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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Nathan Zuckerman, the hero of several of Philip Roth's mid-career novels, is dogged by the notoriety of a book he wrote in 1969, "Carnovsky," which told of a Jew reacting against his parents' first-generation respectability by chasing shiksas around town and involving them in uncanonical sex acts. "Carnovsky" is a huge hit, and everyone assumes that it is autobiographical. "Hey, you do all that stuff in that book?" the Con Edison meter reader asks Zuckerman. "You are something else, man." But the interest in the book is not just prurient. "Carnovsky" is a satire on the Jewish superego, and so it is decried by Jews and denounced by rabbis, on the ground that it will inflame anti-Semitism. A letter addressed only to "The Enemy of the Jews" is sent to the book's publisher; the mail room knows where to forward it.
Zuckerman tries to answer such charges, then tries to ignore them, then finds himself answering them again. By the time we see him in "The Anatomy Lesson," he has been fighting the battle over "Carnovsky" for four years, and his work is at a standstill: "The endless public disputation--what a curse!" At the end of "The Anatomy Lesson," he decides that he will give up writing and become a doctor. My son the doctor: what better atonement could you make to your parents--and, by extension, to all Jewish overseers?
I can think of one better. Imagine that you are Philip Roth, a man bearing a marked resemblance to Zuckerman. Imagine that your book "Portnoy's Complaint," published the same year as "Carnovsky," and treating similar matters, was the cause of a similar public reaction, with people stopping you in the street to tell you sex jokes or call you a pervert, and with public figures denouncing you as a menace to your people. (The distinguished Israeli scholar Gershom Scholem wrote that the Jews, not the author, would pay the price for "Portnoy": "Woe to us on that day of reckoning!") And say that, like Zuckerman, you tried to justify yourself, but at the same time dug in your heels, and that for thirty-five years--much longer than Zuckerman's agon--you went on portraying Jews who showed not only the traditionally prized Jewish traits, such as wit, brains, and moral seriousness, but also the Jewish-joke characteristics: Jews who never stop talking (a character in the 1986 "Counterlife" says that in Israel, even if you've done nothing all day, you go to bed exhausted, just from having people yell at you continually); Jews who view the world as divided between Gentiles and Jews (Portnoy's mother, Sophie, on the Gentiles: "they are another breed of human being entirely! you will be torn asunder!"); Jews who therefore see life as sown with peril, not just from anti-Semites (there are rugs you can trip over, convertibles you can flip over in), and who can't stop telling you to watch out. In Roth's novels, this relentless cautioning is usually done by parents. The sons, most of whom are writers, rebel, and produce comic novels about their elders. For this, guilt is heaped upon them. "Jewish morality, Jewish endurance, Jewish wisdom, Jewish families--everything is grist for your fun-machine," Zuckerman's brother says to him. If you were Philip Roth, caught up throughout your career in this quarrel, and you wanted to make peace, what could you...
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