I recently made a guest appearance of the Burning Books Podcast (a podcast dedicated to literature) and spoke about “glovemaking” in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, the novel itself, being raised in a glovemaking family in Gloversville, New York, the schlemiel, my blog, my new book project, and much much more. Here is the description […]
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 […]
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 […]
I come from a few generations of New York Jews. My father went to Brooklyn Tech and Columbia University. He was born in the Bronx and raised in Manhattan. My mothers parents moved from the Lower East Side and Brooklyn, to Queens, and then to Long Island. But we were the first in the family […]
I always felt like I was born a generation too late. My reception of 60s and 70s radicalism was, if anything, belated. It was the legacy of my parent’s and uncle’s generation. My generation was certainly affected by it but it didn’t “transform” us as it did them. To be sure, as an American growing […]
Like many a schlemiel, I have inherited my father’s story. I have inherited his dreams and his failures. His story is a major part of my own. But it’s a long story with lots of twists and turns. And one blog entry will certainly not do justice to it. So, rest assured, I will turn […]
As a Jew raised in Upstate New York, St. Patricks Day meant a lot of drinking games, parties, and merrymaking. There is nothing Jewish about these activities. Nonetheless, writers like James Joyce made the main character of his epic novel, Ulysses, an Irish Jew. Bloom, the main character, demonstrates the flow of consciousness. In a […]
Schlemiel Theory 