Roth in the Archives: ‘Eli, the Fanatic’ and the Nitra Yeshiva Controversy of 1948

To take what there is, and use it… to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that ...

Henry James, notebook entry, London, May 12, 1889

A special fascination has hovered around Philip Roth’s short story “Eli, the Fanatic” since it appeared in Commentary magazine in 1958. An account of a lawyer who descends into madness while working to reconcile a group of Holocaust survivors with their Americanized Jewish neighbors, Roth’s text has been celebrated for its shrewd social commentary and parable-like density (one critic has called it a “medieval morality play”).¹ Scholars have focused on multiple aspects of the text—its insights into the psychic fallout of assimilation, its use of the doppelganger motif, its running parody of psychoanalysis, and more.² But one fact about “Eli, the Fanatic” has almost entirely eluded critics—that its basic scenario is drawn from an actual episode that occurred in 1948 in Mount Kisco, New York. Indeed, in the same year that Roth’s story takes place and in a town identical to his fictitious town of Woodenton, New York, a zoning controversy erupted that bears an unmistakable resemblance to the events of “Eli, the Fanatic.” As in the story, a group of Holocaust survivors sought to establish a yeshiva in an old mansion they had purchased; local residents complained that the school was out of character with the neighborhood; and a legal drama erupted that exposed the town’s class, ethnic, and religious tensions.³ Though largely neglected by American Jewish historians, this episode gained some notoriety at the time, receiving coverage in the New York Times and in Commentary, while also sparking the imagination of an aspiring writer from Newark with a taste for controversy, who seized upon the basic scenario to create one of the earliest literary works about Holocaust survivors on American soil. As it turns out, then, the Mount Kisco zoning controversy of 1948 has remained in the public awareness (at least among readers of Roth), though in the guise of fiction rather than as historical fact.

What difference does it make to read “Eli, the Fanatic” in relation to this historical event, the Jamesian donnée that evidently inspired Roth? To explore this question, I draw on journalistic accounts, letters to local newspapers, personal correspondence, documents from the American Jewish Committee (AJC) archives, and New Castle town records to reconstruct the Nitra Yeshiva controversy of 1947–1948. Beyond the intrinsic interest created by this episode and beyond the antiquarian interest aroused by its more-than-apparent connection with Roth’s story, this exercise raises pertinent questions in the context of the recent “archival turn” in literary studies.⁴ There are, to begin with, questions intrinsic to any act of annotation: How thick an account of the surrounding context should we provide when glossing a text that is evidently a canny mixture of documentation and invention? How do we account for divergences between the story and the actual historical events? How do we interpret moments in the text that seem deliberately to work against the historical record?

We can also expand our inquiry by considering anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler’s claim that the archival turn in the humanities reflects a turn “from the archive-as-source to the archive-as-subject.”⁵ Here, we begin to broach meta-questions about the aims and limits of archival work in relation to literary analysis, about what can and should count as an archive and how and to what effects it can be used. From this perspective, Roth’s text becomes one among a collection of multiple documents in a broader web of discourse surrounding the yeshiva controversy. New questions include the following : What specific role(s) can we allocate to a literary text—with its embellishments, implicit and explicit intertextuality, hypothetical scenarios, reworkings, and distortions—in relation to other sorts of documents written for different purposes? What do we do with materials that the author did not have access to, such as, in this case, the prehistory of the yeshiva...