Pain as identity, identity as violence, and Philip Roth

Through second grade, I attended public school in a middle class Chicago suburb. There were only a couple of Jewish families at the school, and while I had been exposed to plenty of Jewish people in movies and TV I didn’t know anything about about Judaism as a religion or a culture.

My ignorance wasn’t due to any malevolent social pressures—nobody was “being erased” or anything like that. At this time, I knew my mom would drag us to church about thrice a year, but I did not know the name of our denomination, nor could I even tell you that most Americans were Christian. I also didn’t know that the current President was a Republican and my dad was a Democrat. I didn’t even know that the Spanish-speaking family who lived next door had immigrated from a place called Mexico that had a completely different culture and government from my own. The schemas adults use to classify one another are not the sort of thing a child naturally intuits. Kids are insulated and tend to presume a universality of their own experiences, which is why back in the day the progressive tendency was to foster cultural exchange and awareness.

To this end, one December morning my first grade class was visited by the mother of one of our Jewish students. I was too young to feel sexual urges, but I remember being struck by how beautiful she was. She exuded kindness and I just really wanted to hug her. Her lesson was well-prepared: she told us the story of Hanukkah, explained the traditions and practices as they were celebrated by modern-day American Jews, and then had us play with a dreidel and passed out chocolate coins. All in all, she ruled.

There was one other Jewish kid in the class, however, and his mom was fucking pissed that the pretty lady came and spoke to us so nicely. When she picked up her kid she spent a solid 15 minutes bitching out our teacher, who was also a nice lady and didn’t have the slightest idea what she had done wrong.

I don’t know if the second mom was more orthodox or if she had a personal beef against the first mom or whatever. But she showed up the very next day to provide us with a corrective lesson about the real realities of modern American Jewishness. She looked and sounded like Kyle’s mom from South Park. Her lesson was clipped, dour, angry. Her culture was not about happiness and candy. It was about pain, suffering, and extreme defensiveness. At the end, she opened the floor to questions from us literal first graders, and each was met with dismissive anger.

“Are… so, like, you can eat cheese and you can eat meat but you can’t put cheese on meat?”

Eye roll, exhausted sigh: yes, yes OF COURSE that’s what I just told you!

“Is, umm, is that why [her son] gets to have orange juice with lunch when the rest of us have to drink milk?”

YES! Were you even LISTENING to me?!?

I was tempted to ask the woman how it could be that she was so mean when the other lady was so nice, but even at 6 years old I knew that would, at the very least, get me yelled at.

This woman’s presentation was disquieting enough that I remembered it about 15 years later, when I listened to a This American Life segment in which a woman described her childhood experience at a Jewish summer camp (I can’t find this particular segment, but something similar is discussed here). It was a normal camp experience with some Jewish cultural affectations, the lady said. But one day, the campers were put on lockdown and told the camp was under attack from antisemitic extremists. The children were terrified, naturally, screaming and crying, but after a while the counselors explained this was just a drill, but that they must always remain vigilant because bad people were out to get them. After this drill, the camp experience took on a weirdly militant tone, with kids crafting toy weapons and reenacting Israeli triumphs from 1948 and the Six Day War.

At this time, I was completely ignorant of and ambivalent toward Israel and Zionism. Halfway through the second grade, my family had moved to smaller town in a much more rural state that was approximately 106% white and Christian. Aside from history lessons about the horrors of the Holocaust and a single unit in an 8th grade World Religions class, I hadn’t spend any time thinking about Jewish matters for the same reason I didn’t spend much time thinking about Inuit culture or the history of the Latvian Orthodox Church—it didn’t seem like it was any of my business. I knew there were present-day conflicts, but there were conflicts everywhere. I knew that some people hated Jews for being Jewish, and I knew that was wrong. Everything else? Eh…

Shortly after I heard the TAL piece, I enrolled in a literature seminar course focusing on the works of Philip Roth. I immediately fell in love with his prose style and narrative mastery, and to this day I regard the period from Sabbath’s Theater to The Plot Against America as perhaps the most astoundingly productive decades of any author in American history (or, at least post-WWII). But his most famous and culturally consequential works were those from earlier in his career—Goodbye Columbus, Portnoy’s Complaint, and The Counterlife. These did not resonate with me anywhere near as strongly as the latter works.

Columbus is about the wistfulness one feels at the gloaming of youth, of falling in love with a person but feeling a sense of alienation toward the vagaries of her culture. It’s very well written, but these are common themes—almost universal, I dare say—and their profundity simply didn’t register with me.

Portnoy’s Complaint, easily Roth’s most famous work, is about the sexual and interpersonal neurosis of a young-ish man who has found material success but grapples with the psychological effects of his sexual proclivities. The sex is described in direct and crude terms and so the book caused a scandal even though it was published during the summer of love. But these themes were old hat by the time I read it in the mid-2000’s. Little about the book struck me as novel or even funny, let alone profound.

And then there was The Counterlife, Roth’s “experimental” novel that at the time I could best describe as “Pynchon but boring.” The book switches between perspectives and narrators, and its most salient conflict is a rift between Nathan Zuckerman (Roth’s stock protagonist who is widely regarded as the author’s stand-in) and his brother Henry. Henry has a severe heart condition that’s being treated with medicine that has rendered him impotent. He decides to undergo a dangerous and experimental surgery that will allow him to regain his sexual function—then some experimental narrative stuff happens and it’s not clear if he got the surgery and lived, didn’t get the surgery, or got it and died.

In the book’s second section, Henry is alive and has started life anew by emigrating to Israel. Henry’s wife is still in the US and convinced he’s gone nuts so she implores Nathan to go over there and bring him back. Nathan agrees, and he finds his brother living in a settlement of dubious legal providence, living among other settlers who are basically a violent cult. Henry castigates Nathan for being a self-loathing jew (a phrase I recognized from Woody Allen movies but never really thought about) and for disrespecting the mighty accomplishments of the Zionist state. Nathan fails to convince Henry to come back home to his wife.

Then, another narrative twist: on the airplane back home, Nathan encounters a deranged fan he had met in Israel. The fan tells him he snuck a gun and bomb onto the plane and is going to send a message to the world about Jews no longer being victims. Security disrupts the plot and arrests both men, and then the book takes another turn in which it’s Nathan who’s the impotent one and he can only do mouth stuff with his mistress. Then the book devolves into a long and disjointed meditation on how humans are shaped by the narratives they choose to adopt, which are fabricated by those who have come before them and only effectively exist to the degree to which outsiders believe them to be true.

When I first read it, I found the book inscrutable and its massive praise unwarranted. But at this time, it was 2006 or thereabouts. I was in my early twenties and had spent the entirety of my life absorbing the values of a liberal education system that was, to strain a metaphor, not necessarily run by the kind and pretty mom of my youth, but based upon the values she embodied. Everyone so strongly agreed that ethnic fatalism was bad that they never had to articulate as much. We understood that respect and equanimity were born through engagement and exchange, that embracing atomization leads necessarily to dehumanization and violence, that there was an immense and obvious value in seeking out and fostering connections with our fellow human beings.

Only very recently have I begun to realize that there exist large numbers of people who have rejected this paradigm completely, and that they have been allowed to steer the ships of our cultures into the wine-dark waters of their paranoia and hatred. There are many, many people who regard pain and subjugation as intrinsic to their existence, who not only regard peace and understanding as impossible but harbor an immense hatred to those who believe otherwise. The pretty mom hasn’t just lost. She’s died. We’ve dug up her grave and dumped her charred remains into a furnace or the sea, because we need to convince the world that she never even existed.

Roth’s prescience was recognizing these horrible developments in their early stages. His art was attempting to warn us of their consequences. Needless to say, no one listened.