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EMILY MILLER BUDICK Philip Roth's Jewish Family Marx and the Defense of Faith Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Karl Marx Like Karl and Harpo, I was one of them. Nathan Marx espite its notoriety, Philip Roth's "Defender of the Faith" has received very little sustained scholarly attention—perhaps because the story is so early and so apparently slight and obvious: seemingly nothing more than a story about loyalties divided across the hyphenation ofAmerican-Jewish identity. In fact, "Defender ofthe Faith" has become less important as a work of art, exactly anticipating the issues that swirled in the wake of its publication, than as a document in the history of Jewish American literary criticism. It was this text that produced within the Jewish community the charges of Jewish selfhatred that Roth has spent much of his career refuting.1 And yet "Defender of the Faith" is an exquisitely crafted, complexly philosophical story. It is not primarily, as most of its readers have assumed , a critique ofAmerican Jewry, although the stoty includes ample criticism of American Jews. Rather, it is a philosophical inquiry into the meaning of faith and its defenses, especially as such large philosophical issues evolve out of specific historical circumstances. "Defender of the Faith" is a model of the inseparability of text and context. It unravels its philosophical investigation undet the precise pressures of Arizona Quarterly Volume 52, Number 3, Autumn 1996 Copyright © 1996 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 16 10 56Emily Miííer Budiclc one of the most painful historical events in either Jewish or world history : the Nazi extermination of almost the whole of European Jewry during World War II. By explicitly invoking the events of the Holocaust, Roth's story constructs the stakes in its investigation into faith in such a way as to require the reader to decide exactly those issues that it makes seem undecidable . There is here a superfluity, almost an overdetermination, of political-literary relation. No reading ofthis story can be less than a defense of one faith or another. So proceeding, "Defender of the Faith" does nothing less than examine the conditions that set the stage for holocaustal events. At the same time, however, the story produces a philosophy of faith (and a comic faith, at that) that has everything to do with how human beings mediate against the fate that has just befallen the Jews. As we shall see, this story turns on the two terms faith and fate as governing human moral choice. Roth's "Defender" centers on Nathan Marx, a Jewish sergeant in the U.S. army at the end of World War II (the fighting in Europe is already over), who is called upon to "defend" his (Jewish) "faith" by one of the Jewish soldiers under his command, one Sheldon Grossbart. Grossbart is the story's self-appointed "defender of the faith." What he does, he tells Marx, he does in the name of "religion."1 Accordingly, he makes several neither unreasonable nor unusual demands of the setgeant. By implication, he makes these demands as well of the nation that Sergeant Marx officially, institutionally, represents. In insisting on his right to attend Friday-night worship and to obtain leave to celebrate the Passover holiday, Grossbart is asking for nothing more, though nothing less, than the freedom of religious expression guaranteed him by the United States Constitution: "to be allowed to live as a Jew"—or, given the context in which the story occurs, to die as one (135). The problem, of course, is that Grossbart is not an observant Jew, and is barely interested in Jewish community or identity, let alone in religion : he is merely trading on a shared ethnicity made more fraught by recent Jewish history. Grossbart wishes to achieve not parity with his fellow soldiers, but privilege and, ultimately (in the extremity of the military moment in which this story takes place), exemption. By placing his story in the context of the American army, Roth brings into view the intrinsic coerciveness of all...

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