Roth as Nostradamus
As the novel develops, Roth depicts other moments that feel eerily familiar to ... that Philip Roth had Nostradamus-like skills at prognostication.
Philip on Death and Taxes ...
Philip Roth on Mortality: "It's a Bad Contract, and We All Have to Sign It" | Literary Hub
Philip on Death and Taxes ...
Philip Roth on Mortality: "It's a Bad Contract, and We All Have to Sign It" | Literary Hub
Philip Roth - Writer - Prague, Kafka, and more... - Web of Stories
With Philip Roth's death, a light on the American psyche went out
Jewishness and neurosis. Sexuality and the modern masculinity crisis. Damaged, intellectual and frequently adulterous men seeking solace in the bodies of younger women. When I think of Philip Roth's work, Frank Black's "she's my way out of here" lyrics always seem like an appropriate soundtrack.
Philip Roth: arousing and appalling in equal measures, the divisivE novelist and media dragon Asymmetry Is About as Loving a Eulogy as You'll Find for Philip Roth
From 1972 through 1977, I travelled to Prague every spring for a week or ten days to see a group of writers, journalists, historians, and professors there who were being persecuted by the Soviet-backed totalitarian Czech regime.
I was followed by a plainclothesman most of the time I was there, and my hotel room was bugged, as was the room’s telephone. However, it was not until 1977, when I was leaving an art museum where I’d gone to see a ludicrous exhibition of Soviet socialist-realism painting—it was not until that sixth year that I was detained by the police. The intervention was unsettling, and the next day, heeding their suggestion, I left the country.
Though I kept in touch by mail—sometimes coded mail—with some of the dissident writers I’d met and befriended in Prague, I was not able to get a visa to return to Czechoslovakia again for twelve years, until 1989. In that year, the Communists were driven out and Václav Havel’s democratic government came into power, wholly legitimately, not unlike General Washington and his government in 1788, through a unanimous vote of the Federal Assembly and with the overwhelming support of the Czech people.
The Unbounded Spirit of Philip Roth - The New York Times
Philip Roth, master chronicler of the American berserk, is dead. He was 85... Zadie Smith... Paul Berman... Dwight Garner...Stephen Metcalf... Nathan Englander... James Wood... Bernard Henri-Levy...Sam Lipsyte... Roger Cohen... Ron Charles... Marc Weitzmann... Wash Post...Guardian... The Forward... Media Dragons
In Prague | The New Yorker
The impact of Czechoslovakia's split
The “Velvet Divorce”, the name given to the splitting of Czechoslovakia on January 1st 1993, echoed the bloodless Velvet Revolution that ...
A writer reflects on the loss of a "True Judge."
By JOSHUA COHEN
Baruch dayan ha’emet: This is what Jews say upon being told of another Jew’s death. The phrase, which derives from a Talmudic blessing, means “Blessed is the True Judge”—which can seem a strange, emotionless, and even mindless phrase to utter until you understand the practicality behind it. According to the rabbis, God will refuse your thanks for the good things in life, unless you also thank Him for the bad. You must thank God for all things, no matter how shitty and wasting they might be; no matter how much they might harm you. Accepting God’s judgement—regardless of what that judgement is—accepting it with humility and grace, reaffirms your faith just at the moment at which that faith is being tested, and so this phrase is regarded by Jews as an initial step toward what some Americans call “healing.”
Anyway, this was what I said on Tuesday night, when I was told of the death of Philip Roth: Baruch dayan ha’emet.
In this case, however, I wasn’t proclaiming my resignation to any divine decree. Rather I was blessing Roth himself.
Because Roth, to me was the True Judge. His literature exerted that authority: What he wrote, I accepted; I swallowed. Even his most outlandish fictions, I subscribed to, I assented to—I felt I had no choice. His writing had the style of a verdict, an edict. His sentences, with their total and carefully claused control, came down to me from the mountain—or from the high shelves of the library of the Hebrew Academy of Atlantic County, New Jersey—like commandments cut into stone, and as the descriptions accumulated, as the arguments and counter-arguments piled up, and the appetites were embraced and disavowed with equal fervor, all I could do was submit, surrender, and give myself up completely to his power.
There have been fewer than ten writers—not enough for a minyan—who have ever held such sway over me, and Roth was the only one who, until yesterday, was still living: the only one who could create a world that I couldn’t object to, or overturn, at least when I was in the heat of my reading. Sometimes, to experience this force was stifling. How could I, who was born down the Shore, in Atlantic City, believe in a God who was also from New Jersey? But most of the time, it inspired my awe: How could I, who was born down the Shore, in Atlantic City, not believe in a God who was also from New Jersey?
Roth wasn’t just a maker of ukases: He was a maker of miracles too. Let other Jews multiply loaves and fishes and turn water into wine, Roth managed the more generous and so more impressive feat of turning the parochial into the national. He made his Jersey Jews an American concern, and through that assimilation, they—and that process of assimilation itself—went international.
Every immigrant American writer of every ethnicity and race and, yes, gender, who followed in his wake—whether they acknowledge it or not, whether they like acknowledging it or not—is in his debt. Sure, other writers had tried this transubstantiation trick before—notably Bellow, whom Roth idolized, and that other Roth, Henry—but only Philip Roth attempted it so explicitly, and yet, paradoxically, so casually, in book after book after book (almost 30 novels in all), as if by sheer effort he could drag not just the Old World into the New World, but the New World into the Global.
Roth was also, please remember, a devoted chronicler of the flawed, and so before rushing to censure him for misogyny or chauvinism or any other variety of insensitivity, we’d do well to spend this shiva week revisiting the history, or anti-history, of Socialist Realism. This Soviet doctrine—which dictated that writers should write about the world as it should be, and not about the world as it is—was the bane of Eastern Bloc literature, many of whose eminences wouldn’t have been translated (Bruno Schulz, Danilo Kis), and wouldn’t have been able to physically survive (Milan Kundera, Ivan Klima), without Roth’s principled and circumspect charity. He published their books under his imprint, Writers from the Other Europe; he sent them money. That Roth was such a champion of speech can be attributed to a youth that began under the clouds of World War II and finished amid the politico-sexual tumult of the 1960s. In other words, while Roth might’ve been bred for patriotism, that sentiment was retained not out of filial duty, but continually earned through his struggles against irony and cynicism. He might’ve been the last American novelist ever to fly the American flag in all sincerity: At least, he hung one in the window of his apartment, after September 11.
The Cult of Philip Roth