Studies in American Jewish Literature (review)

120 . SHOFAR lean my head against the couch and surprise myself: in the fever of reimagining my case, I doze off on the couch." Or later on we have-"God is neither underachiever nor overachiever. He is maker and made, dreamer and dreamed." Or-"My poor blind sperm shouting to her [Marilyn's] deaf little eggs over and over, in the very word Moses used as God appeared before him on the mount: Hineni! Over here!" Or-"Michael and Deirdre are missing: Bonnie and Clyde packing a copy of the Old Testament. Two outlaws gone religious." Or the endless lists by Barry- -For the letter E -For the "anythings" worth losing Marilyn for -For the men and women influenced by Spinoza -For how weak, misused, destabilized I am -For why I married Marilyn -For what I think when I make love One .can ask: What really does the philosopher Spinoza have to do with this contemporary Jewish-American novel? The answer: a great deal that is significant and enigmatic. Just as it has to do with a number of other modern Jewish-American novels. Spinoza fascination by Bernard Malamud, I. B. Singer, and many other modern Jewish writers has never abated. Scan the subtexts of The Fixer and The Family Moskat for starters. It's been said that Sandra Schor in this novel "walks out upon the literary landscape as a brilliant new stylist, working in a vein as emotionally complex as it is comically bold and erotically charged." An excellent capsule comment for The Great Letter E. Leslie Field Department of English Purdue University Studies in American Jewish Literature. "The Odyssey of a Writer: Rethinking Philip Roth," edited by D. Walden. Vol. 8, No.2 (Fall 1989). I confess that for twenty years Philip Roth has been an irritant, a thorn in my personal and professional side. How many of his books I have started and refused to finish, even though I loved Portnoy's CompLaint, which must have awakened in me a long-dormant id, and even though the superb stories in Goodbye. CoLumbus have provided me with a psychic and spiritual anchor in my own pursuit of an authentic Judaism. Further, both these books have been fine pedagogical tools for inviting my mostly gentile students to reflect Volume 10, No.2 Winter 1992 121 on the nature of modern Judaism. But I've not had the patience to tolerate what I felt, at some inarticulate level, to be the writing of a man who victimizes his readers in brilliant displays of solipsism and self-absorption, which too rarely rise above an embarrassing narcissism. An art teacher I had, a Sister of Mercy from Milwaukee, once warned me, as I searched for images to record in my artist's sketchpad, "Always find your subject outside yourself. You have nothing but tired and outworn cliches in your head." How ironic that only with Roth's latest work, in The Counterlife and in the more recent appreciation of his father, do we see a reflection of his mature potential, also demonstrated in his two earliest works, P01tnoy and Goodbye, Columbus. At the beginning and near the end of his writing career, Roth seems to have reached beyond Jewish guilt over his perceived offenses to the Jews, and risen to his greatest artistic triumphs. Before reading the excellent collection of articles in the Fall 1989 issue ofStudies in American Jewish Literature, "The Odyssey of a Writer: Rethinking Philip Roth," edited by Daniel Walden, I probably could not have written my opening paragraph. While only two of the ten articles fully resonate with my experiences as a reader of Roth and help me sort out my reading of Roth, the entire collection does successfully rethink and thus reposition Roth in both the literary and the Jewish world. I will comment on the two most effective pieces first, and then briefly summarize the other eight. The collection begins with Sol Gittleman's reflection on Roth's short story, "Eli, the Fanatic." Gittleman's analysis perfectly captures the essence of the modern Jew's struggle to survive and his ambivalent struggle with memory. "From the very beginning," Gittleman writes, "Roth recognized the danger in...