Exit Shoah: Amy Bellette and Fading Cultural Memory in Exit Ghost

In his first novel about Nathan Zuckerman, The Ghost Writer (1979), Philip Roth wrote his young character’s fantasies about Amy Bellette, whom Zuckerman fantasized as being Anne Frank, alive and living incognito in the United States. In Exit Ghost (2007), Roth’s final Zuckerman novel, Bellette appears once more, this time to tell her own Holocaust story. Zuckerman, no longer needing validation from charges of Jewish self-loathing, and now obsessed with his impotence, memory loss, and looming death, confronts Amy one last time. This meeting suggests the changes in America’s collective cultural memory of Shoah and perhaps even offers an apology for Zuckerman’s own appropriation of it as a younger man.