come up to me and asked about my “warmth.” They think it is flattering—and they think it is true.

  I do not believe that they think it is complicated; that warmth, when it does appear, does not just radiate itself—at the center there is usually a fire.

  There are several Jewish graduate students in a class I teach at the Writing Workshop of the State University of Iowa, and during this last semester three of them wrote stories about a Jewish childhood; and in all three the emotional pitch of the drama ran very high. Curiously, or perhaps not so curiously, in each story the hero is a Jewish boy, somewhere between ten and fifteen, who gets excellent grades in school and is always combed and courteous. The stories, all told in the first person, have to do with a friendship that grows up between the hero and a Gentile neighbor or schoolmate. The Gentile is from a slightly lower class—Italian-American in one instance, Tom Sawyer–American in another—and he leads the Jewish boy, who is of the middle class, into the world of the flesh. The Gentile boy has himself already had some kind of sexual experience. Not that he is much older than his Jewish sidekick—he has had a chance to find his way to adventure because his parents pay hardly any attention to him at all: they are divorced, or they drink, or they are uneducated and say “goddamn” all the time, or they just don’t seem to be around that much to care. This leaves their offspring with plenty of time to hunt for girls. The Jewish boy, on the other hand, is watched—he is watched at bedtime, at study time, and especially at mealtime. Who he is watched by is his mother. The father we rarely see, and between him and the boy there seems to be little more than a nodding acquaintance. The old man is either working or sleeping or across the table, silently stowing it away. Still, there is a great deal of warmth in these families—especially when compared to the Gentile friend’s family—and almost all of it is generated by the mother. And it does not strike the young hero the way it strikes Harry Golden and his audience. The fire that warms can also burn and asphyxiate: what the hero envies the Gentile boy is his parents’ indifference, and largely, it would seem, because of the opportunities it affords him for sexual adventure. Religion here is understood, not as the key to the mysteries of the divine and the beyond, but to the mystery of the sensual and the erotic, the wonder of laying a hand on the girl down the street. The warmth these Jewish storytellers want then is the warmth to which the Gentiles seem (to them) to have such easy access, just as the warmth that Harry Golden’s Gentiles envy him for is the warmth he tells them that Jews come by practically as a matter of course.

  I hasten to point out that in these short stories the girls to whom the Gentile friend leads the young narrator are never Jewish. The Jewish women are mothers and sisters. The sexual yearning is for the Other. The dream of the shiksa—counterpart to the Gentile dream of the Jewess, often adjectivally described as “melon-breasted.” (See Thomas Wolfe.) I do not mean, by the way, to disparage the talent of these writing students by comparing their interest in a Jewish boy’s dreams with the kind of dreaminess you find in Golden: what the heroes of these stories invariably learn—as the Gentile comrades disappear into other neighborhoods or into maturity—are the burdensome contradictions of their own predicament.

  Golden and Uris burden no one with anything. Indeed, much of their appeal is that they help to dissipate guilt, real and imagined. It turns out that the Jews are not poor innocent victims after all—all the time they were supposed to be being persecuted, they were having a good time being warm to one another and having their wonderful family lives. What they were developing—as one reviewer quoted by Solotaroff says of Harry Golden—was their “lovely Jewish slant on the world.”

  Ah, that lovely Jewish slant—its existence surely can soothe the conscience: for if the victim is not a victim, then the victimizer is probably not a victimizer either. Along with the other comforts Golden offers, there is a kind of escape hatch for Gentiles who, if they have not been practicing anti-Semites, have at any rate been visited with distrustful, suspicious feelings about Jews, feelings which they are told they ought not to have. Golden assures them (as he assures the Jews) that we are a happy, optimistic, endearing people, and also that we live in a top-notch country—is not his career proof that bigotry does not corrode and corrupt the American system? There he is, a Jew—and one who speaks up, mind you—a respected citizen in a Southern city. Wonderful! And not in Sweden either, or in Italy, or in the Philippines. Only—Golden tells them—in America!

  This may be pleasant therapy for certain anxious, well-meaning Gentiles, in that they do
not have to continue to feel guilty for crimes for which they do not in fact bear any responsibility; it may even unburden some halfhearted anti-Semites who don’t like Jews because they don’t like themselves for not liking Jews. But I do not see that it is very respectful to the Jews and the hard facts of their history. Or even to the validity of Gentile suspiciousness. For why shouldn’t the Gentiles have suspicions? The fact is that, if one is committed to being a Jew, then he believes that on the most serious questions pertaining to man’s survival—understanding the past, imagining the future, discovering the relation between God and humanity—that he is right and the Christians are wrong. As a believing Jew, he must certainly view the breakdown in this century of moral order and the erosion of spiritual values in terms of the inadequacy of Christianity as a sustaining force for the good. However, who would care to say such things to his neighbor? Rather, what we witness daily in American life is the “socialization of the anti-social … the acculturation of the anti-cultural … the legitimization of the subversive.” These phrases are Lionel Trilling’s; he has used them to describe the responses many of his students have to the more extreme elements in modern literature. His words have for me an even broader cultural relevance: I refer to the swallowing up of difference that goes on around us continuously, that deadening “tolerance” that robs—and is designed to rob—those who differ, diverge, or rebel of their powers. Instead of being taken seriously as a threat, a man is effectively silenced by being made popular. They are presently holding beatnik parties in the suburbs—which does not convince me that all men are brothers. On the contrary, they are strangers; that comes home to me every day when I read the newspaper. They are strangers, and just as often they are enemies, and it is because that is how things are that it behooves us, not “to love one another” (which from all evidence appears to be asking for the moon), but to practice no violence and treachery upon one another, which, it would seem, is difficult enough.

  But of course the Jews have done violence. It is the story of their violence that Leon Uris is so proud to tell to America. Its appeal to American Jews is not hard to understand, but again, what of the Gentiles? Why all the piety about the “only authorized version” of a popular song? Why is the song even popular? the movie? the book? So persuasive and agreeable is the Exodus formulation to so many in America that I am inclined to wonder if the burden that it is working to remove from the nation’s consciousness is nothing less than the memory of the holocaust itself, the murder of six million Jews, in all its raw, senseless, fiendish horror. As though, say, a popular song or movie were to come along some day soon to enable us to dispose of that other troublesome horror, the murder of the citizens of Hiroshima. In the case of Hiroshima, we might perhaps be told a story and given a song to sing about the beautiful modern city that has risen from the ashes of atomic annihilation, about how much more prosperous, healthy, and enterprising life is in the new city than it was in the one that vanished. But be that as it may—and who in this go-getting land is to say that it may not be soon enough?—now there is Golden to assure us that even ghettoized Jews were really happy, optimistic, and warm (as opposed to aggrieved, pessimistic, and xenophobic), and there is Uris to say that you don’t have to worry about Jewish vulnerability and victimization after all, the Jews can take care of themselves. They have taken care of themselves. One week Life magazine presents on its cover a picture of Adolf Eichmann; weeks later, a picture of Sal Mineo as a Jewish freedom fighter. A crime to which there is no adequate human response, no grief, no compassion, no vengeance that is sufficient seems, in part then, to have been avenged. And when the scales appear at last to begin to balance, there cannot but be a sigh of relief. The Jew is no longer looking out from the wings on the violence of our age, nor is he its favorite victim; now he is a participant. Fine then. Welcome aboard. A man with a gun and a hand grenade, a man who kills for his God-given rights (in this case, as the song informs us, God-given land) cannot sit so easily in judgment of another man when he kills for what God has given him, according to his accounting and inventory.

  Mr. Uris’s discovery that the Jews are fighters fills him with pride; it fills any number of his Jewish readers with pride as well, and his Gentile readers less perhaps with pride than with relief. However, the hero of Dawn, Elie Wiesel’s novel about the Jewish terrorists, is visited with less comforting and buoyant emotions. He is overcome with shame and confusion and a sense that he is locked hopelessly and forever in a tragic nightmare. No matter how just he tells himself are the rights for which he murders, nothing in his or his people’s past is able to make firing a bullet into another man anything less ghastly than it is. He has seen and suffered so much, in Buchenwald and Auschwitz, that it is with a final sense of the death of what he thought he was that he pulls the trigger on the British officer and becomes another of the executioners in our violent century. He is one of those Jews, like Job, who wonder why they were born.

  Writing About Jews*

  1

  Ever since some of my first stories were collected in 1959 in a volume called Goodbye, Columbus, my work has been attacked from certain pulpits and in certain periodicals as dangerous, dishonest, and irresponsible. I have read editorials and articles in Jewish community newspapers condemning these stories for ignoring the accomplishments of Jewish life, or, as Rabbi Emanuel Rackman recently told the convention of the Rabbinical Council of America, for creating a “distorted image of the basic values of Orthodox Judaism,” and even, he went on, for denying the non-Jewish world the opportunity of appreciating the “overwhelming contribution which Orthodox Jews are making in every avenue of modern endeavor.…” Among the letters I receive from readers, there have been a number written by Jews accusing me of being anti-Semitic and “self-hating,” or, at least, tasteless; they argue or imply that the sufferings of the Jews throughout history, culminating in the murder of six million by the Nazis, have made certain criticisms of Jewish life insulting and trivial. Furthermore, it is charged that such criticism as I make of Jews—or apparent criticism—is taken by anti-Semites as justification of their attitudes, as “fuel” for their fires, particularly as it is a Jew himself who seemingly admits to habits and behavior that are not exemplary, or even normal and acceptable. When I speak before Jewish audiences, invariably there have been people who have come up to me afterward to ask, “Why don’t you leave us alone? Why don’t you write about the Gentiles?”—“Why must you be so critical?”—“Why do you disapprove of us so?”—this last question asked as often with incredulity as with anger; and often by people a good deal older than myself, asked as of an erring child by a loving but misunderstood parent.

  It is difficult, if not impossible, to explain to some of the people claiming to have felt my teeth sinking in that in many instances they haven’t been bitten at all. Not always, but frequently, what readers have taken to be my disapproval of the lives lived by Jews seems to have to do more with their own moral perspective than with the one they would ascribe to me: at times they see wickedness where I myself had seen energy or courage or spontaneity; they are ashamed of what I see no reason to be ashamed of, and defensive where there is no cause for defense.

  Not only do they seem to me often to have cramped and untenable notions of right and wrong, but looking at fiction as they do—in terms of “approval” and “disapproval” of Jews, “positive” and “negative” attitudes toward Jewish life—they are likely not to see what it is that the story is really about.

  To give an example. A story I wrote called “Epstein” tells of a sixty-year-old man who has an adulterous affair with the lady across the street. In the end, Epstein, who is the hero, is caught—caught by his family, and caught and struck down by exhaustion, decay, and disappointment, against all of which he had set out to make a final struggle. There are Jewish readers, I know, who cannot figure out why I found it necessary to tell this story about a Jewish man: don’t other people commit adultery too? Why is it the Jew who must be shown cheating?
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br />   But there is more to adultery than cheating: for one thing, there is the adulterer himself. For all that some people may experience him as a cheat and nothing else, he usually experiences himself as something more. And generally speaking, what draws most readers and writers to literature is this “something more”—all that is beyond simple moral categorizing. It is not my purpose in writing a story of an adulterous man to make it clear how right we all are if we disapprove of the act and are disappointed in the man. Fiction is not written to affirm the principles and beliefs that everybody seems to hold, nor does it seek to guarantee the appropriateness of our feelings. The world of fiction, in fact, frees us from the circumscriptions that society places upon feeling; one of the greatnesses of the art is that it allows both the writer and the reader to respond to experience in ways not always available in day-to-day conduct; or, if they are available, they are not possible, or manageable, or legal, or advisable, or even necessary to the business of living. We may not even know that we have such a range of feelings and responses until we have come into contact with the work of fiction. This does not mean that either reader or writer no longer brings any judgment to bear upon human action. Rather, we judge at a different level of our being, for not only are we judging with the aid of new feelings but without the necessity of having to act upon judgment. Ceasing for a while to be upright citizens, we drop into another layer of consciousness. And this expansion of moral consciousness, this exploration of moral fantasy, is of considerable value to a man and to society.