Philip Roth Enters the Gentile World-An Autobiographical Vignette

...It wasn't the romantic idyll that impressed me so much as the matter-of-factness...

...His education, through eighth grade, also seemed to him an impediment to promotion...

...The football pool was illegal—run, my father told me, by Longy Zwillman and the Newark mob—but I began to buy the cards when I was about 11 and, with a couple of other neighborhood kids, started selling them on the school playground for the candy-store owner when I was 13, establishing my sole affiliation ever with organized crime...

...To make matters worse, we didn't look like a family in need...

...I had not forgotten the campus—either the green quadrangles or the evocative word—yet it would never have occurred to me to apply there...

...I'd get into Bucknell, all right, but for lack of funds I wouldn't be able to enroll...

...She kept a kosher kitchen, lit Sabbath candles, and happily fulfilled all the Passover dietary regulations, though less out of religious proclivity than because of deep ties to her childhood household and to her mother, whose ideas of what made for a properly run Jewish home she wished to satisfy and uphold...

...He certainly was not uneasy being inside a university building for the first time...

...it was a town of about five thousand people, situated at the heart of one of the most conservative Republican counties in the state...

...If anything, my mother, in a demure navy-blue dress, was dressed more attractively—though with no less propriety—than the assistant to the director of admissions...

...sometimes he would leave behind copies of paperback books he'd been reading on the subway and the train home...

...I couldn't have been more dutiful and well mannered, and lacked anything resembling unconstrainable impulses...

...In the middle 1940s, as I made the transition from grade school to high school, a business risk he took wiped out the family savings...

...Not since I'd been to Princeton with my Uncle Ed had I strolled around a town where people actually lived in houses dating back to the 18th century...

...In a predominantly gentile environment, however, she lost her social suppleness and something too of her confidence, and her instinctive respectability came to seem more of a shield with which to safeguard ^herself than the natural expression of her decency...

...After long consultations with my mother, he had invested with some friends in a frozen-food distribution company, and for several years he continued by day as a Metropolitan insurance man while at night and on weekends, without drawing a salary, he went out on the refrigerated truck, trying to hustle frozen-food business in Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania...

...I didn't care where "away" was—one college would do as well as another...

...I sat up late at the little desk in my room, a stack of hotel stationery at the ready for recording my "thoughts...

...but as for college guidance, I knew I had better look elsewhere...

...I couldn't forget what he'd said about the girl: He would pick her up at her dormitory in the morning and they'd walk to class together across the campus...

...8...

...In fact, she was never wholly at ease except among Jews and for that reason cherished our part of Newark...

...My father, a fit and solid-looking man of 50, with thinning hair and rimless spectacles, wore a dark business suit with a vest and looked like someone who himself sat behind a desk and interviewed applicants, as indeed he frequently had done while reorganizing the unproductive staff at the Union City office...

...But the business went bust quickly, and when I was ready for college, he was still saddled with paying off his debt...

...All I needed were professors and courses and a library...

...but I was also strong-minded and independent, and if my father were to challenge the ordering of my private life, now that I was a college student, I would feel suffocated by his strictures...

...In only a matter of weeks this kid, whom I had thought of as being in the shadow of more intense, loquacious types like me, had developed a confident, outgoing manner that smacked of maturity...

...He was 45 and took the risk because it seemed unlikely that, being Jewish, he could get any further with the Metropolitan...

...At 8, 9, and 10, home had seemed just perfect, but that was no longer so at 16 and I wanted to get away...

...But this self-consciousness should not be exaggerated...

...You're not going to Missouri," my father informed me...

...In all, it was an unoutlandish little college town of the kind I'd seen before only in movies with Kay Kyser or June Allyson, not so much subdued or genteel, and certainly not posh or gentrified, but instead suited for the coziest, most commonplace dreams of order...

...Fortunately, in 1949 he was PHILIP ROTH unexpectedly promoted by the Metropolitan to manage an office just outside Newark, in Union City...

...A champion of the Four Freedoms, a foe of the DAR, a supporter of Henry Wallace, I detested the idea of privilege that these famously elitist colleges, with their discriminatory policies, seemed to symbolize...

...He was a good, quiet student with an enthusiasm for baseball, very much the product of a respectable, secularized Jewish family...

...In 1946, with the war draft still on, Sandy had gone into the Navy, and when he came out, in 1948, he was able to attend art school in Brooklyn without help from the family...

...He drew from nude models, he had his own apartment, as a sailor he'd sat in bars where there were whores, and now he did quick, expressive pen-and-ink sketches of Bowery bums...

...My brother had been a Saturday student at the Art Students League in New York during his high school days and, after his discharge from the Navy, spent three years at Pratt Institute...

...here lived the fraternity men...

...I replayed over and over the conversation with my father in the hotel elevator, adding a line of my own that I would not have had the self-control to say to him face-to-face but that I was able to write freely and exuberantly on a sheet of the Lewisburger's paper...

...Though there was something cheery in his temperate character I'd always liked, I found him more housebound than the boys to whom I was closest...

...I had wanted desperately to go away to college, if only to the Rutgers main campus, down in New Brunswick, but though I had graduated at 16, well up in my class, I'd been unable to win a Rutgers scholarship...

...It's too far and we can't afford it...

...Yes, but how can we afford it if they won't give* me a scholarship for September...

...Marty attended a small college of about 1,900 students whose name meant as little to me as Wake Forest or Bowling Green— Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania...

...They have a great journalism school," I told her...

...That's why we'd rooted so hard for Rutgers...

...I felt a buoyant sense of having survived the worst while preserving unimpaired the long-standing pre-university accord that would seem to have made us an indestructible family: "And now we won't have to have that terrible fight—we've been saved by Bucknell...

...At Newark Rutgers, I might be becoming more of a Newarker and an American but I couldn't fool myself, even with the pipe and the Trojans, about feeling more like a man...

...for jewelry she wore the little gold pin she'd been awarded after serving two terms as president of the PTA...

...What's more, if I couldn't win a scholarship to Rutgers, how could I expect assistance from the Ivy League...

...I was upset to hear that...

...And because of the war and the post-war draft, the generation of college-educated younger men whose example I might have followed had disappeared from the neighborhood entirely...

...As for Harvard and Yale, not only did they seem, like Princeton, to be bastions of the gentile upper crust, socially too exclusive and unsympathetic, but their admissions officers were revealed by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith to employ "Jewish quotas," a practice that disgusted a patriotic young American (let alone a member of an ineluctably Jewish family) like me...

...If I remember correctly, Marty practiced the piano with real devotion, which in my mind may have separated him a little too much from those of us who counterbalanced good grades and courteous conduct with shooting craps on the sly and (against the unlikely possibility of being called upon to produce one) storing sealed Trojans in our wallets...

...Even though a big chunk of his salary still went to paying off his business debt, his earnings had increased measurably since he'd taken over as manager of the Union City office, and there had been no choice but to give the correct figure on my aid application form...

...My parents turned out to have been as impressed as I was, though probably less by Bucknell's collegiate look than by our enthusiastic guide, a Jewish boy from our block who seemed to them, as he did to me, to be thriving wonderfully in this unfamiliar atmosphere...

...He had hoped that by the time his two sons graduated from high school, the new enterprise would have taken offand he'd be able to afford to send us both to college...

...There was a clock in the cupola of the men's dorm that chimed on the hour, an elegant spire atop the new library, a student hangout that Marty familiarly called Chet's (though a sign identified it as The Bison), and a dormitory called Larison Hall, where that girlfriend of his had her room...

...I read the names of these places on the sports pages of the Newark Evening News and the Newark Sunday Call and saw them on the football-pool cards that you could buy at the candy store on our corner for as little as a quarter...

...between that and his almost palpable pride in me and my scholastic success, he radiated an unpolished, good-natured confidence that stirred my own pride but that, I felt certain, was killing my chances for a Bucknell scholarship...

...While I was finishing high school, he would come home from Pratt on weekends to set up his easel in the dining room and, over a thick layer of old newspapers, lay out his paints and his drawing materials on the dining room table...

...His family lived even closer to the corner candy store than mine did, but Marty was only rarely to be seen hanging out in the back booths or standing outside by the fire hydrant where I would sometimes amuse the corner regulars with takeoffs of the school principal and the local rabbi...

...In March of 1951 my parents and I made the seven-hour drive to Lewisburg, about 60 miles up from Harrisburg, in a farming valley along the Susquehanna River...

...Since none of my immediate relatives had ever graduated from a liberal arts college, there was no one to point me in the direction of his alma mater...

...To be sure, everything about the rural landscape and the small-town setting (and Miss Blake) suggested an unmistakably gentile version of unpretentious civility, but by 1951 none of us thought it pretentious or unseemly that the momentum of our family's Americanization should have carried us, in half a century, from my Yiddish-speaking grandparents' hard existence in Newark's poorest ghetto neighborhood to this pretty place whose harmonious nativeness was proclaimed in every view...

...In addition to using up the family savings, he'd had to borrow some S8,000 from relatives in order to pay for his share in the partnership...

...But great as my admiration was for these achievements, Sandy's mode wasn't one I could simply emulate: his studies were preparing him for a career as an artist, while my talent, as described in the family, was "the gift of the gab...

...when they showed up again, they were veterans on the GI Bill who seemed vastly older and unapproachable...

...She was less optimistic about my receiving financial aid as a transfer student but assured us that I'd be in a better position to compete for a scholarship after having proved myself at Bucknell...

...Lewisburg emanated an unpretentious civility that we could trust, rather than an air of privilege by which we might have been intimidated...

...I was quite tame, a good, responsible boy with good, responsible friends...

...Marty, who is now a physician in New Jersey, was something of a loner—a skinny, very tall boy, seemingly not so obsessed with sex or so romantically adventurous as my best friends...

...Scattered about Philip Roth Among Gentiles continued from page 25 the campus and on streets down from the Hill were a dozen or so manorial-looking buildings with facades inspired either by English stately homes or by colonnaded plantation dwellings...

...Missouri," my mother repeated tragically...

...Later that day Marty Castlebaum took us on a tour of the university grounds and around the charming tree-lined streets leading to the main shopping thoroughfare, where we had rooms for the night in the Hotel Lewisburger...

...Casually making friends over paper-bag lunches with gentile classmates who had graduated from Barringer and South Side and Central and West Side—boys who previously had been nothing more to me than tough and generally superior adversaries in intercity sporting events—made me fefel expansively "American...

...I'm sure that to Miss Blake, during my Bucknell interview, my mother seemed nothing more or less than perfectly agreeable and ladylike...

...I had also outgrown the family dinner table and was as impatient as any rapidly maturing adolescent with my parents' conversation, but the main reason that I wanted to get away from home for my sophomore year was to protect a hardworking, self-sacrificing father and a devoted but determined son from a battle that they were equally ill-equipped to fight...

...Under the bleachers of the playground they taught us how to shoot craps and to play five-card stud with change stolen from our mothers' purses and our fathers' trouser pockets...

...Forget the scholarship," he told me...

...Through the pool I probably became familiar with far more institutions of higher learning than was the college adviser at the high school, who had suggested to me, when I admitted I might actually like to become a journalist rather than a lawyer, that I should apply to the University of Missouri...

...On "the Hill," at the heart of the campus, the windows of the men's dormitory looked beyond cornfields and pastures to the Lycoming hills...

...As it was, the picture we presented, of a self-made, enterprising, happily cohesive and prospering family, convinced me that I was doomed...

...The turnabout in his fortunes (and ours) had renewed his prodigious energies...

...At this college called Bucknell, in less than a semester, Marty Castlebaum had become an independent young man sounding an independent young man's prerogatives without shame or guilt or secrecy...

...When I told my parents her advice, my mother looked flabbergasted...

...I was astonished: I was still on Leslie Street, keeping my father at bay by heeding high school rules of conduct, while Marty appeared to have entered adult society...

...It was during Christmas vacation from Newark Rutgers that I got to talking to my Leslie Street neighbor Marty Castlebaum, with whom I'd had a genial, if not particularly intimate, friendship ever since grade school...

...That's how, at 15 and 16, I came to read Winesburg, Ohio and A Portrait of the Artist and Only the Dead Know Brooklyn...

...I graduated from high school in January of 1950 and worked as a stock clerk in a Newark department store until I enrolled, in September, as a pre-law student, at Newark Colleges of Rutgers, the unprestigious little downtown branch of the state university...

...There were other colleges, anyway, hundreds of them: Wake Forest, Bowling Green, Clemson, Allegheny, Baylor, Vander-bilt, Bowdoin, Colby, Tulane—I knew their names, if nothing more (not even precisely where all of them were), from listening to Stan Lomax and Bill Stern announce the football scores on the radio Saturday nights throughout the fall...

...I hadn't any doubts that we Jews were already American or that the Weequahic section was anything other than a quintessenA selection from The Facts A Novelist's Autobiography by Philip Roth, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc...

...In grade school I'd been taken once by my Uncle Ed, a cardboard-carton dealer, to see a football game at Princeton...

...I'd study hard, get a "good education," and go on to become the idealistic lawyer I'd imagined becoming since I was 12...

...Still and all, he may well have endured a more inflexible regimen, more assiduously imposed, than what befell me, coming five years later, after she'd had the education of raising him and when my father's weekly Metropolitan paycheck had begun to mitigate their financial anxieties...

...As soon as my brother and I started giving genuine signs of burgeoning independence, she had relaxed the exacting, sometimes overly fastidious strictures that had governed our early upbringing and began to be mildly intimidated by our airs of maturity...

...Our only real tutors were the ex-GIs—the rumba dancers and service station attendants, the make-out artists, soda jerks, and short-order cooks—who had little to do but hang around and play pickup basketball with us...

...Philip Roth Enters the Gentile World AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL VIGNETTE Working as an assistant manager in the Essex district office of Metropolitan Life, my father earned, during his best years, about S125 a week in salary and commissions...

...I considered it a kind of triumphant liberation to have been drawn into the city's rivalrous ethnic society, especially as our liberal arts studies were working—in my idealistic vision—to elevate us above serious social differences, to free from cultural narrowness and intellectual impoverishment the offspring of Weequahic's Jewish businessmen as well as working-class boys from the Ironbound district...

...It appealed to my liberal democratic spirit to be taking college courses in a building that had once been a brewery and to be seated there alongside Italian and Irish kids from city high schools that had been foreign, unknowable, even unnervingly hostile to me when I was attending a neighborhood school whose student body was more than 90 percent Jewish...

...It was a rather prototypic kind of movement, I think, for the mother to go from nurturing her sons to being a little afraid of them and for the sons to move out of their mother's province at 13 or 14...

...Had he been an embarrassment (and of course beforehand I feared he might be), had he tried too hard, setting out to sell Bucknell on what a good boy I was or telling Miss Blake about the progress made in America by our vast array of relatives, we could, in fact, have been in better shape for seeming that much cruder...

...Sandy-—born when she was 23, a pretty, very innocent young woman in a penniless marriage whose own girlhood had been rigorously overseen by a stem, tyrannical father—seems as a child to have felt more constrained by her vigilant mothering than I ever did, though he, no less than I, found more than a little sustenance in the inexhaustible maternal feeling that visibly instigated and tenderized that conscientiousness...

...It felt invigoratingly grown-up to be downtown not as a kid going to the movies with his friends or a boy out to Sunday dinner with his family or a lowly stock clerk mindlessly pushing a rack around S. Klein's, but as the owner of spanking-new textbooks, with a businesslike briefcase (for his lunch) and a pipe in his pocket that he was learning to smoke...

...Though I don't think I could have expressed this then in so many words, I certainly didn't want to recapitulate, at Harvard or Yale, my father's struggle at the Metropolitan to succeed with an institution holding a long-standing belief in Protestant Anglo-Saxon superiority...

...It was the campus that most beguiled me: ivy-covered brick buildings sparsely set amid large trees and long, rolling lawns...

...At the same time, I knew that if I remained in our five-room flat on Leslie Street, living and studying in the bedroom that I had shared since earliest childhood with my brother, there would be increasing friction between my father and me, simply because I could no longer truthfully account to him, or to my mother, either—though she would never dare ask— for my weekend whereabouts or my Saturday night hours...

...In her office Miss Blake, let's call her, told the three of us that with my high school standing and my Newark Rutgers grades I'd have no trouble being admitted with full credit for my freshman courses...

...being a Jew among Jews was, simply, one of her deepest pleasures...

...My mother was really no problem...

...Yet, for reasons of pride and privacy, he forbade me to report the debt...

...There was even a girlfriend, whom he spoke of without a trace of his old shyness...

...After dinner in the hotel restaurant, when Marty had left for his dormitory and we were in the elevator on our way up to bed, my father said to me, "You like it, don't you...

...My dream of away remained fervent, however satisfied I actually found myself at Newark Rutgers, which was situated a little beyond the city's commercial district at the "historic" end of the downtown streets, about a 20-minute bus ride from my corner...

...It wasn't what he said about his studies that made me want to find out more but that he appeared to have absorbed there precisely the qualities that he'd been devoid of as an adolescent, the sort of poise and savoir /aire that encouraged a boy to run for student council president or to date the most popular girl in class...

...The district was doing virtually no business when he came in but offered a real financial opportunity if he could somehow inspire the hapless agency with his know-how and energy...

...You want to go here, you're going...

...I was to be interviewed by an assistant to the director of admissions, a courteous middle-aged woman whose name I've by now forgotten...

...The Castlebaums' outward configuration—and household orderliness—resembled my own family's: a highly competent and well-mannered mother, a hardworking, forthright father (a lawyer, however, and so a big vocational notch up from mine), and an older brother whom Marty strikingly resembled...

...in a way she fell in love with us all over again, like a shy schoolgirl this time, hoping for a date...

...Copyright ©1988 by Philip Roth All rights reserved tially American urban neighborhood, but as a child of the war and of the brotherhood mythology embodied in songs like Frank Sinatra's "The House I Live In" and Tony Martin's "Tenement Symphony," I was exhilarated to feel in contact with the country's much-proclaimed, self-defining heterogeneity...

...She was 47 then, a slender, attractive woman with graying dark hair and lively brown eyes whose appearance and comportment were thoroughly Americanized...

...I knew from my uncle that despite the presence of Einstein, to whose house we'd made a pilgrimage, Princeton didn't "take Jews...

...On a tiny green near his fraternity house there was a Civil War cannon that Marty daringly told my parents went off "when a virgin walks by...

...part of the problem, I figured, had to do with my father's promotion...

...As it happened, he was spared the expense of my brother's college education by the GI Bill...

...I wound up as a freshman in Newark, still living at home...