Roth, Philip (Vol. 1) - Roth, Philip 1933–
Roth, Philip 1933–
Roth, an American novelist and short story writer, is the author of Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 1-4, rev. ed.)
Jews, in writing about other Jews, do not often strike; the appeal to raw human nature, to the individual in his human complexity and loneliness as a mere human creature, is less common than the grand collective themes of Jewish life, of Jewish solidarity in the face of oppression. Even the most gifted and profound writers among Jews tend to describe love and hate, misery and savagery, as if they were merely symbols of the depth and range of Jewish experience. The unusual thing, Mr. Roth's achievement, is to locate the bruised and angry and unassimilated self—the Jew as individual, not the individual as Jew—beneath the canopy of Jewishness….
I admire the edge and fierceness of Mr. Roth's mind, but his book [Goodbye, Columbus]...
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