Four Jewish Novelists Facing Aging Differently

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.

—Oscar Wilde

Older Jewish characters have been a fixture in Jewish novels for some time, usually as objects to be satirized and roundly dismissed. As they sway over thick volumes of the Talmud or concoct fanciful curses against the Evil Spirits, Yiddish grandfathers and grandmothers are meant to represent the Old World and thus everything that a younger, more assimilating generation is eager to forget. Small wonder, then, that the elderly are nearly always Orthodox—and their offspring are decidedly not. On rare occasions—one thinks of Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family series—sentimentality easily trumps dramatic tension, and the result is more akin to ethnic celebration than it is to serious literature.

What happens to Jewish novelists is what happens to us all: they get older. And as I thought about this fairly unremarkable truth, the names of four Jewish novelists—each one complicated in his or her own way—kept popping up in my consciousness. They are the British novelist Howard Jacobson at seventy-one, and the Americans Philip Roth at eighty, Cynthia Ozick at eighty-five, and Herman Wouk (rhymes with smoke) at a remarkable ninety-seven. Their personal adjustments to time's winged chariot tell us nearly as much about aging as do wrinkles and graying hair.

I was surely not the only person who was surprised and more than a little saddened to learn that Philip Roth would no longer be reading, much less writing fiction. He leaked this startling news to a French magazine (Les InRocks) in October 2012, and followed this up with a long interview with Charles McGrath of the New York Times a month later. Roth insists that there will be no more interviews, and that his decision is final: his fictional revels are now officially ended.

Las Vegas bookies do not much care about Roth, which is to say that they have not calculated the odds of his coming out of retirement as they once did for such crooners as Frank Sinatra or such nfl quarterbacks as Brett Favre. Roth is simply not on their radar. By contrast lifelong Roth readers scratch their collective heads and hope, despite the evidence from Roth's mouth, that he will write yet again.

I don't plan to back up my hopes for an out-of-retirement Mr. Roth, but I would lay down serious money that he will help Blake Bailey, his authorized biographer. Therein lies no end of arguments and, count on it, disaster. I say this because Roth will probably quarrel with every page, every paragraph, indeed every sentence that Bailey writes. James Atlas, the author of the magisterial Bellow: A Biography (2002), made it clear that it was hard to keep Saul Bellow out of his hair and away from his writing desk. No doubt Bellow's generous offers to spend time with Atlas were flattering, but Atlas understood that they came with a quid pro quo—namely that Bellow expected to be treated with kid gloves. Bailey, I fear, will have it worse. As I imagine it, Roth gives him box after valuable box of letters, manuscripts, and notes, all with the expectation that he will be pleased, if not downright flattered, by the use Bailey makes of his biographical contributions. What I've just described is more akin to hagiography than to anything that might give rough justice to Roth's complicated life.

I may not be an insider like Bailey, but I have been following Roth's long trail of tears since I was a freshman in college. Among all the important things that Goodbye, Columbus (1959) taught me about fiction, the most important lesson might have been that stories happen at the end of your nose. There is no need, as I imagined in my pre-Roth days, for authors to go on safaris with Ernest Hemingway or raise pints with James Joyce in dear dirty Dublin to be a real writer. John Updike taught me a similar lesson about growing up in small...