Introduction: Philip Roth and Race

83 Introduction: Philip Roth and Race Dean J. Franco Does Philip Roth write about race? The publication of The Human Stain (2000) prompted this question for many, but as the articles in this issue make clear, asking if Roth writes about race is a little like asking if Jews are white. The answers—”yes,” “no,” and “it depends”—apply to both questions and point to the wider arena wherein race itself is defined, described, performed, negotiated, and deconstructed: America itself. And Philip Roth does write about America. Not just “Jewish America,” unless one considers that Roth’s America is always underwritten by the (raced) experience of Jews in this country , which is itself marked by the intertwining of blacks and Jews in American public and cultural life. In short, writing about Jews, or writing about America itself, is already writing about race. If The Human Stain is a heuristic for looking back over Roth’s career, the prompt is necessary perhaps because so many of Roth’s readers tend to see his career as divided into distinct phases: first he wrote about second-generation Jewish American issues, then sex, then himself. So now he writes about America ? Reading Philip Roth with attention to race allows us to see that from Goodbye, Columbus (1959) through Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) to The Counterlife (1986) and Operation Shylock (1993), racialized identities, social race, and the gravity of public assumptions about race are central to Roth’s tales of maturation, acculturation, and postmodern escape (and return). Even Irving Howe’s famous repudiation of Roth after the publication of Portnoy’s can be read in racial terms. Howe’s accusation that Roth has a “thin personal culture” (73) is transformed by Roth into a “thick” postmodernism, as he folds Howe’s and others’ responses to Portnoy’s into the increasingly postmodern life of his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. But as Timothy Parrish notes, Howe’s condemnation of Roth for the evasion of his ethnic obligations is comparable to his critique of Ralph Ellison a decade prior for supposedly shirking his racial obligations (424). Ellison responded that everything he writes is ultimately in the service of the race and vigorously defended Roth against charges of Roth’s Copyright © 2006 Heldref Publications 84 Philip Roth Studies Fall 2006 betrayal of American Jews. The exchange, which Roth has noted as formative for his sense of freedom as a writer, marks both the racialization of Jewishness in Roth’s career and the curious way that Roth, like Ellison, would be tethered to that Jewishness even in his supposed flights from it. The essays in this issue are influenced by critical work in American Studies scholarship, including Karen Brodkin’s important book How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (1998), Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998), Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the American Literary Imagination (1992), and the sustained work of Werner Sollors . Although published too recently to be a resource for the essays here, Eric Sundquist’s new work, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (2005), reviewed in this issue, also established the centrality of race for thinking about Jewish literature and culture. Race is centrally important in Jewish cultural studies works by Jonathan Freedman, Brian Cheyette, Sander Gilman, and Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin. Jewish literary studies have examined race in a comparative framework, including Adam Zachary Newton ’s Facing Black and Jew: Literature as Public Space in Twentieth Century America and Emily Miller Buddick’s Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation, but so far there has been little published on Jewish literature itself as a raced literature. If Jews are or were a race, there are still several ways of approaching what “race” means, and Roth seems to cover them all. In Europe, Jewish religious differences amount to racial difference, as the young Zuckerman learns secondhand in The Ghost Writer (1979), and as confirmed by Maria in The Counterlife: “We’re supposed to be closer to Indians than to Jews, actually” (71). In the United States, Jewish racial difference troubles the black/white dichotomy...