How Not to Be a Jewish Writer

...For Roth, possessed of every gift for writing infectiously and diversely about Jewish life, the outsider's position has had the dismal effect of forfeiting an entire world th at an ambitious novelist could aspire to encompass...

...Czech writers, explains the commissar, "must not only make the country's literature, they must be the touchstone for general decency...

...The hero befriends a Japanese executive and his family, briefly works on an assembly line making elevator parts, meets women "of the pleasure quarter" who paint their teeth black, eats cold prawns for breakfast, lusts for buttered bagels, and finally goes back to California and his understanding laid-back girl friend...

...What a witty, stylish comedy of manners these have-nots of Prague make out of their unbearable condition, this crushing business of being completely balked and walking the treadmill of humiliation...

...The rising note of desperation on which the trilogy ends confirms our suspicion that a writer of Roth's intelligence, mulling over in so many volumes what his responsibilities really are, must be coming to feel that the critics have not done him as large an injustice as he has done his three major subjects: family, the world of Jewish Americans, and the writer's profession...

...Could Roth, detecting more persecutors every year, be demanding a retrial in Kafka's city...

...the people in a state of impervious heaviness...

...At the bidding of an unctuous Czech refugee, Sisovsky (who assures him he is a genius like Musil, Proust and Mann, that not a single intelligent review of his book has been published), Zuckerman travels to Prague to retrieve the Yiddish stories written by Sisovsky's father...

...Just as the comedians gave that vast terrain over to a mild sentimental mediocrity like Sam Levinson, novelists have relinquished it to popular practitioners like Herman Wouk and Chaim Potok...

...But a v/riter who is conscious of being Jewish and ambitious of literary accomplishment does have to be recognizably and unaffectedly so in his fiction, very much as Eudora Welty has to be Southern or Balzac French...

...He was, for instance, sufficiently curious about and embroiled in American life to undertake the difficult subject of the changing relationships between blacks and Jews in The Tenant...

...Here, where "the literary culture is held hostage" and the main shock ought to reside in the censorship and tyranny over Czech artists, Roth makes one deliberate move after another to reconstitute himself as an authentic Jew...

...whereupon the American visitor imagines Susan Sontag wrapping buns at a Broadway bakery, Gore Vidal bicycling sa-lamis to school lunchrooms in Queens...

...faces that appear to be on strike against life...

...It's the first and last funny passage in an epilogue of ferocious confusion between the grim fate imposed on the Czechs and the mortifying one imposed on Zuckerman by himself...

...You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life," Zuckerman insists...

...Ever since the fantasy figure of a live Anne Frank made its decidedly unsuitable appearance in The Ghost Writer (the exact point of diminishing returns for that promising short novel), Roth has been telling himself and us what a serious scribe and concerned Jew he really is...

...In a recent review of Herman Brod-key's new work, Women and Angels, Leon Wieseltier asks legitimately, "Why does everything that a Jew does have to be Jewish...

...with the familiar phrases of disapproval for his books...

...Though it may well be curtains for Roth after the unseemly self-tributes contained in "The Prague Orgy," the critics have until now had reason not to give up on him entirely...

...As a DeVries character quips, alienation is big these days, and no one feels at home without it...

...old, what is there to prevent him from reviewing the situation and beginning again...

...As Zuckerman dons the garments of East European oppression Bolotka comments, "Even in my disgraceful dressing gown, you look like a happy, healthy, carefree impostor...

...Ruth" Westheimer on radio and television is the outrageous conclusion that his injuries at the hands of critics in some way parallel the treatment of artists behind the Iron Curtain...

...To the extent that Philip Roth has ignored this lesson of the master, he has repeatedly thwarted his own talents...

...The country looks to them for moral leadership.' As if all this were not enough, Zuckerman receives a warning that he will be thrown into jail for espionage, he hears reports of mysterious drownings, and the manuscripts he finally cajoles from Sisovsky's resentful discarded wife are instantly confiscated...

...Still, if a novelist is gifted, Jewish and not too...

...For example, Grace Paley has never made a point of being Jewish, but she has, through an unlikely blend of poetry and urban staccato, created a special Jewish inflection...

...We have only to recall Saul Bellow's moving and attentive evocation of a bleak Bucharest in The Dean's December to see that Roth's Prague, devoid of self-respecting novelists like Milan Kun-dera, of a genuine life and real (instead of cafe) conversations, is only a more exacerbated rubric for the unchanging author's derision...

...His subsequent Teitlebaum's Window, much less noticed than it deserved to be, conjured up, in large chunks of slightly churlish nostalgia, teenagers trysting on the dank sand under the Coney Island boardwalk, a husband dejected because his wife denied him creamed spinach, middle-aged ladies yearning to appear on radio shows, students coming into their own in classrooms—the choleric romanticism of lower-middle-class Brooklyn...

...Friedman invents a cardboard-game Japan in seeking to recapture the fun of boyhood adventure fiction...

...Unfortunately, brilliance in some Jewish comics—Joan Rivers, Jackie Mason, Lenny Bruce—as well as some distinguished fiction writers—Delmore Schwartz, Bruce J. Friedman (in Stern) and Philip Roth—has gone hand in hand with speedy observation of foibles in those who are closest to them...

...Why should a trilogy about the rise and decline of a Jewish-American novelist struggling with his readers, his conscience and his problematic disposition end with an episode so peripheral to his actual experience...

...He makes his way among "the old-time streetcars, the barren shops, the soot-blackened bridges...

...They are hardly ever inclined to take pleasure in the human comedy like the more benign British humorists, Kingsley Amis and David Lodge...

...Her prose, patient and savory, radiates a lovely mix of Jewish irony and tolerance...

...This is not at all to suggest that the latter lack talent, or cannot engross us—only to make a distinction between them and writers with obvious tonicity of mind, intensity of feeling and originality of style, such as those chroniclers of the '30s, Henry Roth and Daniel Fuchs, and in our time Bellow and Bernard Malamud...

...What, we can't help wondering, can have brought a once talented, exuberant fiction writer to this sorry pass...

...Not without eloquence, a reader may note, till he gets to the suspect sentence that follows: "This is the city I imagined during the War's worst years when, as a Hebrew studenl of little more than nine, I went out after supper with my blue-and-white collection can to solicit from the neighbors for the Jewish National Fund...

...In addition to creating a whole galaxy of characters who mean a great deal to us, who call attention to the feelings we know and those we have still to acknowledge—the grocer in The Assistant, the striving artist Fidelman, the devoted couple in "Angel Levine"— Bernard Malamud thinks instinctively in terms of moral examination...

...Wallace Markfield, whose first novel, To An Early Grave, was an amusing satire about a group of Jewish intellectuals in the Partisan Review circle, managed for all his acerbity to make his characters arresting and empathetic, and to give an accurate sense of what their universe was like...

...It will certainly look odd to the prospective buyer of this large volume that an author usually provincial and glued to his own anxieties should suddenly take us on an unprepared-for leap into East European territory...

...Her characters, if only in their need to congregate, to talk things over, seem familiarly Jewish...

...Though the plights of Malamud's heroes are never without heavy obstacles, neither they nor the author ever withdraw from the world...

...Apart from being a skilled craftsman, he was that rare phenomenon in American letters, a comic novelist—we have only Peter DeVries to vie with him...

...Bolotka, a theatrical producer immobilized by the authorities who is working as a janitor, tells Zuckerman that in Czechoslovakia only the hacks write—the talented writers drink, carouse and perform menial tasks...

...Yet he takes his leave on a note of bitter-sweet triumph, receiving from the sleek passport clerk a coveted but undeserved epithet: "Zuckerman the Zionist agent...

...No, one's story isn't a skin to be shed...

...There goes the defender of his fame again, preempting, in the very midst of flattering himself, a reader's unkindest cuts...

...The tacit agreement to participate in events outside oneself, to measure one's individual lot in modest proportion to the universal one, is a frame of mind not exclusively Jewish, to be sure, but it is one that must recom-menditselftoa Jewish novelist if he is to be significant...

...Business, science, politics, diplomacy, law—the mainstream of American life in which Jews flourish and make their dent—have scarcely been touched on in his work...

...intolerance is the spur that activates them...

...Now an occasional Hollywood writer (co-author of Splash), Friedman seems bent on zany levity, yet without the coals of grievance his engine has run out of steam...

...But still scandalous in a decade when Portnoy's shock tactics have become routine material for a beaming "Dr...

...Hysteria mounts as Zuckerman identifies the Czech police with his American critics, and the Minister of Culture's depiction of the dissidents—"Sexual perverts...

...Bruce J. Friedman's first novel (1962) about a self-conscious young Jew's confrontation with suburban anti-Semitism was marinated in shame, awkwardness and discomfort, but its prose was high-powered and nervously riveting...

...Up to now, no mention of writers behind the Iron Curtain had interrupted Zuckerman's travail...

...Gratitude, generosity, celebration of life in the midst of suffering—these natural assumptions of his fiction are what stir us, just as they do in the classic I. B. Singer stories, "Gimpel the Fool" and "The Little Shoemaker...

...Finally, one major writer has hewed faithfully to the spirit and texture, the unity and diversity of Jewish life in America...

...Alienated neurotics...

...No less than Edelshtein, the Yiddish poet in Cynthia Ozick's sad and funny story "Envy: or, Yiddish in America" who has lived in the United States for 40 years without being read or translated, and eats his heart out with jealousy of a figure modeled on I. B. Singer, these writers are professional outsiders...

...Not everything every Jew does, perhaps...

...From the beginning, even in such fine early stories as " Eli the Fanatic'' and " Defender of the Faith," and his novella, Goodbye Columbus, Roth made his mark by discerning the most vulnerable aspects—vulgarity, lack of esthetics, hypocrisy—of the world which was in fact the only one he knew...

...In the epilogue, despite several dozen inexplicable repetitions of his cherished four-letter word, and a few half-hearted allusions to aging literary lechers and 15-year-old " Czech dumplings," the only orgy that takes place is the continuing one of the author's self-justification...

...Bitter egomaniacs...

...In Bolotka's squalid room the men exchange outfits so the Czech can see how it feels to be a rich American writer...

...Luckily, there are an infinite number of ways to write about, not so much the "good news" of Jewish American life, as its health, its substance, even its essence...

...Reviewed by Isa Kapp Seeing is disbelieving when it comes to Philip Roth's newly published work, which is nothing more than the Zuckerman trilogy (The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson) plus an 82-page epilogue rak-ishly entitled "The Prague Orgy...

...By contrast his current novel, Tokyo Woes (Donald I. Fine, 187 pp., $14.95), is a bland travelogue, anticlimactic from the title on, of an impulsive visit to a country the author has never seen...

...Reading a comic writer is like looking at yourself in a three-way mirror...

...you get a very complex image in a quick laugh...

...Roth should be so lucky...