Philip Roth and "My American Gang"

Abstract

Philip Roth and "My American Gang" Gustavo Sánchez Canales (bio) What does it mean to be a roth scholar in spain? to answer this question, I refer to "my American gang," a term I use among my university colleagues in Spain when I discuss my research. Obviously, this name is inspired by Roth's 1971 satirical novel about President Richard Nixon. However, I hasten to clarify that the similarities between both "gangs" begin and end in the title. Here, I reference my American gang to tell the story of how international scholarly collaborations have advanced Roth Studies, and I reference my work in the context of these collaborations as an example of the archive we have built collectively, internationally, to further an understanding of Roth's work around the globe. I should begin by saying that Jewish American literature has been at the core of my personal interests since the 1989-1990 academic year, a time when I was about to finish English Philology at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). I had a professor of English and American Literature named Cándido Pérez Gállego who was one of the very few teachers who analyzed the works of writers like Henry Roth and Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Cynthia Ozick, among others. Thanks to him, not only did I then start to delve into their fiction, but it was also clear to me that I would write my dissertation on Bellow. However, I soon realized that exploring the works of such a complex novelist entailed a lot of research in several areas. Bellow's complexity is somehow reflected in the title of my dissertation—"Literary, Philosophical and Religious Influences on Saul Bellow's Novels"—which I defended in June 2001, and obtained cum laude. (My postdoctoral research focused on Bellow.) I do not think I can be accused of revealing a state secret if I say that twenty years ago—let alone during the late 1980s—Jewish American literature was not a "hot topic" in Spain. Despite this—or perhaps because of this—I was determined to publish part of my research in Spain. After all, if Pérez Gállego had succeeded in instilling in me a love for this literature, why could I not try something similar in other forums at a national level? In 2003, Isabel Durán (UCM) and [End Page 95] José Antonio Gurpegui (Universidad de Alcalá, Madrid), as editors of their online Historia crítica de la literatura norteamericana, invited me to contribute an essay for their issue "La tradición judía," which was published the following year. In this essay I examine first- and second-generation writers such as Malamud, Roth, and Bellow. The publication of my first Bellow papers in the early 2000s motivated me to focus part of my research on Bellow. Among others, I would like to highlight "Saul Bellow as a Novelist of Ideas: A Forum" (2016)—a special issue co-edited with fellow Roth Society member, Victoria Aarons—which appeared in Partial Answers (Johns Hopkins UP-The Hebrew University of Jerusalem). There were two other contributions: "A Tale of Two Cities," published in Saul Bellow Journal exactly one decade after "Life, Death" and "Bellow's Cityscapes" included in The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow (2017). In both cases, Victoria Aarons, to whom I am deeply grateful for inviting me to participate, was editor. Chronologically speaking, Bernard Malamud is the second writer to whom I am greatly indebted. My first Malamud essays date from 2006. Specifically, "Bernard Malamud's Russian Background" came out in the Spanish journal Mundo eslavo. Two years before, I had been invited to contribute a book chapter ("Racial Tension, Rage and Destruction in Bernard Malamud's The Tenants") for a Festschrift that also appeared in 2006. This special volume was meant to be a tribute to Angela Downing, at the time a recently retired professor from the Department of English Philology (UCM), the same department where I had been working for years. As in the case of "La tradición judía," I thought this Festschrift could be a good venue for continuing to promote Jewish American Studies...