When Swede, the main character of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, finally makes contact with his daughter Merry – who, as I have pointed out in other blog entries, became a domestic terrorist – he has a few moments of reflection on what “happened to our smart Jewish kids?” Swede’s reflections are worth recounting since they show […]
Philip Roth’s American Pastoral takes American radicalism and terrorism as one of its main topics. Zuckerman, the narrator, explores the life of “the Swede” (or “Swede”) whose daughter, Merry, becomes a radical and ends up blowing up a few buildings and killing a few people in the process. In flight from her first terrorist act, […]
A good writer like Philip Roth knows very well how desperate situations can bring out things about a character that, as a matter of course, are troubling. But Roth, like Shalom Auslander or the Coen Brothers (in the genre of film), sometimes injects comic elements into troubling situations. This has an odd affect because, in […]
Many critics agree that Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is his best novel. And there is a consensus regarding the fact that this is a tragic novel, or as Roth’s narrator Zuckerman says the “anti-American Pastoral.” The sections of the novel map this out: “Paradise Remembered,” “The Fall,” and “Paradise Lost.” However, for this reason, critics […]
Now and then we all like a little mischief. Growing up, I always associated this with breaking the law. If mischief was going on, it was behind people’s backs. And if it was going on, I never imagined it was something that Jews did. It wasn’t – as professor Daniel Boyarin notes in speaking about […]
When I first read Phillip Roth’s American Pastoral, I was blown away by the plot. It was based on something very close to my own life-story: the decline of a Jewish family (the Levovs) which coincides with the rise and fall of the leather business in upstate New York. Indeed, Roth’s words on Gloversville, New […]
Like many American Jews, I am curious about the life of my grandparents and great grandparents. On one side of my family, both of my grandparents were born in Europe but my father and his brothers were all born and raised in New York City. My grandparents on the other side of my family, however, […]
The last two targeting theories I’d like to look at, before I address Emmauel Levinas, Philip Roth, and Andy Kaufman come from Charles Baudelaire and Paul deMan who, apparently, follows in Baudelaire’s comic footsteps. (I have written several blogs on Baudelaire and deMan’s reading of comedy. What I look to do here is to summarize […]
Sacha Baron Cohen has, to be sure, played the schlemiel character in nearly every one of his productions. From Ali G to Borat, we see that Cohen prefers to cast and create comical characters with a schlemiel sensibility. To be sure, Cohen has in many ways taken on the legacy of Charlie Chaplin (who Hannah […]
In classic Yiddish literature, we don’t often learn much about the parents of the schlemiel character (whether in the Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third, “Bontshe Shvayg,” or I.B. Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool”. Shalom Aliechem comes close when he tells us that his Motl character (Motl, the Cantor’s Son) was an orphan and that […]
Schlemiel Theory 