Philip Roth's "Defender of the Faith": A Modern Midrash

Abstract

Mention and to most average readers, and you will hear much criticism of Roth's negative, defeatist attitude toward his own religion-the phrase self-hating will probably come up more than once-while relatively fewer readers will defend as a writer willing to confront the difficulties of post-Holocaust Jewish life in America. Look through the scholarship in the field of studies, and you will find a similar, albeit more nuanced, split between many critics who say, as Aharon Appelfeld does, that [i]n Roth's fiction there is hardly any Jewish philosophy, Jewish tradition, mysticism, or religion, and there is no discussion of who is a Jew or what is a Jew [. . .] Roth's Jews are Jews without Judaism (14), and the smaller number who assert, as Sol Gittleman does, that Philip was among the very first to see how difficult it was for the Jew to be a Jew, amidst the affluence and the urge to be like everyone else, and that Roth would assure his audience that the of the Jew in America would be anchored by both the past and the future (142).These divergent opinions on Roth's approach to Jewish culture and Jewish faith have largely defined the ways that readers look at Roth's works today, with a number of critics offering a sort of compromise between the positions, arguing that Roth's attitude toward has changed during the course of his career: Early in his career the issue and goal seemed to be to tell the truth about Jews, not to repudiate or belittle, but for that traditional reason: to teach. [. . .] In the more recent work, he has added to the idea of telling the truth about Jews' more philosophical questions, including 'What is the truth?' and 'What is a Jew?' (Lyons 194). In other words, Roth's early works dealt with Jewish culture to show that Jews were like other people, and the later work delves deeper, showing a greater willingness to confront the larger philosophical issues of Jewish faith and identity. The two basic positions still exist in this critique, but they are combined in the single author.And yet, with so many different, and often oppositional, approaches to Roth's work as it relates to religion, almost no one looks for literal religious resonances in the texts; his connection to religion is seen as almost entirely cultural and based in a sense of personal identity rather than having a ritual or textual connection. In fact, Roth's work is seen as so antithetical to traditional religion that the story most often told about his relationship to orthodoxy is the humiliating anecdote of when he was shouted down at Yeshiva University by Orthodox Jews decrying his literary insults to the Jewish people, an event to which refers in several interviews as well as in his autobiography. Beyond that, most criticism indicates that he has little relationship to outside of either stereotypical images of Jewish or probing questions of Jewish identity in America.Roth's earliest major work, Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, is almost always read as a commentary on the religious identity of post-World War II American Jews, and it certainly is that. Neil Klugman, Eli Peck, and Ozzie Freedman, central Jewish characters in the various stories of Goodbye, Columbus, all represent different types of American Jews finding their places in the Western secular world. Nathan Marx and Sheldon Grossbart, too, search for ways to understand and inhabit their Jewish identities in another of the collection's stories, Defender of the Faith. However, this story actually has a deeper and more concretely religious connection to than most readers generally seem to notice. Although these two characters do explore and comment on the place of the individual Jew in 194Os America, the story also, when read from a traditional Jewish perspective, proves to be a modern midrash of sorts, a story that grows out of Roth's careful understanding and thoughtful engagement with traditional religious texts and rituals. …