I am an American, Newark Born

Abstract

I am an American, Newark Born Alan Cooper (bio) Such an Augie March-like pronouncement might have spilled out of the mouths of Neil Klugman, Swede Levov, Nathan Zuckerman, Ira Ringold, Marcus Messner, and the "Philips" and "Roths" of their author's late-middle period and The Plot Against America. Might have, but never quite did, although they were all characters from Weequahic. That Newark neighborhood, 96% Jewish, was, for Roth, a Zion of safety that rendered everywhere else, even Israel, diaspora. Perhaps we might include—briefly—Bradley Beach, Weequahic's summer extension on the Jersey shore. Include, that is, for families from Weequahic, who shared refrigerators, pantries, swim-suit changing rooms, Yiddish accents. But being from Bradley Beach, a year-round off-season collection of ethnic flotsam and jetsam, would disqualify Morris [Mickey] Sabbath from feeling safe in that America, even though he'd wiggled his baby toes in the ripples of its eastern shore. Safety was not Augie March's need. His was a buoyancy that carried him through his adventures wherever he went. He was an American before (if only in the womb) he was a Chicagoan. Roth's Weequahic Jews drew on the restorative blood of their womb-like birthplace to barely survive the challenges of the wider world. Weequahic was more than a location within Newark: the smells of its cooking, the accents of its candy stores and ball fields, its steam baths, Roth's grandfather's shaving mug upon a shelf in the barber shop, these visceral associations—much more than any synagogue—created this paradise of Jewishness. Nathan Zuckerman, world traveler, might say, "I am never more of a Jew than when I am in a church when the organ begins. [. . .] I have the emotions of a spy in the adversary's camp" (Counterlife 256). Still, as Aharon Appelfeld would put it, "Roth's Jews are Jews without Judaism" (Alterman). Although his characters could precisely describe the dimensions of a proper Jewish grave, the dying Roth arranged to be buried on the secular campus of Bard College. [End Page 45] For how long can we speak of "the dying Roth"? Was it from the time he stopped publishing fiction? And how, if at all, did his withdrawal from publishing new works affect his ability to withstand the dying? Roth had stopped writing fiction in 2009. It remained for the Library of America to publish his collected nonfiction some nine years later (Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction), reviewed early in March 20181 and excerpted in Harper's Magazine for August 2017 and then again as "Memento Mori" on May 23, 2018 (the day after Roth's death). Among the essays included is one in which Roth tells of his first experience as a writer, at age ten, during World War II. At the kitchen table his loving mother was teaching him to type on her old Underwood typewriter, and he started writing a sea story, Storm Off Hatteras, in imitation of Howard Pease, "the Joseph Conrad of boys' books." Where the author's name was to follow the title, he wrote "Eric Duncan," because, he said, "a name with two hard Cs" is bound to sound strong ("Eric Duncan," Why Write? 346). Three years later, graduating from elementary school, in the first Weequahic class to have celebrated winning the war against anti-Semitism, he co-wrote a pageant-like morality play for graduation called Let Freedom Ring in the spirit of Frank Sinatra's "The House I Live In." The girl who had been chosen as his coauthor played its protagonist, Tolerance. Its antagonist, played by nearly thirteen-year-old Philip, was called Prejudice. The numerous ethnic and religious groups spread out across the stage could not see the protagonist or the antagonist, standing at the sides of the stage, but these groups were praised by Tolerance with quotations from the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and newspaper columns by Eleanor Roosevelt, and they were denounced by Prejudice in language and epithets that Roth would not have uttered in real life. It was his first experience of being bad—and "Secretly, it thrilled me to think I had a natural talent for...