The American dream, or nightmare, was to become "a Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness." The reality, more often, was to be regarded as a Jew among gentiles and a gentile among Jews.
They observed no rituals and belonged to no synagogues. Their first language was English, and they spoke without accents. While predecessors such as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud wrote of the Jews' painful adjustment from immigrant life, Roth's characters represented the next generation. He identified himself as an American writer, not a Jewish one, but for Roth, the American experience and the Jewish experience were often the same. Roth's novels were often narratives of lust, mortality, fate and Jewish assimilation. "No other American writer's work have I read so obsessively, year after year." "No other writer has meant as much to me," Jeffrey Eugenides, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and a new academy inductee, wrote in an email Wednesday to The Associated Press.
He was safely outside Holden Caulfield's fantasy that a favorite author could be "a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it." He didn't celebrate romantic love or military heroism or even consider the chance for heavenly justice. He was among the last major writers raised without television, who ignored social media and believed in engaging readers through his work alone and not the alleged charms or virtues of his private self. He followed with horror the rise of Donald Trump and found himself reliving the imagined horrors of his novel "The Plot Against America," in which the country succumbs to the fascist reign of President Charles Lindbergh.īut Roth, who died Tuesday at age 85, was also a voice - a defining one - of a generation nearing its end. He praised younger authors such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Teju Cole, and confided that he had read "Born to Run," the memoir by another New Jersey giant, Bruce Springsteen. NEW YORK (AP) - In the self-imposed retirement of his final years, Philip Roth remained curious and removed from the world he had shocked and had shocked him in return.
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