Misreading Roth

Is The Controversy that Follows Philip Roth Justified?




Why does controversy seem to follow Philip Roth around? His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, touched off a riot of a reaction in the Jewish- American community when it was published in 1959. Roth, his detractors said, went out of his way to depict his fictional suburban Jews in an unpleasant light, a portrayal that would only give succour to antisemites. Ten years later, in 1969, Portnoy’s Complaint somehow scandalised an America that had witnessed a shocking number of political assassinations, watched nightly the televised carnage of Vietnam, and feared the revolutionaries that seemed to be taking over its cities. (To be fair, most Americans had never before read a depiction of an adolescent masturbating with a piece of liver.) None of the scandals that followed ever reached the heights of these first two, but Roth has, despite writing within a culture that seems to have less and less time for the printed word, shown a consistent talent for making headlines.
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Borges and the Jews part III: Deutsches Requiem

Who shall tell me if you, Israel, are to be found in the lost labyrinth of the secular rivers that is my blood?
—J.L.B., ‘To Israel’

The consensus among Borges’ biographers and critics is that he was deeply apolitical and remained disengaged with local, national, and international affairs throughout his life. It is true that Borges was, especially in his adolescence, a dilettante à la Oscar Wilde minus the ornamental outspokenness. But to certain events he offered political comment, often heavy with sarcasm, of great force. A partial yet enlightening record of his opinions can be found in Selected Non-fiction, edited by Eliot Weinberger. Of the entire selection, only a small portion address the events in Europe; still, they are significant in that they allow a glimpse of Borges’ beliefs and the trenchant style with which he debunked ugly stereotypes. Borges denounced Hitler almost from the start, decrying the arrival of Nazism as a catastrophe for German culture. In ‘A Pedagogy of Hatred,’ he attacks the publication, in Germany of the children’s book Trau keinem Fuchs auf gruener Heid und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid [Don’t Trust Any Fox from a Heath or Any Jew on his Oath]. Here is Suzanne Jill Levine’s translation included in Selected Non-Fiction: Read more

A Catalogue of Jewish Symbols by Ilan Stavans

I feel a contentment in defeat.
— J.L.B., ‘Deutches Requiem’

Borges was a rara avis. The intelligentsia in Latin America, particularly the Left-leaning one, has never been particularly interested in things Jewish. (It isn’t overtly anti-Semitic either, although since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that intelligentsia has become openly anti-Zionist.) More often than not, Jews and their contribution to Western Civilization, are ignored. Is this silence a form of attack? Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize winner in 1990, never addressed Jewishness in an upfront fashion. Paz covered every single imaginable topic in the humanities in his magisterial oeuvre yet not a single poem of his deals with the Jews in general, let alone those in the Hispanic world. Likewise with Julio Cortázar, and Gabriel García Márquez. Exceptions to the rule are Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa. Fuentes has several novels on the subject: A Change of Skin on the Nazis, The Hydra Head on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Terra Nostra on the Jews in the Iberian Peninsula prior to 1492; and Vargas Llosa authored The Storyteller, about a Jewish anthropologist in Lima who becomes a griot among the Machiguenga tribe in the Amazon. Vargas has also, in his sustained non-fiction career, debated issues such as anti-Semitism and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Borges was interested in Jews, not as people overwhelmed with ideological interests, religious fervour and personal passions, but as abstractions. He was attracted to Jews as metaphors. This is not to say he didn’t socialize with them. While in Geneva and Spain during World War I, he befriended a number of Jews of Polish-Jewish origin, among them Maurice Abramowicz (about whom he wrote a poem in 1984) and Simón Jichlinski. They were ‘my two bosom friends,’ Borges wrote in the autobiographical pieces published in The New Yorker. He also became close to Rafael Cansinos-Assens, the latter a Sephardic author responsible for El candelabro de los siete brazos. But what attracted him was the Jew as symbol. Read more

Yo, JudÍo

Borges and the Jews

If I am not one of Thy repetitions or errata…
—J.L.B., ‘The Secret Miracle’

Throughout his life, Jorge Luis Borges was overwhelmed by a strange feeling of unworthiness. Read more