The Newark I Never Knew

Abstract

The Newark I Never Knew Louis Gordon (bio) MEMOIR AS INTRODUCTION I was born in Beth Israel Hospital in Newark in 1963, some thirty years after Philip Roth's birth. But the city changed so much over the next three and a half years that my brother was delivered at St. Barnabas in Livingston. For many Roth scholars, the geography may not mean that much, but to me, the change in birth sites epitomizes the loss of an entire way of urban American Jewish life that largely evaporated in the late 1960s. For many of my generation, the defining difference between us and our parents was the move to the suburbs and loss of a cohesive community. Roth may be a lot of things to different readers, but in a way that no other writer could, he opened the door—even if only halfway—to an earlier America that seemed closed to those of us who grew up in the Jersey suburbs in the 1970s. I first encountered Roth through the television premier of an adaptation of his novella, "Goodbye, Columbus" (1959), which was screened on New York area television around 1975. I couldn't see the ending because it was after my bedtime, but if the film symbolized the division between the new and the old in an era of abolished cultural norms, the old seemed much better. It probably would have come as a shock to Roth, who viewed himself as a rebel, that Neil Klugman seemed to me to be the type of square that I had wished still existed in the 1970s! And that image is even more pronounced in the film where the clean-cut veteran, Klugman, is contrasted with the long-haired rock musicians who play at the country club where he romances Brenda. Fast forward about six years to my last years of yeshiva high school in the Elmora section of Elizabeth, which is the same neighborhood where the Swede's wife, Dawn Dwyer, attended church at St. Genevieve's, and which is only about a ten-minute drive from Newark. Some of my classmates lived on the fringe of the inner-city neighborhood that was now Weequahic; one actually lived in that formerly Jewish neighborhood. Though my peers didn't speak much about Roth, at the beginning of my senior year I stumbled across a copy of Portnoy's Complaint (1969) in a used bookstore. The novel intrigued me but not for the reasons that an entire crowd of assimilated Jews liked it. As a yeshiva high school student in 1980, I knew very well [End Page 59] that Roth had a limited understanding of Jewish tradition. But I was drawn to the fact that he was talking about Newark. Roth's Newark was all around me. My classmate's father had participated in the Southside bonfires against Weequahic that Roth depicted in Portnoy's Complaint, and I had another classmate whose father, a student at Weequahic High School with Roth, was able to separate some of the myths about Roth from the facts. But it was not until the mid-1990s when I was living in Los Angeles that I published what would be the first of my essays, "Philip Roth as He Has Never Been Read Before." In it were the seeds of the type of criticism on Roth's work (is it New Historicism or Cultural Materialism?) that I have been engaged in for the last several years. At some point, my New Jersey origins and literary reading led me to start writing interpretations of Roth that I didn't see anywhere else. NEW HISTORICISM OR CULTURAL MATERIALISM? What Roth did for Newark is unparalleled in literary annals due to the sheer number of books he produced. From the beginning, Roth both thrilled and repelled the hometown crowd. Jane Wallerstein reviewing Roth's first collection in Newark's Jewish News notes that "it isn't often that Essex County appears in fiction, as it does, by grace of a former Newarker, in Goodbye, Columbus. The presence of familiar places in print is one reason why this collection of short stories is absorbing" (17). But, Wallerstein continues, "[a]s an...