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  • Philip Roth’s Other Europe: Counter-Realism and the Late Cold War
  • Brian K. Goodman (bio)

In May of 1973, the infamous Czechoslovak secret police, the Státní bezpečnost (StB), began keeping a classified file on Philip Roth. The US writer was flagged after an informant told the StB that Roth had met with “suspicious persons” during a visit to Prague earlier that spring (14). The secret report also identified Roth as a “supporter of international Zionism,” an antiSemitic code established during the Stalinist era (12). The StB charged that Roth had traveled to Prague under the cover of a tourist visa in order to make contact with several “persons of interest in Czechoslovakia, who in 1968 participated actively in the creeping, opportunistic, right-wing developments in the ČSSR,” the reform movement better known as the Prague Spring (14). The persons in question were all well-known Czech writers and intellectuals: Ivan Klíma, A. J. Liehm, Stanislav Budín, Miroslav Holub, Ludvík Vaculík, and Milan Kundera. Major Hoffman, the agent assigned to the case, recommended the preparation of “operational measures for Roth’s next arrival in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic” (14). For the purposes of this secret operation, Roth was assigned the codename TURISTA, or “the Tourist.”1

What exactly was the nature of Roth’s “tourism” in communist Czechoslovakia during the seventies? “It was Franz Kafka who was responsible for getting me to Prague in the first place,” Roth writes several years after his first visit to Czechoslovakia in 1972 (“In Search” 6). Almost on a whim, Roth drove to Prague from Vienna with his companion Barbara Sproul to see the city where Kafka spent his life. (Sproul later became the Czechoslovak coordinator for Amnesty International.) Upon his arrival, Roth discovered a country [End Page 717] still undergoing a period referred to by Czechs as normalizace, or normalization, following the Soviet-led invasion of 1968. These years were characterized by the resumption of strict state censorship and an official backlash against reform-minded intellectuals and cultural nonconformists. After befriending a small group of Czech writers and intellectuals, most of whom were high-profile targets of the regime, Roth returned annually to Prague. He also began to take greater risks. Claudia Roth Pierpont has recently drawn attention to Roth’s creation of the Czech Ad Hoc fund, a clandestine financial scheme that funneled money from prominent US writers to suppressed writers in Czechoslovakia. After 5 years of visits, Czechoslovak authorities finally revoked Roth’s entry visa due to his escalating involvement with his Czech literary counterparts.

But Roth’s extended literary engagement with Czechoslovakia continued through the end of the Cold War and had even wider consequences. In 1975, Roth initiated the landmark Penguin paperback series “Writers from the Other Europe” and served as its general editor until the series’ end in 1989. The Other Europe series was originally conceived as a way to help Roth’s friends in Prague get their banned work into wider circulation, but it should also be understood as Roth’s great counter-realist project: the creation of an alternative canon that stood in contrast to dominant literary categories on both sides of the Cold War divide. For 15 years, Roth gathered together a wide range of aesthetic models, all of which resist classification according to the prevailing realist literary modes of the postwar era. This project also extended to his own fiction from the period. Building on the fictional strategies of the Zuckerman trilogy and its epilogue The Prague Orgy, which first appeared in 1985, Roth began to move away from the self-directed provocations of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) toward counter-realist interrogations of the individual’s relationship to history. Until recently, we could only speculate about the precise relationship between Roth’s development as a novelist and his engagement with the larger political world he inhabited. This essay incorporates previously unexamined sources— including Roth’s personal correspondence, manuscript drafts of his work, and Czech-language secret police reports—in order to discover how Roth’s political imagination was transformed through its encounter with the Other Europe.

The Other Europe series was especially significant because of the transitional era...

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