Bellow at 85, Roth at 67

Commentary

Volumn 110, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 35-39

  Podhoretz, Norman ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0039172911     PISSN: 00102601     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (4)

1. Houghton Mifflin, 361 pp., $26.00.
2. Viking, 233 pp., $24.95.
3. I voiced this hope in an article entitled "The Adventures of Philip Roth," written shortly after the appearance of I Married a Communist and published in the October 1998 issue of COMMENTARY.
4. Roth, while fully aware of the irony involved in the fact that Silk, unbeknownst to everyone else, is himself black, seems oddly blind to the additional irony that, from another angle, passing for white does convict Silk of racism. I would have thought that Roth - one of whose favorite authors is Franz Kafka - would pursue this fascinating twist. But he never does. Then again, why should he be expected to do so here when he has never been able to understand that the repudiation of Jewishness by Jews can be taken as a form of anti-Semitism?