The writer was accused of being anti-Semitic and self-hating. On the other hand, he was praised by Jews for being one of the most awarded American writers of his generation.
Imagination has a structure that can be deciphered. Reality, on the other hand, is completely indecipherable and unpredictable, until it actually occurs and becomes obvious to tomorrow's newspaper subscribers and to the engineers of finished works.
You can be amazed by a work of fiction and you can even be puzzled by the dreamlike language of a work. nonsense. But the shock he gets from this so-called reality is beyond imagination. “I’ve never seen that!”, yes, but now you’re seeing it. Most writers use their memories to produce fiction, but Philip Roth is known as the author who, more than that, deliberately confuses autobiography and fiction.
I don't write fiction because, to me, it sounds like I'm writing a bunch of lies (although I love reading fiction). I only write memoirs, and even then I filter them all because I feel I'm responsible for the words that come out of my mouth and, even more so, for the words that are engraved, that is, written down. I avoid exposing the people around me, living, dying or dead. I don't tell what I know, I know what I tell. Someone could say, then, that I tell half-truths.
Even though I refrain from exposing the people around me, my memories expose a lot of institutions and people, without naming them, who hide behind these institutions. It may seem contradictory, but in these cases, I am assuming the responsibility of denouncing behavior that seems perverse to me, coming from people and institutions above any suspicion.
Goodbye Columbus
Goodbye Columbus marks the debut of the irreverent Philip Roth in the publishing market. What we know as the sexual revolution of the 1960s, in the United States, took place in the 1950s, to the point of gaining literary space at the end of that decade. The book Goodbye Columbus brings together five short stories, in addition to the story that gives the book its title, which narrates the sexual relationship between two young lovers, originally published in Paris Review.
At the opening of the story Goodbye Columbus, in the first paragraph, the boy gets an erection when he watches a girl pull, with her fingers, the back of her swimsuit, in order to put her flesh in its proper place. I had an erection, in English, would be I had an erection and, more commonly, I had a hard-on, hardly appropriate for a literary work. Philip Roth used my blood jumped, my blood jumped.
The romance continues with the couple's emotional and sexual closeness. The young man asks his girlfriend to use a diaphragm as a contraceptive. The birth control pill was only introduced in the 1960s, but the diaphragm had been widely used by married women in the United States since the 1920s. In the 1950s, several gynecologists began to make the contraceptive available to single women. The girl initially refused to provide a diaphragm, but then gave in. They were in love.
By mistake, the girl left her diaphragm at her parents' house when she returned to college. Her mother, while cleaning out the girl's drawers, found the device under one of her clothes and it was a scandal. When the boy found out what had happened, he could not forgive his girlfriend for her carelessness and the romance ended. Along with the romance between the two lovers, the story also ended, in total disagreement with the couple's sublime involvement up to that point.
In other words, the story falls apart at the end. But what made it a huge success with critics and audiences was the irreverent literary narrative of a loving and sexual relationship between two young, unmarried middle-class people in the 1950s.
Goodbye Columbus was published in book form in 1959. In Epstein, one of the other five short stories that make up the book, the protagonist's daughter also has a sexual relationship with her fiancé. Even the nephew, visiting for just one night, takes the opportunity to bring the neighbor's daughter, whom he had just met, for a sexual relationship at Uncle Lou Epstein's house.
Patrimony
Patrimony, which some writers consider Philip Roth's greatest work, was published in 1991 and tells the story of his life with his father. His father, in tears, asked him not to tell about his mistake (I beshat myself, I shit myself) to the grandchildren, nor to Philip's wife, and he readily acquiesced, "I won't tell anyone." But, after his father left, Philip told his shit to God and the devil, the shit that was the inheritance that his father left him and gave title to Patrimony, a true story.
“Shit was everywhere, splattered on the bathroom rug, running down the rim of the toilet, and in a pile on the floor at the foot of the toilet. It was sprayed across the glass of the shower stall he had just stepped out of; and the discarded clothes in the hallway were caked with shit. It was on the corner of the towel he had started to dry himself with… he had managed to get shit all over the place. I saw it was even on the tips of the bristles of my toothbrush hanging from the holder over the sink.”
"So that was the patrimony… There was my patrimony… the shit. "
And Philip Roth still had to live with the weight of his vain father, in his dreams, complaining about having been buried naked, wrapped in his sacred Jewish cloak, he who wanted to leave for eternity dressed in a dashing suit.
Operation Shylock
Some people value real stories and historical romances, especially if they are available in film form. There are people who have no interest in history at all, but who are thrilled when they watch a “real” historical romance, thinking they are entering high culture.
Before leaving for Israel in April 2023, to accompany me on the trip, a friend gave me the gift of Operation Shylock, which focuses on the irreverent Philip Roth's relationship with Zionism and the State of Israel. I started reading the book while I was still in São Paulo and found it intriguing. By the time I got halfway through the book, I was completely paranoid, thinking about giving up on my trip to Israel. I set off on the trip, but without Philip, who I left to finish reading when I got back to São Paulo, when I wrote Jaffa.
Philip Roth was accused of being anti-Semitic and self-hating. On the other hand, he was praised by Jews for being one of the most awarded American writers of his generation. Operation Shylock, published in 1993, in a game of mirrors, there are three Philip Roths – the author, the protagonist (who also plays the role of narrator) and the protagonist's double (and the protagonist, in the middle of the work, also assumes the role of the double, who could then even be considered a fourth Philip).
In the novel, the protagonist, although upright, after being kidnapped by the Mossad, decides to collaborate with the secret service, so that he can, as he wanted to believe, denounce the ways in which the State of Israel operates. The cynical senior agent, who convinces Philip Roth to collaborate with the Mossad, states that “What we have done to the Palestinians is evil. We have driven them from their homes and oppressed them. We have expelled them, beaten them, tortured them and murdered them. The Jewish State, from its birth, has dedicated itself to eliminating the Palestinian presence in historic Palestine and to dispossessing the land of an indigenous people. The Palestinians were expelled, dispersed and dominated by the Jews. In order to create a Jewish State, we have betrayed our history – we have done to the Palestinians what the Christians did to us: we have systematically transformed them into the despised and subjugated Other, thus depriving them of their human condition. Regardless of terrorism or terrorists, or the political stupidity of Yasser Arafat, the truth is this: as a people, the Palestinians are totally innocent, and as a people the Jews are totally guilty.”
The structure of the work is perfect; the author suppresses the last chapter of the novel because it was rejected by the Mossad, the chapter that denounced the ways in which the State of Israel operated, which had been the reason that had led the protagonist and narrator to collaborate with the Israeli secret service, in an action that exposed and caused the death of his childhood Palestinian friend. The Mossad threatened to ruin Philip Roth's reputation as a writer and tear him to pieces, in a limitless intelligence operation, triggered by a coordinated but dissipated campaign of rumors, infamous jokes, insults, slander, accusations of moral deficiencies, superficiality, vulgarity, cowardice, greed, indecency, falsehood, betrayal, defamation...
Intimidated, Philip, the protagonist, suppresses the last chapter, but, in a note to the reader, the author states that “Any similarity with real facts, places and people, living or dead, is purely coincidental. This confession is false”.
*Samuel Kilsztajn is a full professor of political economy at PUC-SP. Author, among other books, of Jaffa amz.run/7C8V.
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