Reading Myself and Others

by Philip Roth

  “Ultimately”? Is that not a gross simplification of the history of the Jews and the history of Hitler’s Germany? People hold serious grudges against one another, vilify one another, deliberately misunderstand one another, but they do not always, as a consequence, murder one another, as the Germans murdered the Jews, and as other Europeans allowed the Jews to be murdered, or even helped the slaughter along. Between prejudice and persecution there is usually, in civilized life, a barrier constructed by the individual’s convictions and fears, and the community’s laws, ideals, values. What “ultimately” caused this barrier to disappear in Germany cannot be explained only in terms of anti-Semitic misconceptions; surely what must also be understood here is the intolerability of Jewry, on the one hand, and its usefulness, on the other, to the Nazi ideology and dream.

  By simplifying the Nazi-Jewish relationship, by making prejudice appear to be the primary cause of annihilation, the rabbi is able to make the consequences of publishing “Defender of the Faith” in The New Yorker seem very grave indeed. He doesn’t appear to be made at all anxious, however, by the consequences of his own position. For what he is suggesting is that some subjects must not be written about, or brought to public attention, because it is possible for them to be misunderstood by people with weak minds or malicious instincts. Thus he consents to put the malicious and weak-minded in a position of determining the level at which open communication on these subjects will take place. This is not fighting anti-Semitism but submitting to it: that is, submitting to a restriction of consciousness as well as communication, because being conscious and being candid are too risky.

  In his letter the rabbi calls my attention to that famous madman who shouts “Fire!” in a “crowded theater.” He leaves me to complete the analogy myself: by publishing “Defender of the Faith” in The New Yorker: (1) I am shouting; (2) I am shouting “Fire!”; (3) there is no fire; (4) all this is happening in the equivalent of a “crowded theater.” The crowded theater: there is the risk. I should agree to sacrifice the freedom essential to my vocation, and even to the general well-being of the culture, because—because of what? The “crowded theater” has absolutely no relevance to the situation of the Jew in America today. It is a grandiose delusion. It is not a metaphor describing a cultural condition but a revelation of the nightmarish visions that plague people as demoralized as the rabbi appears to be: rows endless, seats packed, lights out, doors too few and too small, panic and hysteria just under the skin … No wonder he says to me finally, “Your story—in Hebrew—in an Israeli magazine or newspaper—would have been judged exclusively from a literary point of view.” That is, ship it off to Israel. But please don’t tell it here, now.

  Why? So that “they” will not commence persecuting Jews again? If the barrier between prejudice and persecution collapsed in Germany, this is hardly reason to contend that no such barrier exists in our country. And if it should ever begin to appear to be crumbling, then we must do what is necessary to strengthen it. But not by putting on a good face; not by refusing to admit to the intricacies and impossibilities of Jewish lives; not by pretending that Jews have existences less in need of, and less deserving of, honest attention than the lives of their neighbors; not by making Jews invisible. The solution is not to convince people to like Jews so as not to want to kill them; it is to let them know that they cannot kill them even if they despise them. And how to let them know? Surely repeating over and over to oneself, “It can happen here,” does little to prevent “it” from happening. Moreover, ending persecution involves more than stamping out persecutors. It is necessary, too, to unlearn certain responses to them. All the tolerance of persecution that has seeped into the Jewish character—the adaptability, the patience, the resignation, the silence, the self-denial—must be squeezed out, until the only response there is to any restriction of liberties is “No, I refuse.”

  The chances are that there will always be some people who will despise Jews, just so long as they continue to call themselves Jews; and, of course, we must keep an eye on them. But if some Jews are dreaming of a time when they will be accepted by Christians as Christians accept one another—if this is why certain Jewish writers should be silent—it may be that they are dreaming of a time that cannot be, and of a condition that does not exist this side of one’s dreams. Perhaps even the Christians don’t accept one another as they are imagined to in that world from which Jews may believe themselves excluded solely because they are Jews. Nor are the Christians going to feel toward Jews what one Jew may feel toward another. The upbringing of the alien does not always alert him to the whole range of human connections which exists between clannish solidarity on the one hand and exclusion or rejection on the other. Like those of most men, the lives of Jews no longer take place in a world that is just landsmen and enemies. The cry “Watch out for the goyim!” at times seems more the expression of an unconscious wish than of a warning: Oh that they were out there, so that we could be together in here! A rumor of persecution, a taste of exile, might even bring with it that old world of feelings and habits—something to replace the new world of social accessibility and moral indifference, the world which tempts all our promiscuous instincts, and where one cannot always figure out what a Jew is that a Christian is not.

  Jews are people who are not what anti-Semites say they are. That was once a statement out of which a man might begin to construct an identity for himself; now it does not work so well, for it is difficult to act counter to the ways people expect you to act when fewer and fewer people define you by such expectations. The success of the struggle against the defamation of Jewish character in this country has itself made more pressing 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. For those Jews who choose to continue to call themselves Jews, and find reason to do so, there are courses to follow to prevent it from ever being 1933 again that are more direct, reasonable, and dignified than beginning to act as though it already is 1933—or as though it always is. But the death of all those Jews seems to have taught my correspondent, a rabbi and a teacher, little more than to be discreet, to be foxy, to say this but not that. It has taught him nothing other than how to remain a victim in a country where he does not have to live like one if he chooses. How pathetic. And what an insult to the dead. Imagine: sitting in New York in the 1960’s and piously summoning up the “six million” to justify one’s own timidity.

  Timidity—and paranoia. It does not occur to the rabbi that there are Gentiles who will read the story intelligently. The only Gentiles the rabbi can imagine looking into The New Yorker are those who hate Jews and those who don’t know how to read very well. If there are others, they can get along without reading about Jews. For to suggest that one translate one’s stories into Hebrew and publish them in Israel is to say, in effect: “There is nothing in our lives we need to tell the Gentiles about, unless it has to do with how well we manage. Beyond that, it’s none of their business. We are important to no one but ourselves, which is as it should be (or better be) anyway.” But indicate that moral crisis is something to be hushed up is not, of course, to take the prophetic line; nor is it a rabbinical point of view that Jewish life is of no significance to the rest of mankind.

  Even given his own kind of goals, however, the rabbi is not very farsighted or imaginative. What he fails to see is that the stereotype as often arises from ignorance as from malice; deliberately keeping Jews out of the imagination of Gentiles, for fear of the bigots and their stereotyping minds, is really to invite the invention of stereotypical ideas. A book like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, for instance, seems to me to have helped many whites who are not anti-Negro, but who do hold Negro stereotypes, to surrender their simpleminded notions about Negro life. I doubt, however, that Ellison, describing as he does not just the squalor Negroes must put up with but certain bestial aspects of his Negro characters as well, has converted one Alabama redneck or one United St
ates senator over to the cause of desegregation; nor could the novels of James Baldwin cause Governor Wallace to conclude anything more than that Negroes are just as hopeless as he’s always known them to be. As novelists, neither Baldwin nor Ellison are (to quote Mr. Ellison on himself) “cogs in the machinery of civil rights legislation.” Just as there are Jews who feel that my books do nothing for the Jewish cause, so there are Negroes, I am told, who feel that Mr. Ellison’s work has done little for the Negro cause and probably has harmed it. But that seems to place the Negro cause somewhat outside the cause of truth and justice. That many blind people are still blind does not mean that Ellison’s book gives off no light. Certainly those of us who are willing to be taught, and who needed to be, have been made by Invisible Man less stupid than we were about Negro lives, including those lives that a bigot would point to as affirming his own half-baked, inviolable ideas.

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  But it is the treachery of the bigot that the rabbi appears to be worried about and that he presents to me, to himself, and probably to his congregation, as the major cause for concern. Frankly, I think those are just the old words coming out, when the right buttons are pushed. Can he actually believe that on the basis of my story anyone is going to start a pogrom, or keep a Jew out of medical school, or even call some Jewish schoolchild a kike? The rabbi is entombed in his nightmares and fears; but that is not the whole of it. He is also hiding something. Much of this disapproval of “Defender of the Faith” because of its effect upon Gentiles seems to me a cover-up for what is really objected to, what is immediately painful—and that is its direct effect upon certain Jews. “You have hurt a lot of people’s feelings because you have revealed something they are ashamed of.” That is the letter the rabbi did not write but should have. I would have argued then that there are things of more importance—even to these Jews—than those feelings that have been hurt, but at any rate he would have confronted me with a genuine fact, with something I was actually responsible for, and which my conscience would have had to deal with, as it does.

  For the record, all the letters I saw that came in about “Defender of the Faith” were from Jews. Not one of those people whose gratitude the rabbi believes I earned wrote to say, “Thank you,” nor was I invited to address any anti-Semitic organizations. When I did begin to receive speaking invitations, they were from Jewish ladies’ groups, Jewish community centers, and from all sorts of Jewish organizations, large and small.

  And I think this bothers the rabbi too. Some Jews are hurt by my work; but some are interested. At the rabbinical convention I mentioned earlier, Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, a professor of political science at Yeshiva University, reported to his colleagues that certain Jewish writers were “assuming the mantle of self-appointed spokesmen and leaders for Judaism.” To support his remark he referred to a symposium held in Israel this last June at which I was present; as far as I know, Rabbi Rackman was not. If he had been there, he would have heard me make it quite clear that I did not want to, did not intend to, and was not able to speak for American Jews; I surely did not deny, and no one questioned the fact, that I spoke to them, and I hope to others as well. The competition that Rabbi Rackman imagines himself to be engaged in hasn’t to do with who will presume to lead the Jews; it is really a matter of who, in addressing them, is going to take them more seriously—strange as that may sound—with who is going to see them as something more than part of the mob in a crowded theater, more than helpless and threatened and in need of reassurance that they are as “balanced” as anyone else. The question really is, who is going to address men and women like men and women, and who like children. If there are Jews who have begun to find the stories the novelists tell more provocative and pertinent than the sermons of some of the rabbis, perhaps it is because there are regions of feeling and consciousness in them which cannot be reached by the oratory of self-congratulation and self-pity.

  The Story of Three Stories*

  The three stories of mine that Larry Arrick has chosen to adapt and direct for the stage—and that, taken together, he calls Unlikely Heroes—are among the first I wrote and published. As a result I am no longer on intimate or even particularly friendly terms with them. This isn’t to say that I find the stories wholly without merit, or that, from the heights of my professionalism, I am ready to dismiss them out of hand as juvenilia. For one thing, there are no such heights, only new stages in the writer’s perennial apprenticeship. Each new project makes one into a beginner again, though a different sort of beginner in the seventies than in the fifties. My point is simply that fourteen years and five books of fiction have come and gone since these stories were everything to me, and I would be a mawkish, deluded parent if I were to feel toward them in their awkward adolescence as I did in their darling infancy.

  At seventy-nine, Tolstoy told a youthful admirer, “I have completely forgotten my earlier work.” Not quite half the titan’s age, I am able to recall the tiny apartment across from Stagg Field on Chicago’s South Side where, fourteen years ago, I sat at my desk writing these stories, yet I am largely out of touch by now with the interests that generated them and determined their spirit and tone. I remember some sentences here and there as mine, but it has already begun to seem that a stranger imagined the story as a whole.

  The pressures of personal history and literary idealism that cause a first book to be written are apt to be like none that a writer is ever to experience again. The example of the great writers will probably never be stronger (for good and bad) and his own virgin forest of memory, fantasy, and obsession may never again be so vast. Then there is the exuberance of being a literary orphan. Not as yet informed that he is a realistic writer, or a Jewish writer, or an academic writer, or a controversial writer, he is not tempted either to satisfy the expectation or to subvert it. An embarrassment of riches—and yet, with it all, the fledgling invariably winds up writing somewhat like the bad poet described by T. S. Eliot, who is “usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.”

  In my own earliest work I attempted to transform into fiction something of the small world in which I had spent the first eighteen years of my life. The stories did not draw so much upon immediate personal experience or the history of my own family as upon the ethos of my highly self-conscious Jewish neighborhood, which had been squeezed like some embattled little nation in among ethnic rivals and antagonists, peoples equally proud, ambitious, and xenophobic, and equally baffled and exhilarated by the experience of being fused into a melting pot. It was to this nation-neighborhood—this demi-Israel in a Newark that was our volatile Middle East—that I instinctively turned for material at the beginning of my writing career, and to which I returned, ten years later, when I tried to distill from that Newark Jewish community the fictional, or folkloric, family that I called the Portnoys.

  Of the three stories dramatized in Unlikely Heroes, “Epstein” is the most strongly rooted in that vanishing world. It is the story of an aging Jewish businessman, married and lonely lo these many years, who is jolted by a sexual pang into the bed of the buxom widow across the street. For his terminal bravery he receives a venereal rash and, if that isn’t enough in the way of somatic retribution, a nearly fatal heart attack. I wrote “Epstein” when I was twenty-four, ten years after my father had recounted a similar tale of neighborhood adultery during dinner one night—mealtime being Scheherazade-time in our kitchen. At fourteen I had been delighted to hear that scandalous passion had broken out on our decent, law-abiding street, but my pleasure derived especially from the blend of comedy and sympathy with which the story had been told. A decade later, when I set out to make fiction from this delicious bit of neighborhood gossip, I tried to be faithful to the point of view of the original narrator, which seemed to me morally astute and, in its unself-righteous gaiety and lustiness, endearing. In writing I of course shifted the story’s intestines around to get at what I took to be the vital organs—and then tacked on a special cardiac seizur
e to give the story the brutal edge that Mr. Reality had strangely neglected to impart on this occasion.

  With “Defender of the Faith” and “Eli, the Fanatic”—the other stories adapted by Arrick for Unlikely Heroes—I began to move out of the old neighborhood, relying less upon the ethos and atmosphere of a place than upon a state of mind, a sense of self, which for lack of a better term is frequently called “Jewishness.” Written immediately after “Epstein,” these two stories turned out to be something of a departure from those stories of Jewish life upon which many readers, myself included, had been raised, particularly in the immediate postwar years. Instead of telling of a Jew who is persecuted by a Gentile because he is a Jew—a subject treated variously in Gentleman’s Agreement by Laura Z. Hobson, Focus by Arthur Miller, and The Victim by Saul Bellow—each of my two stories was about a Jew persecuted for being a Jew by another Jew.

  I did not realize at the time that I had turned the familiar subject of anti-Semitism somewhat on its head, and that, in writing of the harassment of Jew by Jew rather than Jew by Gentile, I was pressing readers to alter a system of responses to “Jewish” fiction to which they had perhaps become more than a little accustomed. Had I been fully alert to the demand being made and the expectations being bucked, I might not have been so bewildered by the charges of “anti-Semitism” and “self-hatred” that were brought against me by any number of Jewish readers following the publication in The New Yorker, in 1959, of “Defender of the Faith.” 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 Jewish life. In some instances, understandably, it was asking the impossible.