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American Jewish Fiction 51pGoodbye, Columbus and Five Stories By Philip Roth HOUGHTON MIFFLIN, 1959. 320 PAGES. Philip Roth pulls no punches. Think of him as the lifelong, official “Dennis the Menace” of the American Jewish community, only with a sparkling wit and flawless prose instead of a slingshot. Roth’s debut collection peers behind the scenes of rampant Jewish success in the years following World War II, devoting equal time to what is desirable and what is repulsive about suburban life. The result is an always fresh, hilarious, and surprisingly poignant set of stories that launched their young author—he was 26 at the time—to national prominence when he was awarded the National Book Award in 1960. In the title novella, Roth dissects the summer romance of Neil Klugman, a middle-class 20-something whiling away his days behind the desk of the Newark Public Library, and Brenda Patimkin, the doted-upon daughter of a plumbing magnate. Their relationship is a train wreck in slow motion, and if the issues of desire and longing across class lines are not clear enough in the main plotline, Neil’s summer sojourn in the well-to-do environs of Short Hills is paralleled by a young African American boy’s passionate but ill-fated relationship with a book of Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings. Some readers have objected to Brenda—who is ridiculed for the number of cashmere sweaters she owns and for getting her nose “fixed”—as a vicious caricature of what came to be called the Jewish American Princess, and some consider her the inception of a misogynistic streak running throughout Roth’s career. At the same time, in the novella itself Brenda is much less vapid and frigid than the version of her that appears in the wellknown movie released in 1969, starring Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw; Neil is intimidated not only by the size of her father’s fortune but also by her wit and intelligence. The book’s other stories are too good to miss. “The Conversion of the Jews” is perhaps the best piece of writing ever produced about the American heder, children’s after-school lessons in Judaism that are one of the persisting institutions of Jewish life. “Defender of the Faith,” meanwhile, is a meticulously crafted, wrenching tale of what the Rabbinic tradition calls sinat khinam—the baseless hatred Jews bear one another in their hearts—set in a U.S. army training camp in the final months of World War II. All of these fictions demonstrate Roth’s unparalleled ear for dialogue and his tenderness for the people he mocks, and, besides being both touching and hilariously funny, they set forth the themes that have continued to occupy Roth throughout his career: desire, mortality, and the place of Jews in postwar America. Further reading: Generations of writers have tried to do for their suburban environments what Roth did so masterfully for Newark—recently, for example, David Bezmozgis’s Natasha and Other Stories (2004) in Toronto, and Daniel Stolar’s The Middle of the Night (2003) in St. Louis. Maxine Rodburg’s The Law of Return 76 (1999) offers an alternative take on Newark’s Jews. Roth’s own oeuvre returns to New Jersey again and again (see, particularly, American Pastoral). Many scholarly books about Roth and his fiction can be found in any library, and an authorized biography is currently in the works; in the meantime, for more on the author’s tortured relationship with himself, see his semi-autobiography, The Facts (1988). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52pThe Pawnbroker By Edward Lewis Wallant HARCOURT BRACE JOVANOVICH, 1961. 279 PAGES. For most of us, remembering the Holocaust takes effort; we listen to the stories, watch the films, read the histories, and tell ourselves to “never forget.” The people who have come to be called “survivors” in contrast, didn’t get to choose whether to remember or not—as much as they might have liked to leave brutal memories behind in Europe, they couldn’t. Sol Nazerman, the protagonist of Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Pawnbroker, is one such sufferer. Nazerman runs a pawnshop in Harlem, buying and selling back the personal goods of poor African Americans and Latinos as well as one pathetic, failed Jewish poet. It is a colorful, small-time business, and it doesn’t matter whether the pawnbroker turns a profit or not: the operation is only a front for a gangster, Murillio, who pays Nazerman a comfortable salary for his services. With this money...

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