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- [00:00]
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New Books Network Announcer
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:33]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
Welcome to New Books Network. I'm your host, Schneer Zalman Neufill. In his literary biography Philip Roth Stunned by Life, published by Yale University Press in 2025, Stephen J. Zipperstein captures the complex life and astonishing work of Philip Roth, one of America's most celebrated writers. Stephen Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. I'm so glad Stephen's book has brought him to our program. Welcome.
- [02:06]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
It's good to be with you.
- [02:08]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
So to get started given your scholarship that often, or I think for the most part, I don't know, has focused on eastern Europe, the 1800s and the early 1900s. I'm curious what attracted you to this project on Roth.
- [02:28]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
I've built biography into many of my books on Russian jewelry and others, and so just the writing of biography has always fascinated me for reasons we could talk about a bit later. And Roth himself has immensely intrigued me as I describe at the very end of the book, I read Port Norris Complaint. Actually the chapter called Whacking off the Content, I needn't explain. Eventually a chapter of Port Norris Complaint that came out a couple of years later. I read at the age of 17 on my way to the Chicago Yeshiva and I was hoping to remain an Orthodox Jew, the way in which I was raised. But I was just beset with all kinds of intellectual questions and dilemmas which made it increasingly impossible to remain Orthodox. What Roth provided me with was a very useful reminder that the world that I was yearning to enter with no panacea. And that inasmuch as Alexandra Portnoy, who has all the freedom of the world, is a hopeless neurotic. It was an insight that Roth had about the nature of culture, of liberal culture, that I found crucial. And I think reading Roth at that moment just embedded his voice in my mind. And then once I met him and helped start the project Jewish Lives, it occurred to me that, well, why not try to explore this deeper? And what persuaded me in the end that I had something to say about him, as I describe in the book, was my discovery, fairly early in my research, of the taped version of an event that he would describe repeatedly in his fiction and his memoirs. An experience he had at Yeshua University in 1962, a couple of years after the appearance of Port Norris at the appearance of his first book, Goodbye Columbus, in New York.
- [04:58]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
Yeshiva University in New York, New York.
- [05:01]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
Yeah. And he described the event as little less than excommunication, as something comparable to what Spinoza had experienced and built a lot of his fiction around this ostensible harassment. It turned out, as the tape revealed, the audience loved him. And the tape allowed me to understand was the chasm between life and art in Roth and something about rage, a topic that preoccupies him, that he wrestles with and that he built into his memory of this event that wasn't quite what he recalled.
- [05:48]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
Yeah. And just to elaborate for a moment, one of the reasons why that may have been a very significant incident for Roth himself is that Yeshiva University, for those who are unfamiliar, is Orthodox institution, is an institution of higher learning that was founded for, quote, unquote, modern Orthodox Jews. And presumably most, if not all of the people in the audience at this forum that Roth attended were modern Orthodox Jews.
- [06:25]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
That's not entirely clear. Perhaps most were Orthodox Jews. The auditorium in which it took place was the largest at Yeshiva University. But what I discovered in the Yeshiva University archives is that the event was advertised at all of the coffee houses in Greenwich Village, including restaurants that were not kosher. And. And that a whole bunch of Yamulkes skull caps worn by males were actually on offer at the door, which suggests that they were anticipating a fair number of non Orthodox Jews. Shiva University. And Roth didn't and couldn't have understood. This was then at the helm of a kind of liberalization of modern Orthodoxy. I don't believe that's any longer the case. And. And figures who excoriated him, like Emmanuel Rachman, were worried, I think, that the kind of scrutiny that he was imposing onto Jewish life would lead to a reaction on the part of precisely the Orthodox Jews who he had hoped to liberalize. And so there was a lot of going on there that Roth didn't and couldn't have understood. And that, given my own expertise, I was able to sort of unearth.
- [07:55]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
Yeah. But just to stay with that incident in. What was that? 62, 1962. For a moment, I'm curious what you make of it, the chasm between how Roth remembered it and sort of memorialized it in his own writing, this kind of horrific, traumatic confrontation between him and this at least nominally or somewhat Orthodox Jewish audience, and what the record, the audio recording of the event actually shows.
- [08:34]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
What he remembered was something very real. And I was able to reconstruct this after speaking to a number of people who had actually attended the event in 62, was that the audience loved him. But those people who didn't like him, he was already a controversial figure in literary life and specifically in American Jewish life. Those who didn't like him approached him at the end, at the stage. Now, every time I've given a vaguely controversial talk, the people who don't like you come to the stage, and I'm convinced it says Jewish as Passover Seder. That's what he remembered. And he made that in his mind, quite sincerely, I think, into what actually occurred. He swore afterwards that he wouldn't write another book with Jewish figures. And he spends several years writing When She Was Good, his one and only book without any Jews. And so I don't doubt the sincerity of his memory. I doubt the veracity. But what it. You know, again, he's not a historian, he's a fiction writer. And so he's allowed to make things up, and even not. And he doesn't need to stick to facts per se, but what it led me to was a deeper understanding of rage in Philip. And at the same time, as an artist, what he's able to do time and again is to interrogate rage to understand its underbelly. Some of his most noisome characters are people who are overwhelmed by rage, with rage defining their life. And so here, as so often the case, he was able to take qualities of his own and to interrogate them and to reveal their underpinning in ways that a lesser, lesser writer would be Incapable of doing right.
- [10:41]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
And I'm wondering, do you have a sense of how Roth felt about literary biographies in general and those about him in particular?
- [10:52]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
Yeah. Roth kept many secrets. I mean, all of us have secrets in our lives that we don't want broadcasted in a biography or the pages of a newspaper. I don't see that as unique to Roth. Roth perhaps was more preoccupied with secrecy than most. There's an interplay at Roth, and I'll come back to the question of secrecy in a moment. An interplay between a tendency to just reveal things that others would sequester and at the same time to hold tight to things that he kept just to himself. His most famous book, Portnoy's Complaint, is a exploration of masturbation, one of the very few sexual activities that would. Where there was considered to be unseemly in the 1960s, basically the lids were off about almost everything else. And at the same time, as I point out in the book, he maintained a secret relationship with a woman who lived a half a mile down the road from him in Connecticut for nearly two decades. And then, while he's still seeing the woman, writes Sabbath Theater, where he describes the relationship in copious, vivid, extraordinary detail. And so that interplay between masking secrecy, something he talks about a lot in interviews and in his novels, and the interplay between secrecy and incredibly candid self revelation is a feature of his life and his work throughout. So I forget the question. Solomon, remind me of what you.
- [12:51]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
Right. No, no, no, you're talking about how Roth felt about biography in general and biographies of him in particular.
- [13:01]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
Well, by and large, he hated biography. And at the same time he was enormously intrigued by biography. He writes about biography with incredible astuteness long, long before there's any prospect of someone writing his biography. And the saga of his efforts to have a biography produced is a long saga and a saga with some profound pitfalls. Of course, as is pretty well known, he courts various biographers. He persuades a good friend of his, Ross Miller, to write his biography. He doesn't like what Ross Miller is doing. He drops Ross Miller not only as a biographer, but as a friend, though they were the closest of friends for over two decades. He then speaks to a number of biographers. We had a conversation about my writing an authorized biography of him as well. I wasn't comfortable with the idea at the time. And then he hires a very fine biographer, Blake Bailey, who's written biographers of Cheever and others. And Blake spends years writing a volume just short of a Thousand pages, it's published, it's by and large praised, and then it ends up being pulped by its publisher, Norton, because soon after its appearance it's discovered that Blake had identified various girls at a high school that he had taught at, followed them until the age of 17 or 18, had sex with them, and then an accusation, never brought to court, was made against him that he had raped another woman and the book disappeared or ended up having a kind of shadowy life. And so all this surfaces after Philip's death, but adds to the story really of his anxiety about the nature of biography. He's enormously preoccupied with biography starting in the mid-90s with the appearance of his ex wife Claire Bloom's portrait of their marriage in a memoir of hers, an altogether acidic portrait. And he wants an antidote and he sees biography as an albeit imperfect antidote.
- [15:32]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
Right, so to step back, a drop in history. Who were Roth's parents and what were they like?
- [15:41]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
You know, in general, any biographer needs to have more than a dose of modesty. You know, you try as best as possible. And I interviewed 120 people and used just little short of 30 archives to try to portray this man's life and tried as best as possible to understand his relationship with his parents. And whether I did manage this or not, readers will have to decide. He builds an enormous amount of his work around his parents, around family. He's enormously preoccupied with the Saliens, the impact to family. And so much of his work actually takes place in the place where he grew up with his family in Weequaic, southwest suburb of, of Newark. His father is deeply caring, deeply rambunctious, deeply opinionated man. His mother appears in one way or another, despite Roth's Demurel's and Portnoy's complaint. And of course, then again, she doesn't. He draws on life around him for so much of his work, especially on his parents. And repeatedly friends of his who would meet his parents would actually share that they were far less interesting than Roth portrayed. So I spent a fair amount of energy in the book trying to understand the relationship, relationships that he had with his parents, both because they were so inevitably formative, because they figure so crucially in his fiction and because they were so, so complex. So that's where I could begin to describe the relationship.
- [17:57]
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- [19:00]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
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- [19:03]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
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- [19:13]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
Fascinating.
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Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [19:18]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [19:20]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
Cut the camera.
- [19:21]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
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Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
Right. So you. You already touched on this. What were the similarities between Roth's mother, his actual mother, Bess, and Sophie Portnoy, the mother in Roth's most famous novel, Portnoy's Complaint.
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Stephen J. Zipperstein
You know, so it's a novel. It's a novel really, built around the desire, an impossible desire in a Jewish household, as he describes it, to be let alone just be left alone. You just, you know, just not have people pay attention to you. The. Hence the Blessed privacy that one has in only one room in one's house, the bathroom where you could actually lock the door. And so in many ways, it's a book built around an intense desire, one that Roth feels strongly and that he spends so much of his life unsettling, is the prospect of just mediocrity. As he says at one point, I just want to be able to be bad without guilt. I want to be able to drink whiskey, I want to be able to hunt, I want it to be able to eat lobster. I want to do all the kinds of things that are deemed bad in my house, but that, you know, I just. I want to be able to get bad grades. And. And so the only way, the only, the only way in which he can be bad, as he comes to find in his adolescence, is sex, because all of the prospects are close to him. He says, I can't even steal cars. And so the similarity between his mother and Sophie Portnoy are both remote and real. His mother is a careful dresser. She's very thin. She doesn't seem to raise her voice all that much, but she commands an enormous attentiveness. And one of the more crucial similarities, as I came to discover in speaking with the fourth wife of his brother, Sandy. Sandy had died by the time I started researching my book, was that the famous scene in Port Norris Complaint where she holds a knife over the children and threatens to use it unless they eat properly was something that she did. And so her maternal sins were not all that great. Alexandra Portnoy acknowledges that his mother's sins are all that great, but they impinge, they overwhelm. This man who writes about the kind of dirt underneath contemporary culture, was raised in a home where, as I came to discover, neither Sandy nor Philip tended to use the bathrooms of their friends in their friends homes because no bathroom was as clean as theirs. And so it's not hard to draw a connection between her mothering, by and large, benign, but nonetheless impactful, and his literary imagination.
- [23:28]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
All right, and you mentioned about Roth's sense that it was impossible to escape scrutiny or to be alone in his Jewish home where he was raised. How Jewish was that home? In other words, were there strong Jewish influences on Roth as a kid?
- [23:54]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
Yeah, you know, Jewish influences, as you know well, come in so many shapes and sizes. And part of my desire in writing this book was to try to explicate what Jewishness has meant and means for American Jews. The notion that we're one of the three great religions in America is a misnomer since Most Jews live like lapsed Catholics in their relationship to religion. And to the best of my knowledge, in the state of Israel, there's been only one prime minister who attended synagogue outside of an electoral cycle, Menachem Begin. And yet it's called the Jewish State. So, you know, I think that Rogue Santos understood on some level that to act Jewish you didn't have to go to synagogue. And so it's a deeply Jewish home, but in ways that might seem unusual, the parents actually belong to synagogue. They go to synagogue mostly his father, late in life in order to hear a non Jewish Bulgarian sing ditties from Fiddler on the Roof. But at the same time, it's deeply Jewish. He grows up in a neighborhood that by the time of his childhood is 95% Jewish. His closest friends are Jewish, the girls he initially dates are Jewish, the girls he eventually dates are rarely Jewish. And he grows up dreaming about being a lawyer and the employee of the Anti Defamation League and fighting for Jewish freedom. And it's profoundly Jewish and Jewish in ways different from your background or mine. Certainly.
- [25:49]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
Very Orthodox backgrounds.
- [25:51]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
Yes. Both of us coming from Orthodox backgrounds of one sort or another. But part of my intent of the book, without making this explicit, was to actually answer just that question. What it is that makes something Jewish outside of the confines of the synagogue and without the use of Jewish ritual, traditional objects.
- [26:15]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
Right, right. So, yeah, I guess I picked up on that myself, reading your book and also just reading a bunch of Roth. I think it's interesting you have a quote from Roth, something about. Yeah, I didn't read a lot of Jewish books like Ethics of the Fathers or something, which is one, you know, sort of famous ancient rabbinic text. So it seemed like maybe he was aware of, obsessed with, I don't know, like felt insecure about like just how much sort of formal Jewish knowledge he absorbed or he was able to channel in his writing.
- [27:00]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
Yeah. The quote about Ethics of Fathers is particularly interesting. Sits in response to criticisms of his short story, Epstein, a man who has an affair with a neighbor, a middle aged neighbor next door, and picks up, or so it seems, Gonorrhea and his portrayal. Epstein is criticized because of Epstein's something of a Jewish ignoramus. And Roth responds and stuff you don't expect Epstein to know. Ethics of Our Fathers. Ethics of Our Fathers, as you and I know, is one of the most basic of all Jewish texts. It's not something that a particularly learned Jew would be aware of, but Philip was so far from that culture that he used that as an example He's. He's preoccupied early on with Buber. He likes Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher and the eventual expert on Hasidism. He's fascinated by Mordecai Kaplan's civilization. Civilization.
- [28:08]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
I'm sorry, Judaism as a civilization.
- [28:11]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
As a civilization. He recommends it to several people and.
- [28:15]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
Sorry, just the. Kaplan is the founder of the Reconstructionist.
- [28:21]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
Movement, the one Jewish movement founded in America and religious movement founded in America. Yeah. So one of the mysteries about Roth that I tried to explicate was that his interest in Judaism per se is scant. His knowledge certainly is scant, and yet his preoccupation with things Jewish is pervasive up until the very, very end.
- [28:48]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
Yeah, right. It does seem almost like a paradox. I mean, as you mentioned, there may be only one book of his enormous corpus of writing that doesn't include any Jews. In other words, almost all of his books include some, if not mostly Jewish characters. And so many, let's say, American Jews, secular American Jews, think of Roth as, like, so Jewish, quote, unquote.
- [29:19]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
But doesn't that get to what it means to be so Jewish? And just the mystery of what it means to be so Jewish? And that was something I really tried to explicate in the book. In other words, you can be so Jewish and be largely indifferent to Judaism per se, and hence the difficulty of actually identifying who Jews are remains, I think, a persistent mystery in American culture. Jews are deemed to be too wealthy to be ethnics, and in fact, they're far less religious than the term religion implies. And I mean, every time I'm asked on a form to check whether I'm Caucasian, I have difficulty doing so because Caucasian. William Buckley is Caucasian, not me. But what is one to check? And so there is kind of an anomaly about Jews, an anomaly that's surfaced vehemently ever since October 7th, and that arguably has been used to political advantage by Donald Trump and others. And so to the extent to which anyone has managed to explicate these mysteries, I think Philip Roth has.
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Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
Right. And what was the city of Newark, New Jersey, like when Roth lived there, and what influence did it have on his stories?
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Stephen J. Zipperstein
Yeah, he keeps on, with rare exceptions, he builds his fiction around Newark. It's almost a preoccupation, almost vaguely comparable to Joyce's. Of course, both had to flee the city that they write about in order to write about Joyce.
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Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
With Dublin.
- [31:16]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
Right. Joyce is Dublin, of course. Let me get to that in a moment. But I. I ran this by Roth, and he wouldn't agree or disagree, but Roth is deeply Influenced by the Soviet Jewish writer Isaac Babel, best known for his novel, translated as Red Cavalry, about a Jew fighting in a Cossack unit. And the ambiguity of it all, the ambiguity of the relationship between Jews and violence, Jews and earthiness. And Babel's a deep influence on Roth, and he explicates this in the most bookish of all of his books, the Ghostwriter. But I'd long felt that there was a scene in one of Babel's famous short stories, the Awakening, that helps one understand Roth's attitude toward Jewishness and also attitude toward Newark. It's the story of the Awakening, where about a boy in Odessa. There are many famous Jewish violinists who emerge from Odessa. They end up making a bunch of money in addition to garnering fame. His father, the boy's father, wants him to take piano lessons and to become a famous. Actually, violin lessons, and to become a famous violinist. He has no talent. He hangs out at the shore. And about five weeks after the lessons begin, Mr. Zagorsky, his teacher, the boy spots walking toward their apartment, and he hides in the one and only place where you could actually be secure and be alone. The bathroom. And there are attempts to knock down the bathroom door, unsuccessful. And then comes a scene at the end of the short story that I think deeply influenced Ross, but at least explains something essential about Roth. He hides in the bathroom until nightfall. Bible describes an aunt of his comes to fetch him and to take him to her house as a refuge. They're walking through the Odessa streets. And then the narrator says, I was thinking of running away, but he never does. And it's just that moment that Babel. That Babel. And then again, Roth explores time and time again, thinking of running away. So many reasons to run away. So much rambunctiousness, so much irrationality, you know, he points out in Portnoy's Complaint that somehow, in a Jewish home like his, you can't eat pork except in a Chinese restaurant, where it's the case with God knows what, then you could eat pork. The rationality of it he doesn't understand, but he captures something about the mores, who, the wages of Jewish culture. And I think that this is similar to returning to your original question to his relationship to Newark. He flees Newark. He would never imagine living there, but it bears down on him. And it's small enough to be a kind of collection of ethnic villages. He grows up in its Jewish ethnic village. Roth often talks in his interviews about how he could only write about what he knows, and he knows nothing better than Newark. And hence he stays there. It's also a way for him to mark off a territory that's different from bookish New York. And so he's keenly preoccupied with the interplay between body and mind. And I think he feels he could write more astutely, more honestly about body and not the cerebral if he zeroes in on Newark.
- [35:19]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
Very interesting. Speaking of the body, was Roth attractive as a young man and was he popular with women?
- [35:27]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
Yeah, yeah. So he looked different than either you or me. He's six foot one, he's muscled, and yeah, he draws women. One anecdote I learned from an erstwhile friend of his co counselor at a summer camp contacted me and described to me about how Roth loathed the owner's wife. And in fact, in order to embarrass the owner's wife, the owner of this camp, at the first family visiting day, he announced to the campers that she had lost her chastity belt. And in front of all the parents, all the campers are searching for her alleged chastity belt. And yet, when his co counselor, later a doctor, returns to the camp to work as the camp doctor, the first thing that this woman asks is, where is Philip Roth? She's drawn to him, too. So he's deeply attractive to women. And that's how he meets Maxine Grofsky, who becomes the focus of his famous novella Goodbye, Columbus. And she hadn't spoken to anyone interested in Roth before, and she was willing to talk with me. We had several meetings. And she describes how sort of much as described in the very beginning of Goodbye, Columbus, which was eventually made into a very famous film. About 10 years after the novella appeared with Allie McGraw, she is about to jump into the pool at the camp where Roth is a counselor imitating the the taking of Moses out of the water. And she spots this handsome man and walks over to him and asks if he'll hold her glasses. And that actually inspires the very beginning of Goodbye, Columbus. And no, he's enormously attractive to women, remain so well, in some ways into his early 70s later, right?
- [38:07]
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- [38:33]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
Very interesting. Yeah, I mean, I guess I. I was. I kept on. As I read your book, I kept on coming Back to the, the, the, the, the title about stung by life. And I'm just trying to figure out how is he stung by life in the sense that as far as we could tell in terms of his upbringing, his parents, I mean, no one's life is perfect. Everyone has issues, but, but they seem to be loving parents. They seem to have taken care of him as best they could. He, he's, he's good looking, he's healthy. He, he seems very successful at attracting all of these, you know, beautiful women. What, what, what is your sense of, and you mentioned earlier on about the rage and how, how Roth felt rage. And then he seemed to channel that into some of his most famous characters. Like where does the rage come from?
- [39:28]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
Yeah, where does rage come from? As I came to see it, it's a feature of the way in which he sees the world. I think it would be reductionist to insist that much of this is born out of his sense that any criticism of him is impertinent because what he deserves is the undiluted adulation of mother and others. I think there's an element to that, but I think it would be reductionist to simply insist that that's the origin. But I kept on seeing this as a salient, is a crucial feature in his life, repeatedly as a crucial feature of his fiction. And I remained enormously impressed at his capacity to both feel this and to be able to interrogate it and to interrogate it in himself. And so an example of this rage and the way in which he uses it as a master of fiction is precisely in his portrayal of Maxine Grofsky, or as he calls her, Brenda Potemkin in Goodbye Columbus. In Goodbye Columbus, Brenda Potemkin, modeled after Maxine Grofski, or so it seems, is immensely self preoccupied, preoccupied with material goods, comes from enormously wealthy family, is overwhelmed by the appearances of life, but nothing deeper. And yet the protagonist of the male protagonist of the story, Neil Klugman, senses that he's on the road to marrying her. And the woman I met and then who was described to me by many others who were close friends of Roth at the time, was a girl right out of high school, three or four years younger than Roth, overwhelmed by him, overwhelmed by his learning, who would have done anything for him and who was really anything like the woman described a good by Columbus. And now I met Maxine Grofsky in her late 80s, describing her as a late teen. There's an enormous chasm there. She remains a profoundly beautiful woman still, but based on what she Described to me, and then friends of his described to me and then others I spoke to who knew the family. And the family was not all that wealthy. They were richer than the Roths. And it seems unlikely that the squirrel straight out of high school was as overwhelmingly manipulative as Roth describes, as he says in Sabbat's Theater. And I use this as a quote at the frontispiece of the chapter where he meets Brenda Potemkin, where he meets Maxine Grofsky, love is slavery. And I. I think, as I've come to see it, his need to write about Brenda Potemkin in this way is his way of distancing, explaining his flight from Newark. She comes to represent Newark. She comes to represent domesticity in Newark. It's as close as he comes to actually settling down, settling down in like his parents. Are we quiet? And maybe that's all the more reason why he needed to portray her in the light that he did. And.
- [43:31]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
Right. And. Let's see. Oh, so I'm curious, to use a phrase from a questioner who you wrote about, who wrote to Choth and asked, why so much schmutz? Why is there so much sexuality in his writing, including, famously, all sorts of masturbation and other kind of sexual acts, and one could fairly say a kind of obsession with sexuality. I'm curious what you make of all that. And just to add to that a bit, I have a close friend who's a woman who I was surprised to discover that she had read every single one of Roth's books. And I was surprised just because I didn't think that she would find this type of excessive discussion of sexuality, you know, appealing. And I asked her about it, and she said, oh, I always skimmed over those parts. I basically deleted them in my mind. Like the story, you know, the writing, whatever the characters, the dialogue is so powerful. I just deleted all the sex talk. It's not really relevant to the story. You could just cut it out and the story and the book, you know, remains the. The book. And I'm curious what you think of that as a sort of strategy for reading Roth. In other words, what is the relationship between all of this, quote unquote, schmutz, all of this sex talk in his books and the larger genius that is Roth's writing?
- [45:12]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
Now, I don't know that you could disconnect. I mean, I'm not going to query her reading habits, your friends, but I'm not sure that you could disconnect preoccupation with sexuality from Roth. I don't know that it's only Roth that is overwhelmed by sexuality. And I don't think his reference to the importance of Schmutz in understanding life is made simply in reference to sex. And I think what he insists on seeing is every aspect of life that bears down on us. His preoccupation with Schmutz, so to speak, has a direct bearing on his relentless preoccupation with the diminishment of old age, the subject of the last of his several books. And as he watches his own body deteriorate, he's actually writing about. He writes about so many aspects of life that we would prefer not to think about. I mean, Schmutz isn't only, as he sees it, in reference to sex, it's also in reference to defecation. Hence that section in Patrimony where he describes his father's uncontrolled defecation. He's insistent on seeing the reality beyond what we prefer to see the reality. And I quote this at some length, what I consider to be a brilliant review by the critic Keith Gessen of his book the Dying Animal. And the Dying Animal features his narrator Kepesch, who's his most narcissistic of all narrators. And it's a description short book describing Kepesch's obsession with the body and especially the breast of a former student. And can I just read you a paragraph or two from Keith Gestin's review? Here's a quote. Not a great work, writes Keith Gestin in a review. A book didactic, he says, in the vein of the anti marital rantings of Tolstoy, but comparable to Tolstoy, more so than any American of his time in the urgency with which he seeks, which he, sorry, seeks to say, and his willingness to apologize for convictions expressed here more transparently, even more powerfully than anywhere else in Roth's work. Deliberately offensive is how Gessen aptly characterizes the novel, informed as it is, with a sense of desperation that pulses through the book for Kepisch, for Roth, Kepesch is, as Gesson puts it, the dullest and most methodical of his protagonists and at the same time little less than historian of the sexual revolution of the 60s. And then he continues. Let me get to the crucial paragraph. He says, it's only in sex that you are as Capuchin Cis most cleanly alive, most cleanly yourself. Don't forget. Don't ever forget it. Yes, sex is limited in its power. I know very well how limited. But tell me, what power is greater? And then Gessen ends this essay with a paragraph, as I say, comparable in its discomforting pertinence to the best of Roths. And this is how Gessen writes, ends his review, the Dying Animal. You could answer virtuous reader, as you have answered Roth so many times before, that art and its promise of eternity is greater, or politics with its promise of justice is greater, or religion and its promise of spiritual peace is more powerful. You could answer Ra thus. But one of you would have to be lying. Sex is enormously powerful, and Schmutz, as Roth understands it, is not exclusive to sex. And at the same time, all of that is utterly crucial to what it is that life is about. So I'd urge your friend not to skip those pages.
- [49:44]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
Right, right. I appreciate that. I hope she's listening. Yeah. And just to add, so schmutz is a Yiddish word for dirt. Okay. And okay, as he puts in his.
- [49:58]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
Response to that critic who asked him why so much schmutz, what he says is to describe Jews without schmutz would be to describe them as less than human. And he's describing humans with all of their foibles, in many ways, an heir to what Roth does from the outset are all of these efforts on the part of black African American writers, other writers, to describe the underbelly of otherwise vulnerable cultures. And in many ways, all of these efforts, the series Girls on tv, all owe, in many ways their inspiration in one way or another to Philip Roth.
- [50:46]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
All right, well, there's so much to talk about, but we have to narrow our focus just because of time. So I'm going to skip ahead in terms of Ruat's production, what his immense body of work, and talk about the plot against America. Could you tell us briefly what the novel is about?
- [51:12]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
Yeah, the novel is about the rise of Charles Lindbergh as President of the United States. And he defeats Franklin Roosevelt in Roosevelt's efforts for a third term and. And makes a pact with Germany not to respond to Germany's expansionist activity in Europe, and then begins in ways that are somewhat deceptive but nonetheless altogether concerted to marginalize Jews and to draw younger Jews into a kind of America first quasi fascistic set of beliefs. The belief at the time was that Lindbergh, with his very short sentences, his clipped way of expressing complicated views, was reminiscent of Bush Jr. I in more direct ways. Although Roth wouldn't have been thinking about this, he seems to presage some of the political strategies of our current president. And so, I mean, Roth curiously manages to predict, eerily, in retrospect, the Rise of Trumpism in America, the impact of a terrible plague in his book Nemesis. For someone who's been accused by so many critics of being excessively self preoccupied, there's a prescience in wrath and uncanny prescience that one sees in the Plot Against America and elsewhere.
- [53:16]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
Right. I appreciate what you're saying. We don't have time to get into it now, but I'll just sort of put it out there for the listener. Roth's book, the Counter Life, which deals with issues of Israel, Palestine and Jews and their relationship to the region and Jews in America and so on. I think there's also. I recently reread it and I was just blown away at just how much is in there. That was, I think, published in the 80s, if I remember correctly, in 86.
- [53:53]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
And then his book Operation Shylock, with its preoccupation with Diaspora ism, which he sees as utterly absurd, the notion that actually that Poland is awaiting the return of millions of Jews from a beleaguered Israel. His preoccupation with diasporism also speaks to an issue that is now very much current. But probably his Operation Shylock, along with the Counter Life, are the finest portraits of the dilemma of Israel and Zionism on the part of any American writer.
- [54:39]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
To go back to the Plot Against America for a moment, what do you make of Roth's depiction of Limberg as garnering widespread support in America, even among Jews?
- [54:52]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
Yeah. What do you make of the fact that some 35% of the Jewish population of America, including probably members of your family and mine, are stalwart supporters of Trump? Do you want us try to answer that question?
- [55:07]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
How much time do we have? I'll let you take a crack at it.
- [55:14]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
There's a Yiddish saying originating in Eastern Europe via Christelsich as Yiddelseg. If you want to understand Jews, look at Christians. And so we're more similar than some people assume. And so when you have a hero and someone who is embroiled in a terrible kidnapping issue and who flies across the Atlantic and who then captures the presidency at a profoundly vulnerable moment when Jews don't want to stand out and when Hitler is beginning to do what he Jews in Europe, is it a surprise that so many Jews in Roth's novel find him alluring? And so I find that less of a mystery than the predilections of my relatives and yours today. So if you could begin to explicate that, I'd be willing to return to your show and explicate Lindbergh.
- [56:13]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
It's a fair deal. It's a fair deal, yes. Obviously there's a lot to be said about a contemporary support, especially among sort of ultra Orthodox Jews in America for Trump and sort of conservative politics more generally.
- [56:35]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
How do you explain, as you and I have talked about in the past, the way in which ultra Orthodox Jews today are both theoretically anti Zionist but among the most militant supporters of the war in Gaza? And so you explain that one.
- [56:54]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
Right, right, I agree. And I have to say, again, anyone who wants to know what Philip Roth thinks about that, the last question you put to me, I think if you read the Counter Life, it's there. I mean, in a way, honestly, I got the chills as I was reading it. I'm like, interestingly enough, for Roth and the Counter Life, he's describing sort of right wing extremists, Jewish extremists in Israel who are causing all sorts of trouble for their Palestinian neighbors. But he describes them as the fringe. And in the 1980s, demographically and socially, politically, this, they really were much more to a large extent, whereas today they're very much at the heart of the Israeli government. And so in that sense, demographically and sort of structurally, some things, significant things have shifted at the same time. Certain basic ideologies, philosophies, reliance on religious texts to make political arguments have not shifted at all and are very much the way that Roth has some of his characters portraying them in that novel.
- [58:13]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
I think that speaks to an essential quality of Roth's that I try to describe toward the end of my book. He's not dated in the way in which so many of his incredibly talented contemporaries feel dated today, like John Updike, an extraordinary stylist, but his feels old fashioned, Roth's does not. And the very fact that so many decades have passed since the writing of the Counter Life, so much has happened in that part of the world since the writing of the Counterlife. But you, as an astute reader, could pick up the Counterlife today, a book finished in the mid-80s and could find it immensely pertinent to today, speaks to something that I came to discover in Roth. I never, as much as I was immersed in this book, I never tired of his writings. And they remain alive in some measure, I think, because of the way in which he threw himself into himself into his writings and was willing to interrogate and criticize so many of his own impulses. And so there's a kind of incredible, relentless honesty about life in his books that make them in many ways irreplaceable and that's what I meant by stung by life. I took the term from an obituary, a eulogy that he writes for his University of Chicago friend, Richard Stern, where he describes him as being stung by life. I'm not describing it as simply the byproduct of pain, but the byproduct of a constant awareness of the power of life and the interplay between its better moments and its many awful, more awful moments.
- [60:22]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
I think that's as good a moment or a point as any. To end our discussion for today, I want to thank you so much for taking your time to share your thoughts with us.
- [60:34]
Stephen J. Zipperstein
Pleasure. Good to talk with you.
- [60:35]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufill)
That concludes our program. Thanks for listening and have a great day.