Roth’s Daughters

I want to begin by confessing that I am not a particularly creative teacher of Roth. I have probably most often taught Goodbye, Columbus and the stories in that collection—primarily “Eli the Fanatic”—then Portnoy’s Complaint, The Ghost Writer, The Human Stain, and American Pastoral, nearly always in classes on Jewish literature and culture in some form. But the teaching experience that stays with me the most is one where I wasn’t teaching college students at all, but facilitating a book discussion series at our local library. I didn’t choose the books; this was a national book series sponsored by Nextbook, and our theme was “Fathers and Daughters in Jewish Literature.” We had started with Tevye the Dairyman, and after a few other novels finally arrived at American Pastoral. A woman in the group, who at around sixty years old was one of its youngest members, reacted fiercely to the novel. She hated it. It turned out she hated it because she identified so strongly as a student activist of the late sixties, with SDS, anti-capitalism, and anti-Vietnam protest—and thus identified with Merry Levov. She read the novel as channeling the Swede completely—his liberal complacency, his compliant capitalism, his horror at his radicalized daughter. Merry is grotesque, a caricature, the butt of the novel’s joke, she argued, and Roth doesn’t really understand the politics; he got it so wrong. And that was where her engagement with the novel ended. As Hana Wirth-Nesher observed in her famous essay about teaching Roth, “Reader identification with a character or a situation may often block critical reading more than facilitate it.”¹

So in the tradition of Hana Wirth-Nesher’s piece on reading “Eli the Fanatic” in Tel Aviv and her experience of confronting unexpected readings of a familiar text, I want to spend some time with this particular reader’s reaction to the novel, how it moved around my own reading, and then venture toward some thoughts on teaching American Pastoral in a different historical moment, fifteen years after its original publication—after 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Occupy, on a campus that privileges social justice and activism, to students who are indeed more apt to identify with Merry Levov than with the Swede, but whose identifications don’t necessarily preclude complex and critical readings.

Let me go back to Tevye der milkhiker as a source text for American Pastoral. The genius of Tevye der milkhiker is that it describes generational rebellion from the parent’s point of view, and we as readers see both generations’ impossible choices. Tevye, about modern, Jewish, proto-feminist rebellion in the face of extreme historical pressures, but narrated by a traditional, patriarchal, bewildered, yet loving father, is like yet so unlike American Pastoral, where we as readers seem to be guided to be repelled both by the Swede and Merry and the choices they make. The theme of fathers and daughters is not an unproductive organizing structure to examine in Roth. Roth obviously more often takes up the relationship of sons and fathers—and, in his arguably most teachable text, sons and mothers, thus coming to be read as speaking as and for neurotic (and misogynistic) Jewish sons everywhere. In thinking about Roth’s daughters, I found myself returning to Brenda Patimkin as an origin point and reflecting what a great distance in fact separates American Pastoral from Goodbye, Columbus, even though it describes events that happened only a decade later. Brenda’s genteel sexual rebellion has become Merry’s “indigenous American berserk”; the little boy in the Newark library asserting his right to knowledge and power by looking at Gauguin has exploded into the Newark race riots. Others have commented on the fact that Roth in American Pastoral seems to revisit and revise Portnoy’s Complaint, that product and seeming celebration of late-1960s liberatory politics and culture, but I actually see Goodbye, Columbus and American Pastoral as twinned texts: both are about Newark and the migrations outward of upwardly mobile Jews and their rebelling daughters; and both narratively link women and people of color...