![]() In the novel’s first section, which is set against the backdrop of the Iraq War, the Roth-based character tells the Halliday-based character, “If you want to learn about the Holocaust I’ll show you what to read.” One of the three books he recommends is Eichmann in Jerusalem.)Įichmann in Jerusalem set off a furious reaction upon its publication. When she was in her twenties, the author Lisa Halliday had a relationship with a much older Roth, which she turned into fiction in Asymmetry. (Roth’s respect for Eichmann in Jerusalem seems not to have faded across the years. The story begins in August 1963, when the Princeton sociologist Melvin Tumin grumbles in a letter to Roth about the fact that Roth “liked” Arendt’s report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which had appeared in The New Yorker that spring. That we even know of that archive is because of the work of another Roth biographer, Ira Nadel, in a little-noticed article in 2018. Today, at a moment of rising anti-Semitism and increasing polarization, when the tendency, even among writers and intellectuals, is to circle the wagons in defense of team and tribe, their shared archive of heresy among the heretics pays revisiting. Summoning the anxious wrath of a still vulnerable community, Roth and Arendt occupied a singular position: defending the margin against the marginalized, refusing the political pull and moral exaction of an embattled minority. Yet, throughout the postwar Jewish ascendancy in America, as other writers and scholars eased their way into the conversation, Arendt and Roth distinguished themselves-not by stirring up the little magazines but by contending with the Jews. She wrote The Human Condition he wrote Portnoy’s Complaint. She fled Hitler and never looked back he fled his parents and kept going home. She was born in Germany in 1906 he was born in Newark in 1933. The difference between the two writers is obvious. Arendt was a real presence for Roth, and the unexpected convergence between their biographies and concerns, particularly regarding Jewish questions, is as uncanny as the doubles that populate Roth’s novels. The result is a life stripped of one of its vital currents. When the two come together in the form of Arendt, his interest seems, well, nonexistent. As Judith Shulevitz argues in a searching analysis of the allegations and the biography, Bailey is as incurious about Jewishness as he is about the reality of women. In the wake of the allegations of sexual assault and inappropriate behavior that have been made against Bailey, the omission may seem small or slight. Instead, he focuses on the other course, “The Literature of Desire,” and Roth’s erotic presence inside and outside the classroom. ![]() In his five-page discussion of those years at Penn, Roth biographer Blake Bailey makes no mention of this course or Arendt. One of the courses was the literature of the Holocaust. In 2014, the mystery writer Lisa Scottoline wrote an instructive essay for The New York Times about two undergraduate seminars she took with Philip Roth at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s. Fred Stein Archive/Bettmann via Getty Images
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