Patrimony

Philip Roth (1933–2018)
From Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013

Interesting Links

Exhibit: “Philip Roth: An Exhibit of Photos from a Lifetime” (Newark Public Library)

“Roth Returning to Newark to Get History Award” (Marjorie Keyishian, The New York Times)

Review of Patrimony: A True Story (Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review)

Previous Story of the Week selection
• “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings,” Philip Roth

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The Essential Hamilton: Letters & Other Writings
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Herman Roth with his sons Sandy and Philip at Bradley Beach, NJ, in 1937. The photograph was used for the front cover of Roth’s 1991 book, Patrimony.

While wintering in Florida in late 1987, eighty-six-year-old Herman Roth lost most of the sight in his right eye. A doctor misdiagnosed the ailment, with its accompanying facial paralysis, as Bell’s palsy, which is usually temporary. The condition worsened, however, and he soon couldn’t hear out of his right ear. After Herman returned to New Jersey, an ophthalmologist expressed doubts about the diagnosis and an MRI scan was ordered by the family physician, who called Herman’s son, the novelist Philip Roth, with the results. Philip drove to his father’s apartment to break the news. As he recalls in his 1991 memoir, Patrimony:

I sat in the chair across from him, my heart pounding as though I were the one about to be told something terrible. “You have a serious problem,” I began, “but it can be dealt with. You have a tumor in your head. Dr. Meyerson says that given the location, the chances are ninety-five percent that it’s benign.” I had intended, like Meyerson, to be candid and describe it as large, but I couldn’t. That there was a tumor seemed enough for him to take in. Not that he had registered any shock as yet—he sat there emotionless, waiting for me to go on. “It’s pressing on the facial nerve, and that’s what’s caused the paralysis.” Meyerson had told me that it was wrapped around the facial nerve, but I couldn’t say that either.

After a yearlong illness Herman Roth died in October 1989.

In Patrimony Philip Roth accompanies his father through each stage of his final ordeal. Writing for The New York Times Book Review, the poet Robert Pinksy praised the book for telling “one of the central true stories many Americans share nowadays: the agonized, sometimes comic labor of a family and a dying parent who must deal with all the loyalties and grudges of their past while coping with their transformed future.” The book went on to win the National Critics Circle Award for biography.

A year after the publication of Patrimony Roth became the first novelist to receive the New Jersey Historical Society award, given annually to “an individual or individuals who have made significant contributions to New Jersey history.” Katharine L. Auchincloss, the chair of the organization, praised Patrimony for chronicling “a community that existed for a short time. It is a wonderful look at that community—not sentimental, a rich and sharp sense of the city.” Roth’s speech accepting the award in his father’s name has been published for the first time in Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013, the tenth and final volume in Library of America’s definitive Philip Roth edition, and we present it here as our Story of the Week selection.

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The person who should be standing here today to receive an award of honor from the New Jersey Historical Society is not the author of Patrimony but the subject of Patrimony, my father, Herman Roth. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Barney Greengrass

Norman Manea (b. 1936)
From Becoming Americans: Immigrants Tell Their Stories from Jamestown to Today

Interesting Links
Video: “Norman Manea — 25 Years in Translation” (Yale University Press, YouTube)

“Exile, Hooliganism, and Norman Manea’s The Hooligan’s Return” (Carla Baricz, Los Angeles Review of Books)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Peter,” Willa Cather
• “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” Edith Maude Eaton
• “The First Seven Years,” Bernard Malamud
• “Celebrations of Thanksgiving: Cuban Seasonings,” Ana Menéndez

Barney Greengrass, Upper West Side, Manhattan, c. 2005–2009. Uncredited photograph via Tumblr.

A few years back, the novelist Philip Roth told a Vanity Fair reporter an anecdote he has often related to underscore his concern that the audience for serious literature was dwindling to the point where it might soon become a cult:

I have a Romanian friend named Norman Manea, who’s a writer, and Norman has been a friend of mine since he left Ceauşescu’s Romania. He lived there through the worst of the dictatorship, and they harassed him at every turn, and he couldn’t get published.

So he went to see a friend who was an elderly writer he respected, and he began to complain about the fact that he had no readers. And his friend said to him, “How many readers does a writer need? Four. That’s all you need is four readers. You, unfortunately, have two!”

For nearly three decades, Manea (who turns eighty on Tuesday, July 19) has lived in the United States. Since his arrival, he has published numerous books and essays, including his acclaimed 2003 memoir, The Hooligan’s Return. Yet—while he certainly now has an audience larger than two—he is still unknown to most American readers, even though he has received accolades from an astonishing range of writers and critics and has won dozens of international awards—and is often considered a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize.

In March 1997, on the ninth anniversary of his arrival in this country, Manea strolled through his neighborhood on his way to Barney Greengrass, a century-old deli on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The opening selection of The Hooligan’s Return recalls this outing and then presents a short account of the assassination in Chicago of a fellow Romanian writer—a still-unsolved crime that led to Menea temporarily receiving FBI protection.

Additional information about Manea is included in the headnote that precedes the story, which was reprinted in the LOA collection Becoming Americans: Immigrants Tell Their Stories from Jamestown to Today (edited by Ilan Stavans).

Notes: On page 640, Manea quotes a line from the first stanza of “Report from Paradise,” by Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (1924–1998).

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The bright spring light, like an emanation from Paradise, streams through the large picture window wide as the room itself. . . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings

Philip Roth (1933–2018)
From Philip Roth: Novels & Stories 1959–1962

Interesting Links

“Philip Roth Goes Home Again” (Scott Raab, Esquire)

“Separating Fact from Fiction in Philip Roth’s Latest Novel” (Robert Wiener, New Jersey Jewish News)

“Philip Roth’s Eightieth-Birthday Celebration” (David Remnick, The New Yorker)

Previous Story of the Week Selection
• “The First Seven Years,” Bernard Malamud

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Philip Roth: Novels & Stories 1959–1962
Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories | Letting Go | 913 pages
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Philip Roth, with a photo of Franz Kafka in the background. Bob Peterson/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

Sixty years ago Chicago Review, a small but prestigious literary quarterly published by the University of Chicago, accepted a story by a twenty-one-year-old graduate student who had just begun attending the school on a scholarship. “The Day It Snowed” was Philip Roth’s first published work of fiction—if one doesn’t count the five stories he wrote for the literary magazine he cofounded while an undergraduate at Bucknell College. The following year his second story (“The Contest for Aaron Gold”) appeared in Epoch, a literary review published by Cornell University—and that story was selected for inclusion in the 1956 edition of Best American Short Stories.

Then, in 1957, Roth’s literary career took a dramatic turn when he sent his next story, unsolicited, to Commentary magazine, and Norman Podhoretz, still a relatively new assistant editor, championed its publication. Years later Podhoretz recalled:

In reading “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings” when I had fished it out of the slush pile, I, too, was amazed by how extraordinarily accomplished this young writer already was. . . . [In the stories included in his first book] Roth demonstrated that no one, not even Bellow himself, had so perfectly pitched an ear for the speech of the first two generations of Jews who had come to America from Eastern Europe, or so keen an eye for the details of the life they lived, or so alert a perception of the quirks and contours of their psychological makeup.

“You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings” was Roth’s first story in a national magazine. Additional stories, as well as essays and reviews, soon appeared in The New Republic, The Paris Review, Esquire, and The New Yorker. In 1959 Roth gathered six of his early works of short fiction (including “You Can’t Tell a Man . . .”) in Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, the first of twenty-nine volumes of fiction—and his only story collection. The book received the first of Roth’s two National Book Awards.

During a career spanning more than fifty years, Roth returned again and again to the unnamed Newark school that provides the setting for “You Can’t Tell a Man”—right up to his final novel, Nemesis, which describes a “fictionalized but plausible” polio outbreak at Weequahic High in 1944. And, perhaps most famously, his alma mater serves as the backdrop of Portnoy’s Complaint, which includes the school’s unofficial chant:

Ikey, Mikey, Jake and Sam
We’re the boys who eat no ham
We play football, we play soccer—
And we keep matzohs in our locker!
Aye, aye, aye, Weequahic High!

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Notes: In 1950–51 the Kefauver Committee (mentioned on page 185) was headed by Estes Kefauver, Democratic senator from Tennessee, to investigate the infiltration of organized crime into interstate commerce. The Ancient referred to on the same page is Heraclitus (c. 540 – c. 480 BCE), who wrote, “A man’s character is his fate.”

This Story of the Week selection was suggested by Greg Martinez, of Gainesville, Florida.

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It was in a freshman high school class called “Occupations” that, fifteen years ago, I first met the ex-con, Alberto Pelagutti. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission.
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.