The Liberation in Roth’s American Berserk

Sound and fury, signifying nothing. Jew, Christian, American, Nazi - all labels, all beliefs. People like Roth get so wrapped up in the minutia of beliefs that they truly can't see the forest for the trees. One day, we'll program the human abstract thought process in a computer, and at long last learn what role beliefs play in human behavior and, more importantly, misbehavior. The only program of the human mind that presently can be programmed in a computer that can't feel is our "survival" program, and the AI community denies the existence of such a program. In addition to pain avoidance, pleasure seeking, and sex, we do operate on a survival program; and it is this program that we have tricked in society with our ridiculous beliefs about what is supposed to survive. The computer program of the mind will give us irrefutable proof of what we have done and are doing to ourselves.

Don't forget another remarkable Jewish author, the late, geat Chaim Potok. His novels such as "The Chosen" and "My Name is Asher Lev" masterfully displayed the struggle of young Jews with the orthodox ways of their parents.

Fascinating to read about. I haven't had any time for fiction since the collapse of the old world that used to allow time for that. And that was decades ago. The world has become immediate. Mephistopheles is in the pulpits. As consciousness attempts to build up, psycho-thermodynamics tears down. There is a visceral fight to keep the gates of enlightenment closed.

Celebrating the diversity of the Royal Wedding last Saturday, I spent some time channel surfing for an interesting movie and ran across Keeper of the Flame, the Hepburn-Tracy movie on the Lindberg-like pre-war politics that Roth excoriates. An odd coincidence of a wedding, an event with such dramatic contrasts to Trump's presidency, a film that domesticates and excoriates American fascism, and Roth's death. But...life is full of coincidence.

May 24, 2018 We are well advised to indulge in the works Mr. Roth to add to advancing our conversations for the America idiom and surely the pleasure pain boundary for our subconscious; yet depth of insights to the readership maturation i.e. enlightenment for all universal. timeless. The times create the man of his times for all times and so it is that American literature has its sage and yet pragmatics to earn the confidence that yes this can be great aspects of what we love with tears, and smiles as Americana literature perennial / preferentially indeed reads. jja Manhattan, N.Y.

Some 25 years ago I was talking to a woman in Paris who matter-of-factly told me her father was Jewish and her mother was French. I explained to her that that was the problem with Europe. In America a person might say that her father was Jewish and her mother Christian, but the distinction between Jew and American would never be made. 100% Jewish and 100% American. The paradox that Roth luxuriated in.

Let's see now: Philip Roth, Woody Allen, Barbara Streisand, Sandy Koufax, Albert Einstein, Mel Brooks, Steven Spielberg, Red Auerbach, Jonas Salk, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, Sammy Davis Jr., Ariel Sharon, Sergey Brin, Marilyn Monroe, Menachem Begin, Cardinal O'Connor, more than 20% of all the Nobel Prize winners in history, plus the guys who invented most of the atomic bomb and put together the Old Testament. Somehow we seem to have missed Tuesday Weld and Willie Mays. But otherwise, not too shabby.

Here was someone who truly deserved the Noble Prize in Literature. May his just rewards be in heaven. And may successive Nobel committee members who failed to provide recognition of his greatness hang their heads in shame.

Roth was an atheist, which should surprise no one. After the Holocaust, pastrami is real, Elohim a wager. The wit that distinction imitates lives in Woodie Allen movies, Milton Berle's file trays of jokes for all occasions, Mel Brooks' "Blazing saddles" and "The Producers. This fine little tribute is making Philip Chuckle, and if Gabriel wakes him with a high C-sharp today, and God summons Philip to a glassel tea, why Philip will be in the 7th Heaven he could never wrap his mind around. And if this welcoming to Paradise does not happen, I'll bet a portion of Roth's beloved American in CT or Newark will vibrate almost imperceptibly, while permanent inked seismographs wiggle in a seductive dance of ink on paper. He'll be laughing, "I knew it! Told ya so." Thank God or pure luck for gifting us with the products of Philip's talent - the only living American to have the Library of America issue acid-free, hardbound copies of everything bearing his name. How or why we had him for 85 years beats the heck outta me. Near his end, Roth said "Old age is not a battle. It's a massacre." Whistle past that concluding sentence. He did. Is. Philip would roar, in fact, and start paraphrase eecumming's line, "How do ya like your [not-so] blue-eyed boy now, Mr. Death?" Listen, the earth moved. He was a lusty man in ink and sheets. We need more like him.

What I learned from Philip Roth was that -- while "white guilt" is worrying that your ancestors were too ethnocentric -- "Jewish guilt" is worrying that you aren't ethnocentric enough for your ancestors.

Roth was an atheist, not able to believe in a world sane enough to know the name, let alone the preferences, of a Supreme Being. A Tsarist once asked an old Jewish man, "Why do you Jews always answer with another question?", to which the rabbi he was addressing and threatening replied, "So how should I know?" Roth didn't speculate about his next stage appearance. Could it be Heaven with Gabriel for an alarm clock and tea with Elohim to follow? Or a space in the cool earth of CT or Newark, a worm-farm as a poet joked? Either place will be greeted by an earth-shaking burst of Roth's laughter: "No kidding, I was sooo wrong. Heaven and no literary critics or Nobel ignobilities. Hilarious". Or, "I knew it, home sweet home is right here tho' it is wormy as heck. Told you so." And Roth's hopes were never fulfilled here. No one's is. But laugh at that and you are mighty close to Heaven, as eecummings wrote, "How do you like your blue-eyed boy now, Mr. Death?" Words get read even when you're here, there or down below. The Library of America has issued every Roth. work No other living author. Wherever Roth is, life angelic or nematode, dances. When asked about the strength we need to battle old age, Roth said, "Old age is no battle. It's a massacre." Still, in black ink, his love for life endures, as Shakespeare said. Bye, now, and shalom, boobelah.

Roger Cohen, one fine writer praising another.

I loved Roth for his exuberant and full-throated Jewishness. No defensiveness, no hedging, no shame.

I am afraid for my children and grandchildren that for them the future will be they will again be Jews and no longer Americans. They will be Elites and no longer American. They will be liberals and no longer Americans. They will be those striving to be Americans but falling just short. We will miss Philip Roth and content ourself with Chaim Potok.

Good one. Out with a laugh at ourselves. And a recall to where America First originated...in the Republicans' tilt toward isolationism when Hitler was gobbling up Europe. All foreshadowed in Roth's The Plot Against America.

Nice to read about about even the less personally felt work of a novelist as skilled as Roth when they are novels as moving and sociologically evocative as AMERICAN PASTORAL and the THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA have proven for many. However, isn't Roth's use of a daughter turned, first, serial 1960s radical bomber and, subsequently, Jain Hindu anorexic more properly evocative of the laughter Wilde thought appropriate to Dickens' death of Little Nell than to tears? Isn't PLOT's initially bold attempts at an illuminating alternative history betrayed by the work's happy final revelations that the fascistic Lindbergh presidency was just a passing nightmare after all? Better to celebrate what Roth has wrought when he is plumbing his truest veins --the Chekovian beauties of ZUCKERMAN BOUND, the Calvino-like ingenuity of THE COUNTERLIFE and the Skakespearian riches and depths of SABBATH'S THEATER.

Perhaps one should remember that he was also a manipulative, unfaithful, and cruel partner in his relationships with women, and a completely self-absorbed, if skilled writer.

Judging from the comments here and for Roth's obituary in the Times, I'm one of the few readers who does not admire Roth. I've tried some of his books and haven't found the literary quality as high as it's claimed to be. Furthermore, he was an out-and-out misogynist. Take his protagonist in The Human Stain, who pursues a woman who is much less educated than he. Or the obsessions with women's anatomy (as opposed to their minds or souls) on the parts of Portnoy or David Kepesh. And finally there is his Jewish self-hatred. I don't use this term lightly, but Roth deserves it. In almost all his books, the protagonist would escape his Jewishness if he could. And Jewish women are always portrayed in a negative light and never as objects of desire. This leads me to the one Roth book I was able to get through: The Plot Against America. This book at least looked back fondly at Roth's childhood in Newark. And in Roth's counter-factual narrative, Charles Lindbergh as president presaged the real-life Donald Trump as president.

It is a strange and peculiar fact that neither Roth nor Updike, two of our most liberating and thrilling writers, never won the Nobel Prize.

Philip Roth makes "Jewishness" accessible to every non-Jew who has the foresight to read him. My only regret when I think of him and his work, all of which I've enjoyed and marveled at for decades, is that the committee selecting the Nobel laureate in Literature saw fit to bestow that award on people like Bob Dylan, bypassing Mr. Roth. That would've been some acceptance speech. This is an artist on the same level as Faulkner and Bellow, not some clever lyricist.

As a young person I discovered Roth in Portnoy's Complaint which also introduced me to Jewish life and thought. The man was brilliant in every way possible in his ideas of what being an American was about. He also introduced me to the ugly side of being an American. I do not see any writers like him today. Literature has dropped in quality and I miss not having another book of his to read.

If reading Philip Roth's books are as good as Roger Cohen's column about reading Philip Roth's books, I am hooked.

Philip Roth wrote lovingly and with eyes wide about the generation of Jews, growing up and living in Newark who were first and second generation Americans, the sights and sounds - and yes, smells - of a generation struggling to fit in, yet also striving to retain their cultural identity. His Newark is personal and in novels such as 'The Plot Against America' that community becomes universal. My Newark-born and raised father walked out of Yad Vashem saying he could still smell the stench. I miss the sight and smell of those Tabatchnick pickle barrels. Roth's insight into American Jews and their experiences and lives will live on.

I have read most of his works. In the remote possibility of one word summing up his work , for me it would be fearless. He was inspired rather than intimidated by the human condition. It is why his books, the very same book, could make you laugh and cry. I think Roth observed life as a man but confronted it as a writer.

Based on my experience studying and living there the British have never been terribly fixated on Jews and Jewishness. They have been fixated on other minorities but Jews have long been totally assimilated (after all one of their most celebrated 19th century prime ministers was Jewish) so I'm not sure all this alleged embarrassment actually existed. Namier is a classic case of assimilation but although very talented he was a very angry man and nursed a grievance about not getting a chair at Oxford. Even Isaiah Berlin said so. America it seems to me is much more fixated on the Jewish condition. Aren't Roth's novels exhibit A? To the British it's a subject of no interest whatsoever

Thank you, Roger, once again, for a lovely tribute to a gifted and essential American writer. We all can glean much from Philip Roth's diverse writings, about America, about ourselves. So important in these terrifying times.

Lovely column and photo. “American Pastoral” is wonderful for so many reasons, one of which is his conjuring up of Newark’s bustling manufacturing era. When I was young I loved his early work; as I have aged I treasure his later works. He was one of a kind.

Mr. Cohen, I just recently read "The Plot Against America" and I was amazed at how prescient Mr. Roth was in writing the novel. I should've highlighted how many similarities there were to Trump and his astonishing grasp on the "base". Ironic, too, that they would be referred to as "base". Indeed! The world is a little less rich with the exit of Mr. Roth. Like Melville, Hawthorne, and Faulkner, however, he will live on.

First Wolfe and now Roth. We are losing some great ones. Who will replace them? When I walk into a bookstore now I struggle to find anything that interests me. I spend a lot of time re-reading the greats. Does anyone in America still write quality literature? At least there is still Cormac McCarthy, but he seems to have stopped writing altogether.

The comparisons in the press to the work of Henry James, in whose work I specialize, are out of whack, but that doesn't matter. Roth's work is beautiful; I have written a forthcoming essay on him. Mr. Roth, the world is a poorer place without you. Thank you for your lasting contribution to American fiction.

Mr. Cohen, I loved reading this tribute to Roth. Thank you for it.

Roger Cohen on Philip Roth - brilliant. The essence of Roth was liberation through laughter. I translated some short pieces of this late master.

The Plot Against America is the best book on the Trump Administration ever written. Godspeed, Mr. Roth.

My experience reading Roth was in some ways similar to the author's. As the author said, the Jews in Roth's novels proudly walked with big J's on their T shirts. Let me quote Roth's high school athletic chant from Portnoy's Complaint: "Ikey, Mikey, Jake and Sam We're the boys who eat no ham We play footbal, we play soccer And we keep Matzohs in our Locker" I grew up in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, which was like a little bit of Kansas and Alabama transplanted into New York City. In my conservative neighborhood, my relatives were shy about our Jewishness. Roth gave me the idea of being proud of my roots.

Roth was the only writer who could artfully weave the American mania into the mind of an individual. 'American Pastoral' is one of the most beautiful and disturbing books ever written. The mind of Swede's daughter is highjacked by the revolutionary rhetoric of the '60s with utterly disastrous consequences. The poignancy of Swede showing off how a quality glove is made to a terrorist posing as a naive college coed is heartbreaking. "I Married a Communist" is similarly tragic, as Roth's hero begins to live the fantasy projected onto him by those who exploited him.

Philip Roth would have been perfect to write this scenario that could occur if the president gets elected to a second term. Here would be the story in a nutshell. With over 3000 lies in less than a year and a half that would equate to more than 15,000 lies by January 20th, 2025. The human mind cannot absorb 15,000 lies except those who voted for him because they do not see them as lies at all. The president strongarms congress into repealing the 22nd amendment and he becomes president for life. There is no more freedom of the press. The NYT and Washington Post are banished because of a Supreme Court ruling. The Court is made up of 7 conservative members and Kagel and Sotomayer. There is no free speech anymore. There is no religious freedom as we are all evangelicals, but we do have the power of using mulligans. The pope is persona non grata. Lying is the preferred language of survival. Russian immigrants flock to the U.S. The president convenes a meeting in 2025 of countries, Russia, the Phillipines, Turkey, North Korea, the mid eastern states, Israel, Brazil and Venezuela and China.. Millions of Americans flee to Canada. That would have been enough fodder for Roth to write an epic novel. Maybe with his passing someone will pick up the torch and carry it forward.

Thank you, Roger, for putting Jewishness at the heart of Roth where it belongs. A welcome tonic to obits (even here) that call him a “White male”, as though Jews are white, or that say Coleman Silk “passed as white” when he passed as Jewish. Anyone unclear on the difference could start by reading his novels. And with him passes, I’m afraid, that miraculous Jewish century, from Einstein and Freud to Woody Allen and Roth - an object lesson in the imaginative vitality of emancipation. Goodbye, Columbus.

Philip Roth was an unquestionably prominent writer, and his passing away is, outside of his family, a cultural loss. However, when one compares Philip Ruth's outlook on life with that of the architect Peter Edelman, of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin fame -- both natives of Newark, N.J. -- one wanders if there was something in Newark water or air that made both these creative artists so conflicted.

If Maureen Dowd had written an appreciation, it would likely have left out all the books. Thank you, Roger.

With its (even apologetically) reductive emphasis on his Jewish heritage above all else, Roth would have perfectly understood and thoroughly despised this, without doubt well intentioned appreciation. In fact he'd have been so irritated, it may even have driven him back to his desk.

Roger Cohen - note that Philip Roth, in photo accompanying your paean to him, is the same age as our president is now. But Roth looked his age, 71. He was lucky enough to get out of America's horrific "pastoral" present when the getting was good. Those who never read his books should read all of them (30 novels) starting here, starting now. Great that he was able to stick literary forks into Trump before he left us. Philip Roth's Jews emanated from New Jersey in the 1930s (Newark and Weequahic High), and he taught us that Jews emanated, and still emanate, from America the beautiful. America the melting pot. And not the America of Trump today, the vile olla podrida we are witnessing. We - Jews or not - are so disoriented in Trump's berserk America today. Philip Roth showed the world -- in his brilliantly inimitable fashion -- another way of living as a Jew in America. We remember that he reiterated that "radical change is the nature of American life". Is the only constant in life. We are in the midst of that shocking change now, and though grieving, we are happy he left us all of his precious gifts.

Roth was a proud Jew and a proud American. He knew that he did not have to choose between these two influences. He knew that the greatness of America was predicated on the fusion of pride in one’s immigrant background and pride in American citizenship. Time for Trump to read a Roth novel.

As a contemporary of Philip Roth, I found Portnoy's Complaint hilarious. I laughed all the way through it. I saw him as lampooning, much better than I could, the human comedy that many like me saw happening around us -- as formerly overly-repressed people tried, not very successfully, to deal with normal human sexual desire, outside the cocoon of religious fear and repression. Not a few went berserk, fornicating as though it were a religious rite -- and some even began running around stoned and naked at rock festivals. Perhaps it was cruel to laugh, but they struck us as very funny. What they saw as earth-shaking revolution, we saw as postponed and chronic adolescence. What they thought they were rebelling to abolish were things that we, more slyly, had simply worked around. We, like Roth, were characteristic of those later labeled The Silent Generation. They were called Boomers. Boom! Boom! Well, the majority of them turned out fine after they finally grew up.

When I went to graduate school in Britain I knew that I wasn't in Boston anymore when I heard one of the undergrads refer to a attractive female classmate as "a Jewess from Blackpool", which sounded to me like something out of a Walter Scott novel. During a school break when I stayed on Lake District farm, my hosts were so jaw dropping surprised that a scruffy student like myself who looked like any twenty something in the village was Jewish that they thought I was putting them on and kept saying "gowon -what are you really?" several times until they accepted that Jews aren't born with top hats and waistcoats. Glad that Roth gave you a literary to a different Jewish world more liberated from the pall of Europe,

I grew up in the same neighborhood as Roth although three years earlier, and knew "Swede" (Yes,he was a real person ) For me Roths novels are like taking a trip back home, a place never seen again except in the theater of his books. I wish I'd had the opportunity to reminisc with him.

I found a copy of Philip Roth’s collection of short stories: Goodbye, Columbus : And Five Short Stories, which I’ve been perusing. Roth was popular among my parent’s generation (1st and 2nd generation Jews born in America), but not so much with mine (Baby Boomers). I was surprised to see two short stories that deal with religious identity. The first, THE CONVERSION OF THE JEWS, is about a Hebrew school student who challenges his rabbi about whether the virginal conception of Jesus, as described in the New Testament, could at least theoretically be true. The character is somewhat deranged, so it’s hard to tell if Roth is making fun of him or if his challenge reflects Roth’s own musings about Christianity. The second story, DEFENDER OF THE FAITH, describes the efforts of an American Jewish soldier in World War II to try to follow the kosher dietary laws. Again it’s hard to tell if Roth is mocking this person or fairly describing the difficulties of assimilation for some of the people among whom he was raised in the New York Orthodox Jewish community of his youth.

In the middle of "The Human Stain," Roth pulls the rug out from underneath the reader with the grace and panache of a master magician yanking the tablecloth from a fully set table leaving the table setting intact and undisturbed. The central character is not who we thought he was at all, and yet he is very much who we imagined him to be, only now even more so. Both Michael Cunningham and Ian McEwan attempt this same feat in their novels "The Hours" and "Atonement." Both are fine books but they don't even come close. Roth is gone and we are force every day to listen to Jerkish until it becomes almost impossible not to be fluent. Sad, indeed.

I find this essay self-serving and self-congratulatory, qualities that Mr. Cohen shares with Mr. Roth. The heart of the Jewish religion, lies in Israel it's future, it's past and it's wonderful present history. Mr. Cohen is a quibbler & self denier. Sex isn't sacrifice, criticism isn't prayer, cleverness isn't belief t

There are many similarities, but the experiences of one immigrant group are nowhere near identical to those of another immigrant group.

I remember reading "Portnoy's Complaint" when I was in high school. It's not that I could related to the mind or experiences of a nice Jewish boy. His religion wasn't a big thing to me. But as I recall, what captured my attention, as a nice repressed WASP teenage girl, was the liberation of the cussing. Oh, I loved all of the cussing, all of those lovely, expressive, realistic, vulgar words that I was not allowed to say out loud, forced as I was to pretend that everything in the world was nicey-nice. But as I read them, I could think them, and it was wonderful!

Some years ago, a member of the Nobel committee, attempting perhaps to slip the bonds of personal obscurity, remarked disparagingly on the "insularity" of American letters. Either that remark was the product of cultural envy, or that dumb provincial never read Philip Roth. Thank you, Mr. Cohen, for a fine appreciation.

Wolfe and Roth, two of the most astute diagnosticians of the American condition, both of them down in one week. For readers who like their fiction literary, it's a punch to the gut.

Perhaps he died *of congestive heart failure* as an admonition to a profoundly annoying nation. That would be the last of a remarkable set of fictional accomplishments.

A very finely written and insightful tribute. Thank you.