Ghost Writer, The by Roth Philip

Author:Roth, Philip [Roth, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Modern Classics, Novel
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 1979-01-01T02:00:00+00:00

P.S. If you have not yet seen the Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank, I strongly advise that you do so. Mrs. Wapter and I were in the audience on opening night; we wish that Nathan Zuckerman could have been with us to benefit from that unforgettable experience.

The sheet of questions prepared for me by the Wapters read as follows:

TEN QUESTIONS FOR NATHAN ZUCKERMAN

1. If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the thirties, would you have written such a story?

2. Do you believe Shakespeare’s Shylock and Dickens’s Fagin have been of no use to anti-Semites?

3. Do you practice Judaism? If so, how? If not, what credentials qualify you for writing about Jewish life for national magazines?

4. Would you claim that the characters in your story represent a fair sample of the kinds of people that make up a typical contemporary community of Jews?

5. In a story with a Jewish background, what reason is there for a description of physical intimacy between a married Jewish man and an unmarried Christian woman? Why in a story with a Jewish background must there be (a) adultery; (b) incessant fighting within a family over money; (c) warped human behavior in general?

6. What set of aesthetic values makes you think that the cheap is more valid than the noble and the slimy is more truthful than the sublime?

7. What in your character makes you associate so much of life’s ugliness with Jewish people?

8. Can you explain why in your story, in which a rabbi appears, there is nowhere the grandeur of oratory with which Stephen S. Wise and Abba Hillel Silver and Zvi Masliansky have stirred and touched their audiences?

9. Aside from the financial gain to yourself, what benefit do you think publishing this story in a national magazine will have for (a) your family; (b) your community; (c) the Jewish religion; (d) the well-being of the Jewish people?

10. Can you honestly say that there is anything in your short story that would not warm the heart of a Julius Streicher or a Joseph Goebbels?

Three weeks after hearing from the judge and Mrs. Wapter, and only days before my visit to Lonoff, I was interrupted around noon by the Colony secretary. She had come out to my cabin in her coat, apologizing for the disturbance, but saying that I had a long-distance phone call that had been described by the other party as an emergency.

When my mother heard my voice she began to cry. “I know it’s wrong to bother you,” she said, “but I can’t take any more. I can’t take another night of it. I can’t sit through another meal.”

“What is it? What’s the matter?”

“Nathan, did you or didn’t you get a letter from Judge Wapter?”

“Oh, I got it all right.”

“But”—she was flabbergasted—“then why didn’t you answer it?”

“He should not have gone to Wapter with that story, Mother.”

“Oh, darling, maybe he shouldn’t. But he did. He did because he knows you respect the judge—”

“I don’t even know the judge.”

“That’s not true.

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