Jewish American Heritage: Philip Roth
Friday, May 25th, 2018May 25, 2018
May is Jewish American Heritage Month in the United States. To celebrate it, World Book looks back at the life of acclaimed Jewish American writer Philip Roth, who died at age 85 on Tuesday, May 22. Roth was known for his frank, comic, and often satirical portraits of modern Jewish society and family life in the United States.
Philip Milton Roth was born on March 19, 1933, in Newark, New Jersey. He graduated from Bucknell University in 1954 and received a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Chicago in 1955. Roth first gained fame for Goodbye, Columbus (1959), a collection of five short stories and a short novel. In the title short novel, Roth explored the material attractions and spiritual costs he saw in suburban upper-class Jewish life. Roth’s most famous novel is Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). Critics have praised it as a funny, intimate, and accurate study of the guilt feelings of a typical American Jewish son.
Roth featured the artistic and psychological struggles of a Jewish American author named Nathan Zuckerman in several works. Zuckerman is the central character in the novels The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), and The Anatomy Lesson (1983). The three novels were issued along with the story “The Prague Orgy” as Zuckerman Bound (1985). A fourth Zuckerman novel, The Counterlife, was published in 1986. Zuckerman also narrates The Human Stain (2000), in which racial, sexual, and academic politics collide. The novel makes up a trilogy, along with American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998) that investigates important political and social conflicts after the end of World War II in 1945. Zuckerman is also the central character in Exit Ghost (2007).
In the novels The Facts (1988), Deception (1990), and Patrimony (1991), Roth explored the uncertain territory between autobiography and fiction. The narrator of The Plot Against America (2004) is the author, Roth, as a young man. The novel considers an alternative history in which the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt for the presidency of the United States in 1940. Roth’s other novels include Letting Go (1962), When She Was Good (1967), Our Gang (1971), The Great American Novel (1973), My Life as a Man (1974), The Professor of Desire (1977), Operation Shylock (1993), The Dying Animal (2001), Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), The Humbling (2009), and Nemesis (2010).
Jewish American Heritage Month has been celebrated in the United States since 2006. The Jewish Museum of Florida and southern Florida Jewish community leaders backed an effort to create the celebration, which was championed in Congress by Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida and Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. The month of May was chosen after the Library of Congress celebrated the 350th anniversary of Jewish American history in May 2004. The anniversary recalled the 1654 arrival in New Amsterdam (modern day New York City) of Jews fleeing religious persecution in Portuguese-controlled Brazil.