The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography by Philip Roth

Author:Philip Roth [Roth, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: nepalifiction, TPB
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2013-07-01T16:00:00+00:00

All in the Family

I still don’t think it was innocent of me to have been as astonished as I was at twenty-six when I found myself up against the most antagonistic social opposition of my life, and not from gentiles at one or the other end of the class spectrum but from angry middle-class and establishment Jews, and a number of eminent rabbis, accusing me of being anti-Semitic and self-hating. I hadn’t begun to foresee this as a part of the struggle to write, and yet it was to be central to it.

As intellectually sophisticated as I was, “self-hatred” was still a new idea to me then; if the phenomenon had ever been present in my world, I had certainly never perceived it as a problem. In Newark, I hadn’t known anyone to whose conduct self-hatred was anything like the key, and the Bucknell chapter of Sigma Alpha Mu, whatever its shortcomings, never seemed to chafe under its distinctive identity or noticeably to apologize for itself. When Moe Finkelstein, one of the Sammies’ two varsity football players, entered the game for Bucknell, his fraternity brothers invariably sent up a whoop signaling their proud affiliation, a demonstration of feeling that would have driven a self-hating Jew into paroxysms of shame. In fact, what was most admirable about the Sammies was the easygoing way in which they synthesized themselves into a manifestly gentile environment without denying their difference or combatively insisting on it. Theirs seemed to me, even then, a graceful response to a social situation that did not always bring out the best in people, particularly in that conformist era.

And virtually from the day that I arrived in Hyde Park as a graduate student and rented a tiny room in International House, the University of Chicago looked to me like some highly evolved, utopian extension of the Jewish world of my origins, as though the solidarity and intimate intensity of my old neighborhood life had been infused with a lifesaving appetite for intellectual amusement and experimentation. When I began graduate school in September 1954, the university seemed to me full of unmistakably Jewish Jews far less self-conscious and uncertain about themselves, really, than the Irish Catholics from Minnesota and the Baptists from Kansas—Jews wholly secularized but hardly chagrined by a pedigree from which they seemed to derive their undisguised contentiousness, their excitability, and a gift for satiric irony whose flavor I recognized immediately: our family friend Mickey Pasteelnik, Newark’s Apple King, had he enjoyed a literary education, would surely have talked about The Wings of the Dove very much like my ebullient fellow student from Brooklyn, Arthur Geffin. Ted Solotaroff—with whom I profitably debated for years after I returned from the Army in 1956 and entered the Chicago Ph.D. program—remembers us referring to Isabel Archer as a “shiksa.” I recall another conversation, over beer at the University Tavern, where Geffin tended bar at night, in which much scrupulosity was expended determining if Osmond wasn’t really a Jew.

This was of course so

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