Reading Myself and Others

by Philip Roth

  *The circumstances of Pincus’s arrest were altered by Lelchuk after I had read the manuscript, and in the published novel are somewhat different from what I describe here.

  *Introduction to Laughable Loves, a collection of Kundera’s stories (Knopf, 1974).

  *Shortly after the publication of this piece, Kundera was permitted to go to Paris to receive the Prix Médicis Etranger.

  *Visiting Prague again, some months after writing this introduction, I learned that though the “self-critical confession” read on the Prague radio was attributed to Holub, the reader’s voice was not his, and there are some in the literary community there who would not be surprised to find that the words were not all his either.

  *Introduction to Playing House, ou les jeux réprouvés (Seghers, 1974), the French translation of Fredrica Wagman’s first novel; it was a runner-up for the Prix Médicis Etranger.

  *Written in 1974.

  *I say “longer works” because the hard and ugly facts of life in a short story like “The Old System,” published first in Playboy in 1967, are of the sort that have been known to set the phones ringing at the Anti-Defamation League. Baldly put (which is how these things tend to be put when the lines are drawn), it is a story of rich Jews and their money: first, how they make it big in the world with under-the-table payoffs (a hundred thousand delivered to an elegant old Wasp for lucrative country-club acreage—and delivered by a Jew Bellow depicts as an orthodox religious man); and then it is about how Jews cheat and finagle one another out of the Almighty Dollar: a dying Jewish woman, with a dirty mouth no less, demands twenty thousand in cash from her businessman brother for the privilege of seeing her before she expires in her hospital bed. This scene of sibling hatred and financial cunning in a Jewish family is in fact the astonishing climax to which the story moves.

  One wonders about the reception the defense agencies would have given to this story, especially appearing as it did in Playboy magazine, had it been the work of some unknown Schwartz or Levy instead of the author of Herzog. Indeed, in the aftermath of sixties’ political radicalism and the traumatic shock upon Jews of the October 1973 war, one wonders what position the Jewish press and cultural journals would take if a first novel like Dangling Man were suddenly to be published, wherein the thoroughly deracinated and depressive hero seems to dislike no one quite so much as his Jewish brother’s bourgeois family, or if out of the blue a book like The Victim were now to appear, in which the hero’s Jewishness is at times made to resemble a species of psychopathology.

  *Written in 1973.