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<\/a><\/p>\nSteven J. Zipperstein said his training as a historian helped him separate truth from fiction in writing his biography of Roth. (Yale University Press)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Even before the uproar, many younger readers lumped Roth among the \u201cgreat white males\u201d of mid-20th-century literature, and throughout his career Roth was dogged by accusations that he was a misogynist, both in his fiction and his private life. The scandal seemed to confirm these accusations by proxy, conflating the author and his biographer. <\/p>\n
Stanford historian Steven J. Zipperstein had already begun his own biography of Roth before the author died in 2018 and while Bailey\u2019s book was under contract. \u201cPhilip Roth: Stung by Life,\u201d part of Yale University Press\u2019s \u201cJewish Lives\u201d series, isn\u2019t meant as a corrective to Bailey\u2019s book or the fallout. But it does argue why Roth remains relevant and vital, especially to current Jewish discourse.<\/p>\n
Writes Zipperstein: \u201cHe would probe nearly every aspect of contemporary Jewish life: the passions of Jewish childhood, the pleasures and anguish of postwar Jewish suburbia, Israel, diaspora, the Holocaust, circumcision, the interplay between the nice Jewish boy and the turbulent one deep inside.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University, whose previous books include \u201cPogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History.\u201d He first met Roth when he invited the author to speak to his colleagues and graduate students at Stanford. Roth showed up with a blonde woman in a silky blouse \u2014 not his wife at the time, actress Claire Bloom \u2014 and proceeded to spend the session flirting with her. His students were not amused.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nPhilip Roth in 1967. (Bernard Gotfryd\/Wikipedia)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
They met again over the years under less antic circumstances and Roth gave his blessing to Zipperstein\u2019s project. \u201cWe carried on a series of conversations, and he introduced me to his loyal entourage, and made it clear to them that they could share things with me that they otherwise might not have shared,\u201d Zipperstein told me. <\/p>\n
In our conversation, held over Zoom this week, Zipperstein and I spoke about how Roth scandalized the Jewish world with early works like \u201cGoodbye, Columbus\u201d and \u201cPortnoy\u2019s Complaint,\u201d how he both resented and cherished his Jewish readers, and why so much of his prodigious output still holds up. <\/p>\n
The interview was edited for length and clarity. <\/p>\n
How did you come to write a biography of Philip Roth? He already had an authorized biographer, so what did you hope to bring to your book?<\/p>\n
I\u2019d met Roth years ago at Stanford \u2014 there\u2019s a brief mention of it in the book. After I finished \u201cPogrom\u201d there was this long pause before it came out [in 2018], and I started wondering what I might do next. I\u2019d helped found the \u201cJewish Lives\u201d series, and Roth seemed a pretty good fit.<\/p>\n
But honestly, he\u2019d been in my head long before that. I first read him in Partisan Review \u2014 a chapter from \u201cPortnoy\u2019s Complaint\u201d called \u201cWhacking Off\u201d \u2014 just before I went off to the Chicago yeshiva. I was raised in an Orthodox family, wrestling with whether I could stay in that world. And Roth\u2019s voice \u2014 it stuck with me. Not because of the masturbation, but because Portnoy has all this freedom and he\u2019s miserable. That hit home. It told me that leaving the world I was raised in wasn\u2019t going to be simple, and that freedom wouldn\u2019t necessarily make me happy. That realization \u2014 about freedom and its discontents \u2014 has stayed with me my whole life as a historian.<\/p>\n
Then, years later, I came across the recording of the Yeshiva University event in 1962 \u2014 the one Roth described as a kind of Spinoza-like excommunication. The tape told a completely different story. That was the moment I thought: there\u2019s a book here, about the distance between Roth\u2019s memory and reality.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s talk about that Yeshiva University event. Roth at the time was the young author of \u201cGoodbye, Columbus,\u201d which includes stories that some rabbis and others in the Jewish community said portrayed Jews in a negative light. Roth was invited to sit on a panel with Ralph Ellison and an Italian-American author to talk about \u201cminority writers,\u201d and Roth would later insist that the audience \u201chated\u201d him. What did you find when you listened to the recording?<\/p>\n
Well, Roth remembered it as this traumatic scene \u2014 the audience attacking him, shouting him down. But on the tape, the audience loves him! They\u2019re laughing, applauding. The only confrontation comes from a few guys who come up to the stage afterward to argue.<\/p>\n
What interested me wasn\u2019t just that Roth misremembered it \u2014 it\u2019s how he misremembered it. It tells you something about how he experienced the world. The people who criticize him are the ones who loom largest. That was revealing to me, both as a biographer and as someone who\u2019s taught for decades. The people who dislike you \u2014 they\u2019re the ones you remember.<\/p>\n
But there is an almost literary bookend to that event: In 2014, the Jewish Theological Seminary awarded Roth an honorary doctorate. How did he react to that?<\/p>\n
He was stunned! It was a casual decision by the institution, but a momentous decision as Philip saw it. He said in his speech, \u201cThis is the first time I\u2019ve been applauded by Jews since my bar mitzvah.\u201d He meant it sincerely.<\/p>\n
Roth wasn\u2019t a historian; he was a novelist. He remembered as he felt, not as it happened. My job was to separate those two things, not to punish him for it, but to understand the gap.<\/p>\n
Roth once said, \u201cThe epithet \u2018American Jewish writer\u2019 has no meaning for me. If I\u2019m not an American, I\u2019m nothing.\u201d As someone who insisted that he was first and foremost an American writer, as opposed to a Jewish writer, would he have liked being part of the *Jewish Lives\u201d series?<\/p>\n
Oh, I think so. He thought it was fair. We never talked about it directly, but I suspect he would\u2019ve liked the company \u2014 King David, Solomon, Freud, Einstein.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s this anxiety about calling writers like Roth or [Saul] Bellow or [Bernard] Malamud \u201cJewish writers,\u201d as though that makes them smaller. No one says Chekhov isn\u2019t Russian enough. But say \u201cJewish writer\u201d and people start to hedge.<\/p>\n
I once said an American Jewish writer is someone who insists he\u2019s not an American Jewish writer. Roth fit that perfectly.<\/p>\n
There was a time when the Jewish experience was seen as a lens through which to understand modern life. Jews were central, not peripheral. Roth captured that paradox: Jews as both insiders and outsiders, too white and not white enough, privileged yet insecure. That ambivalence is his great theme.<\/p>\n
\u201cPortnoy\u2019s Complaint\u201d came out in 1969 and both delighted and scandalized readers with its descriptions of the narrator\u2019s sexual adventures and fraught relationship with his Jewish parents. The reaction was extraordinary. I think it may be hard in our current era to imagine a literary novel selling so many copies and becoming such a part of the pop culture landscape.<\/p>\n
[Critic] Adam Kirsch said it best \u2014 it was one of the last times a novel could set off the kind of cultural frenzy that today only Taylor Swift can provoke. The timing was perfect: Censorship had loosened, the sexual revolution was on, and \u201cPortnoy\u201d hit a nerve.<\/p>\n
Roth claimed afterward that he didn\u2019t want that kind of fame again. But of course he missed it. He hoped \u201cSabbath\u2019s Theater\u201d [his 1995 novel] would do it again. He knew it wouldn\u2019t. He was mourning the loss of a serious readership, even as he kept writing as if it still existed.<\/p>\n
Roth\u2019s reputation seems tied up in how he portrayed women in his fiction and how he treated women in his personal life. You describe his serial relationships with many, many women, which often ended as soon as the sexual excitement wore off. At the same time, many of these same women remained loyal, and many gathered at his bedside as he lay dying, and some have written admiring memoirs. How did you approach that paradox?<\/p>\n
I tried to be honest without being prurient. Roth decided very early that he was going to be a great writer \u2014 perhaps as great as Herman Melville or Kafka \u2014 and he came to conclude that there\u2019s not a whole lot of discretionary time for relationships. <\/p>\n
He\u2019d fall in love hard, live with someone for two or three years, then move on. I didn\u2019t moralize about it. Many of those women remained close to him. Others didn\u2019t. He was loyal in his own way. <\/p>\n
And his relationships with men, except for one significant detail, are not vastly dissimilar from those that he has with women. They\u2019re utilitarian. Incredibly loyal friends hang on, because they\u2019re so enamored by Roth and they feel deeply protective of Roth.<\/p>\n
He also listened more intently than anyone I\u2019ve ever met \u2014 though you were never sure whether it was you he was listening to, or the story he was going to write next.<\/p>\n
Tell me about your book\u2019s subtitle, \u201cStung By Life.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a phrase I found in a eulogy Roth wrote for his friend Richard Stern. He said Stern was \u201cstung by life,\u201d and I thought, that\u2019s Roth.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nPhilip Roth receives an honorary doctorate at the Jewish Theological Seminary\u2019s commencement in New York on May 22, 2014. (Ellen Dubin Photography)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
He was perpetually shocked by existence \u2014 by what people do, by what happens to them, by what happens to him. Zuckerman, his alter ego, is defined by ambivalence \u2014 about women, about Jewishness, about America. Roth described everything well, but ambivalence best of all.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve written books of history, and biographies of other Jewish literary figures, including the Zionist thinker Ahad Ha\u2019am and Isaac Rosenfield, the American-Jewish writer who died in 1956 when he was only 38. What challenges did you find writing about a figure like Roth, who was still alive when you began work on the book, and what do you think you brought to it that maybe others couldn\u2019t?<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve written and taught biography for years. Roth spent his entire life writing about himself, but not telling the truth about himself. That puzzle fascinated me.<\/p>\n
Some Jewish figures \u2014 Isaiah Berlin, for example \u2014 chose biographers who didn\u2019t quite understand the Jewish stuff. I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to understand him from the inside out.<\/p>\n
I loved his work before I started. I love it even more now. Words were my way out of a world where answers were predetermined by Maimonides. Roth fought that battle too \u2014against dogma, against certainty, through language.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I think Roth\u2019s gifts as a comedian have overshadowed other qualities of his work \u2014 for example, everyone who read \u201cPortnoy\u201d remembers the slapstick about masturbation, but I love his lyrical descriptions of his old Weequahic neighborhood in Newark and heading down to the park to watch \u201cthe men\u201d play softball. Was he worried that he\u2019d be shelved in the \u201chumor\u201d section of the bookstore?<\/p>\n
He liked to say he was a comic writer in the tradition of Kafka and [Heinrich] Heine \u2014 not Shecky Greene, [the Catskills comedian].<\/p>\n
But yes, he could be incredibly funny. In many ways, \u201cThe Ghost Writer\u201d [1979], as beautiful and lyrical as it is, is all written in order for Philip to have that punchline about Anne Frank. <\/p>\n
The book\u2019s narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, a writer like the young Roth, imagines that Anne has survived and that he can heal a rift with his family by bringing her home as his fiance\u00e9. <\/p>\n
\u201cNathan, is she Jewish?\u201d \u201cYes, she is!\u201d \u201cBut who is she?\u201d \u201cAnne Frank.\u201d In many ways, those were the lines that begat that brilliant book.<\/p>\n
I also feel people overlook how much he wrestles with the Jewish condition \u2014 and not just Jewish mother jokes or nostalgia for the old Weequahic neighborhood. In books like \u201cThe Counterlife\u201d and \u201cOperation Shylock\u201d Roth was writing about Zionism, assimilation, extremism and the tension between Israel and the diaspora when few other serious novelists were. Does he deserve to be more widely read as part of the very current Jewish debate over these topics?<\/p>\n
Yes. I think in sort of more conservative, traditional Jewish quarters, he ended up being seen as an enemy of the Jews. But thinking about your question, it\u2019s hard to think of any piece of extraordinary fiction that\u2019s really made its way into the Jewish communal debate. <\/p>\n
But Roth actually entered emphatically into the Jewish conversation. At one point in the late 1980s, Roth gives an interview to his friend Asher Milbauer. And he admits that the Jewish readership is his primary readership. He says writing as an American Jew is akin to writing for a small country where culture is paramount. As for other readers, he said, \u201dI have virtually no sense of my impact on the general audience.\u201d<\/p>\n
How would you describe that impact, and why should he still be read and admired?<\/p>\n
Because he closes his eyes to nothing. He looks straight at the things we\u2019d rather look away from \u2014 sex, aging, death, hypocrisy, joy. He writes about the child of good parents, the lover, the son, the dying man \u2014 all the selves we carry.<\/p>\n
He shows how truth and illusion coexist, how clarity is always fragile. And he does it with language that\u2019s alive. That\u2019s what endures.<\/p>\n
Does he still feel relevant to you?<\/p>\n
Completely. Even among his contemporaries \u2014 [John] Updike, Bellow \u2014 Roth feels less dated. Maybe that\u2019s because he was never comfortable. He kept interrogating everything, including himself.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why he\u2019s still with us. The rest of us are still trying to catch up.<\/p>\n
Learn about Philip Roth\u2019s \u201cPortnoy\u2019s Complaint\u201d and other classics in a new course from My Jewish Learning: \u201cFunny Story! The Best Jewish Humor Books of the Past 75 Years.\u201d Taught by Andrew Silow-Carroll, the four-session course starts on Monday, Oct. 27 at 6 p.m. ET. Register here<\/a>.<\/em> <\/p>\n <\/p>\n