Roth, Philip, (American Pastoral [hc, Houghton Mifflin, 1997] 978-0395860212 [pb, Vintage, 1998] 978-0099771814 [Seymour “Swede” Levov is the Jewish American success story, handsome, a gifted athlete, manager of his family’s glove manufacturing company, married with a family. His world is shattered when his daughter, Merry Levov, becomes radicalized in antiwar politics, and plants a bomb in protest which kills a man. She subsequently disappears and becomes a fugitive and the Levov family is disgraced. Swede spends futile years searching for her, while his marriage and sanity deteriorate. When he finally finds her years later, she is living in abominable conditions, a physical and emotional wreck. At its bleak conclusion, Swede’s entire world, family, and assumptions about his life and place in the world have collapsed in ruins. Roth’s final point is devastating: the dream of stable, assimilated, postwar American innocence—the “American pastoral”—was always fragile and perhaps illusory. The Swede’s tragedy is not simply that catastrophe struck his family, but that he fundamentally misunderstood the nature of human beings and history.]
United States · Fiction author
Philip Roth
Philip Roth (1933–2018, born in Newark, NJ and died in New York City) – [the pre-eminent American Jewish novelist of his generation. He engaged the subject of Jews and crime, though usually in indirect, psychological, social, or symbolic ways rather than through conventional gangster fiction or detective plots. Crime in Roth is often tied to transgression, fraud, sexual scandal, political paranoia, or the fear of Jewish moral corruption within American society. For the purposes of this bibliography, I will limit the focus to three of his books which deal more directly with different forms of criminal behaviour:
Roth, Philip, (Operation Shylock: A Confession [hc, Simon & Schuster, 1993] 978-0671703769 [pb, Vintage, 1994] 978-0679750291 [- a complex, metafictional political thriller, identity satire, and meditation on Jewishness, Israel, and the Holocaust. The novel begins with a character named “Philip Roth” traveling to Jerusalem during the late 1980s, at the time of the trial of alleged Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk (“Ivan the Terrible”). Roth has recently suffered a mental breakdown caused by the misuse of a tranquilizer. Once in Israel, he discovers that another man is impersonating him. This double—also calling himself Philip Roth—is publicly advocating a bizarre ideology about Jews leaving Israel and returning to Europe, and the relative safety of avoiding concentration in one vulnerable location. The novel intertwines various storylines, including pursuit of the impersonator; encounters with Israeli intellectuals, Mossad-linked figures, settlers, Palestinians, and Holocaust survivors; reflections on Jewish identity after the Holocaust; the Demjanjuk trial and questions of memory, testimony, and historical truth; and a quasi-spy narrative involving Israeli intelligence services. The narrator is eventually drawn into murky espionage intrigues and pressured by Israeli agents who suspect manipulation, propaganda, or deeper conspiracies. This cauldron of conflicting issues and blurred distinctions destabilizes the reader by mixing real historical events, autobiographical detail, and invented material. The narrator repeatedly insists that the book is a “confession,” while simultaneously making it impossible to know what is true. Among Roth’s works, it is one of the most sustained engagements with Israel and with internal Jewish ideological conflict.]
Roth, Philip (The Plot Against America [hc, Houghton Mifflin, 2004] 978-0618509287 [pb, Vintage, 2005] 978-1400079490 [See related film] [an alternative-history story imagining what might have happened if the United States had turned toward authoritarian nationalism and antisemitism on the eve of World War II. In the 1940 presidential election campaign, the isolationist Charles Lindbergh promises to keep America out of the war in Europe while subtly encouraging antisemitic sentiment. He defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt and signs non-aggression understandings with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Anti-Semitism gradually becomes normalized in American public life. Rather than focusing on high politics alone, the novel shows how national changes invade everyday life: friendships fracture, relatives become politically divided, and ordinary Jews begin to fear for their safety and citizenship. Government programs pressure Jewish families to disperse from urban communities into rural America in the name of “Americanization.” Crime here becomes governmental and societal.
As the novel progresses, riots, intimidation, conspiracy theories, and state-sanctioned persecution intensify. Radio commentator Walter Winchell becomes one of Lindbergh’s loudest critics and is eventually assassinated, helping trigger nationwide anti-Jewish violence. Lindbergh then mysteriously disappears, the country descends toward chaos, and rumors of a Jewish conspiracy fuel further pogrom-like unrest. Eventually the historical timeline is restored, Roosevelt returns to power, and the United States enters World War II.]
In sum, Roth is not concerned with Jewish organized crime so much as with the question: What happens when Jews cease being exemplary outsiders and become fully implicated in the corruption, violence, and disorder of modern life? That question runs through much of his fiction. Roth helped transform Jewish-American literature by insisting Jews could be immoral, violent, sexually excessive, politically dangerous, self-divided, ridiculous, or destructive— rather than merely victims, moral exemplars, or comic outsiders. That was one reason his work was so controversial within parts of the American Jewish community in the 1960s and 1970s. [ChatGPT] See companion list of Movies-Films-TV Series for entry on 2020 TV miniseries adaptation of the book.