Reflections on Reading Roth

Abstract

Reflections on Reading Roth Victoria Aarons (bio) and Debra Shostak (bio) We are honored to have been asked to reflect for this special issue on our engagement as readers of Roth's fiction for more than three decades. What follows is our very personal take on reading and writing about Roth as his work developed and then moved toward its completion. Focusing on the questions Roth's fiction has moved us to ask over the years, we look back in the form of a conversation with an imaginary interlocutor on the aspects of Roth's fiction that have interested us most. Like Roth, if perhaps immodestly, we are reading ourselves and others. In thinking about our individual responses to the following questions, we have been pleased to discover the ways in which our thinking has intersected and also the different directions from which we approach Roth's fiction. What questions and texts first engaged you in thinking about Roth's work? VA: I first read the collection Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959) in college when, on something of a whim, I enrolled in a course on Jewish literature. In retrospect, that class set the direction for what would become my professional life. Reading Roth's "Goodbye, Columbus" and the other stories in the collection pulled me into a world with which I was intimately familiar. I was immediately drawn to what for me was a narrative voice I'd been hearing all my life. It was the collective voice, if exaggerated, of my grandparents, aunts and uncles, and the host of "characters" I had grown up among. It was a recognizable if hard to pinpoint, yet decidedly Jewish voice, one I associated with both the things I wanted to escape and those I wanted to hold on to. I identified in it those conflicting impulses, as Roth himself once put it, born from "the desire to repudiate and the desire to cling, a sense of allegiance and the need to rebel, the alluring dream of escaping into the challenging unknown and the counterdream of holding fast to the familiar" ("Preface" xiii-xiv). So many of Roth's characters, and especially the early ones, straddle both worlds: the obligatory pull of the past and the equally compelling seductions of diasporic self-reinvention. I'm thinking, say, of a character like Eli Peck in "Eli, the Fanatic," whose neurotic attempts to navigate his competing obligations as a Jew at a fraught moment in history [End Page 71] consign him, in an act of surrender, to being The Jew, that is, the Jew who didn't get away, the Jew trapped in history. A man of comically neurotic extremes, Eli, in the face of such history, can no longer act the part of Woodenton's "progressive suburban community," where Jews and Gentiles live in fantasized, if tenuous "amity," but rather, gives himself up to the very stereotype of which he wishes to absolve himself (Goodbye 261-62). Eli will enact, in a moment of ill-conceived defiance, a caricature of the Jew, dressed in black-clothed Medieval garb, "talking a dead language […] making a big thing out of suffering […] going oy-oy-oy all your life" (Goodbye 278). And of course, the impersonation is not so simple with Roth. It's not that Eli capitulates to that which he fears most about himself. But rather, Eli is torn between competing fears of self-loathing: his fear that he has capitulated to the need to erase his Jewishness in order to appease both the Gentiles and the other assimilated, camouflaged, and prevaricating Jews in the community; and his fear that he is stuck in the past, "like in the Bronx the old guys who used to come around selling Hebrew trinkets […] talking a dead language," "suffering sufferings already suffered once too often" (Goodbye 278, 280). In other words, he enacts, in a moment of exhibitionistic parody, the Jewishness he believed himself to have fled. As always with Roth, the ego finds itself punished by the superego. And, as the child of a psychoanalyst, this made perfect sense to me. You might say, then, that it was Roth who directed me into...