Philip Roth and the Jews (review)

Book Reviews 149 in the road tour, but many of the events in the novel lack a feeling of reality, with disaster following disaster. All the ingredients of a made-for-TV movie. Steven A. Riess Department of History Northeastern Illinois University Philip Roth and the Jews, by Alan Cooper. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. 319 pp. $19.95. Alan Cooper's book on Philip Roth and the Jews comes as a long overdue and most welcome contribution to Roth studies. At last we have a comprehensive, perceptive, and in-depth analysis ofRoth's treatment ofand by Jews, mainly American Jews, who have preoccupied, astonished, and alternately hectored and gratified this gifted author ever since he began writing four decades ago. As Cooper says in his Preface-and abundantly demonstrates in the chapters that follow-"Roth is much more complex, as both a writer and a Jew, than readers of his early works know" (p. xi). Those early works, mainly the stories in Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and Portnoy's Complaint (1969), outraged the conservative Jewish establishment , who took great umbrage that an author, especially a Jewish one, would write about adultery, masturbation, blasphemy, and other high crimes and misdemeanors (as they were considered) that contemporary Jews committed. Still insecure in their social position in America, these offended Jews (most of whom were of an older generation than Roth) saw him as a betrayer, a self-hating, antisemitic Jew of the worst stripe. As Roth argued at the time, and as Cooper amply details, these Jews missed the point. They utterly mistook Roth's artistry and his confidence in Jews as a people strong enough to endure the treatment found in the work of other writers, whatever their ethnic backgrounds. What underlies Roth's writing from the 1950s to the present is precisely as Cooper says: "an American's attempt to filter out illusions from the world through the agency ofa wry Jewish sensibility" (p. 23). Ifthis attempt makes for wholesale misunderstandings , which Cooper dutifully documents and analyzes, it also links Roth to other major writers. In Herzog and The Dean's December, for example, Saul Bellow earnestly attempts to expose reality from the camouflage of illusion and to insist that we Americans confront reality-or suffer the consequences of not doing so. Roth's sensibility differs from Bellow's, just as his humor differs; but at bottom both are intent-as any serious writer must be-on the perennial quest to uncover and display the real nature of our common human existence. For Roth in his early novels, Letting 150 SHOFAR Fall 1997 Vol. 16, No.1 Go (1962) and When She Was Good (1967), this meant "trying to square the myth of opportunity with the devilish dues required to sigri on to the American dream, especially for a Jew" (p. 86). The novelist's job was not to solve the problem, but to show its dimensions, and by so doing Roth (like many writers before and since) made himself vulnerable to attack. In his later work, particularly in the trilogy Zuckerman Bound (1985), but also in My Life as a Man (1974), Roth turned autobiography into fiction. Ifhis disastrous first marriage (to Margaret Martinson Williams) along with his emphasis on a Jewish male's fascination with and pursuit ofshiksas powerfully influenced his earlier novels, Roth's experiences as a famous-or infamous-author provided a wealth of material for him to contemplate, digest, and turn into fiction. The Jewish theme, like the theme offathers and sons (which began as early as Letting Go), was again very much in evidence. In the novels that followed, especially in The Counterlife (1987) and Operation Shylock (1993), Roth raised more Jewish issues than ever before, introducing complications that Jewish Americans have experienced since Israel became not only a Jewish state, but also a conquering nation occupying disputed territories. Meanwhile, as Cooper says, a Jewish "transformation" was taking place in ways that Roth's surrogate, Nathan Zuckerman, could not adequately recognize or assess (p. 211). In Israel, grandchildren of the vanished generation of the European shtetl "were signing treaties and shouldering Uzis"; in America, they were becoming "senators and CEOs." American...