"EU, the Fanatic"

Like "The Defender of the Faith," "Eli, the Fanatic" is suffused with dark humor. The comedy derives from the contrasts and juxtapositions of an assimilated Jewish community in predominantly WASPish Woodenton suddenly confronted by an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva in its midst. The yeshiva consists of some 18 refugee children presided over by Leo Tzuref and cared for by a nameless survivor of concentration camps. The affluent Jews who have moved to Woodenton in suburban New York—merchants as well as professionals and their families—are disturbed by the presence of this outlandish settlement and want it removed. Not only does the yeshiva violate the town's zoning ordinances, but, more significantly, it is acutely embarrassing for the town's assimilated Jewish residents. The harmony established between themselves and their Protestant neighbors is, they feel, endangered by the yeshiva and particularly by the strange greenhorn, a Hasid who marches around the town in his fantastic black garb shopping for the children. They therefore call on one of their own, Eli Peck, an attorney, to get the yeshiva to move.

Eli does his best under the most trying circumstances. Tzuref is stubborn and refuses to budge, making Eli feel as though he were persecuting the already-too-muchpersecuted refugees from Hitler's Europe. Eli's sense of this oppression is repeatedly exacerbated by knowing that these are mainly children he is trying to remove, children who flee from the very sight of him as he walks over the grounds to negotiate with Tzuref. Nor does Eli's home life provide more than scant consolation for him (though it provides much humor for the reader), as the efforts of his very pregnant wife to "understand" Eli invariably have the opposite effect. Having suffered two nervous breakdowns earlier, Eli is by no means heartless or insensitive. He feels for Tzuref and the children, and he feels for his community, whose members increasingly pressure him to resolve the predicament they see themselves in.

Eli tries to compromise by offering Tzuref conditions: first, that the religious, educational, and social activities of the yeshiva of Woodenton be confined to the yeshiva grounds and, second, that yeshiva personnel who appear in public be attired in clothing usually associated with American life in the twentieth century. The reply Eli gets from Tzuref is typically succinct:

Mr. Peck:

The suit the gentleman wears is all he's got.

Sincerely,

Leo Tzuref, Headmaster

Eli therefore once more visits Tzuref at the yeshiva, again frightening the children, to discuss the situation. As usual, the room is dim, unlit by electricity (Tzuref eventually lights a candle). They argue at cross-purposes. Eli, rational, insists that the greenhorn could get another suit; they—he and his clients—will even pay for it, he suggests, smacking his hand to his billfold. Tzuref, otherwise motivated, also smacks his hand to his breast, at "not what lay under his coat, but deeper, under the ribs." Eli's appeal is to the laws of the community; Tzuref s is to the heart, to God's law, not mortals.' He insists that since everything but the man's black suit has been taken away from him, the least the Woodenton Jews can do is suffer a little too.

At an impasse, the two end their discussion, and Eli, guilt-ridden, sneaks off into the night trying not to frighten the little children once more. He finally breaks the impasse in an unusual manner as his wife gives birth to their son in the hospital. He takes one of his best suits, wraps it up, and delivers it to the yeshiva. But the issue is not yet entirely resolved. Although the "greenie" wears Eli's clothes—good suit, hat, shoes, everything—and parades around the streets of Woodenton in them, to the astonished satisfaction of Eli's friends, that is not the end of the affair. Soon afterward, while Miriam is still in the hospital with the baby, Eli hears a noise outside his back door. There he finds the B on wit Teller box he had used to pack his things deposited on his doorstep. In the box are the black clothes of the "greenie," complete with broken shoes, black hat, and tsitsit, the fringed garment worn by Orthodox Jewish men.

Slowly, as he dons the strange clothing, Eli begins to realize why it has been left there. This time when he leaves his house to go to the yeshiva, he scares not the children, who scarcely notice him, but his next-door neighbor, Harriet Knudson, who is busy painting the stones on her lawn pink. At the yeshiva he confronts the greenie, busy painting the porch columns white. Until Eli says "Shalom" he does not turn around, and when he does, recognition takes some time. As they gaze at each other, Eli has "the strange notion that he [Eli] was two people. Or that he was one person wearing two suits. The greenie looked to be suffering from a similar confusion."

In his "mixed-up condition" Eli reaches out to the greenie to fasten the button-down collar of his shirt, but the gesture frightens the poor man, who backs away in terror. Chasing after him, Eli finally corners him and yanks the man's hands away from his face, pleading with him to tell him what else it is he must do. The greenie, raising one hand to his chest and jamming it there, then points off to the horizon, toward the center of Woodenton. Not until the greenie repeats the gesture does Eli understand its significance, and he heads toward the town.

What happens then is both funny and poignant. Roth adeptly portrays the town in its everyday activity and dress, into which the figure of Eli Peck, now dressed as a Hasid, strides. The impact is stunning: "Horns blew, traffic jerked, as Eli made his way up Coach House Road." But Eli perseveres, knowing that everyone thinks he is having another nervous breakdown. He knows he is not insane. If you chose to act crazy, he thinks, then you weren't crazy. "It's when you didn't choose. No, he wasn't flipping." Soon afterward he remembers his wife in the hospital and, rejecting the idea of changing back into his own clothes, makes his way to her bedside.

Seeing him, Miriam is nearly beside herself:

"Eli, why are you doing this to me! . . . He's not your fault," she explained. "Oh, Eli, sweetheart, why do you feel guilty about everything. Eli, change your clothes. I forgive you."

"Stop forgiving me. Stop understanding me."

"But I love you."

"That's something else."

Love is something else, Eli has learned, and it passes understanding. He insists on seeing his newborn son, and as he contemplates the "reddened ball—his reddened ball" the interns come and tear off his coat, injecting him with a sedative. "The drug calmed his soul," the story ends, "but did not touch it down where the blackness had reached."

"Eli, the Fanatic," the most powerful story in the collection, brings the volume full circle. Whereas Goodbye, Columbus ended with Neil Klugman rejecting love, rejecting religion, ready to start work on Rosh Hashanah, Eli Peck ends with a resolve not to let his wife, his neighbors, or his psychiatrist persuade him to renounce his actions. Through Tzuref and the greenie and the children at the yeshiva, he has learned what none of the others appreciate: the meaning of sacrifice, sacrifice through love, which for Philip Roth appears to be the essence of Judaism. It has cost the greenie everything to end up in Woodenton dressed in a nice tweed suit and decent hat. It has cost Eli just as much to recognize the sacrifice, reciprocate it, and allow comedy to triumph.

Some commentators have criticized Roth for this story as they have done for the others, claiming his ignorance of Jewish tradition or, worse, his innate anti-Semitism and self-hatred. Sol Liptzin, for example, argues that no Hasid would surrender his traditional garb to appease the residents of a New York suburb: Rather, he would devoutly pray for them. This aspect, Liptzin maintains, shows Roth's "ignorance of the inner motivation and behavior of Jews" [The Jew in American Literature, 1966]. Although perhaps technically correct, Liptzin's argument may be beside the point, which is partly to show the chasm between traditional and assimilationist Jews and the difficulty of any rapprochement. Whereas Liptzin claims that Roth is being "theatrical and not genuine," "genuine" seems to signify merely the literal, and, of course, Roth in writing imaginative literature is not being literal-minded. If he is "theatrical," then that is partly what makes the story succeed. It is good theater, make-believe, although make-believe dressed up in the trappings of reality.

The Jews of Woodenton, for example, are real enough. Though they speak English, they talk like Jews; Saul Bellow, for one, picked up the Yiddish rhythms that characterize their speech ["The Swamp of Prosperity," Commentary, July 1959]. The streets of Woodenton look like real streets too; as Gittleman remarks, Coach House Road is "the ultimate suburban street, with a Colonial-styled supermarket" where the president of the Lions Club, "the epitome of proper, Gentile Woodenton," encounters Eli in his Hasidic dress. The theatrics undoubtedly constitute much of the comedy; in fact, the story opens like the first scene of a play or film, as Eli approaches the yeshiva for his first meeting with Tzuref. Much of the story is in dialogue too, emphasizing the theatrics but also dramatizing the issues. In addition, it lets Roth display the kinds of wit that characterize both Tzuref and Eli, as they talk at cross-purposes during their initial conference and thereafter:

"The law is the law," Tzuref said.

"Exactly!" Eli had the urge to rise and walk about the room.

"And then of course"—Tzuref made a pair of scales in the air with his hands—"The law is not the law. When is the law that is the law not the law?" He jiggled the scales. "And vice versa."

Roth's resolution of the conflict in "Eli, the Fanatic" may be factually or theologically inauthentic, but Eli's insight as well as his courage cannot be dismissed on those grounds. However unlikely, if not impossible, it might be for a Hasid to exchange clothes with a modern Jew in suburban New York, the exchange does provoke comedy on all sides. And underlying the comedy is the essential truth concerning the loss of values, of tradition and identity, that Eli Peck finally comes to recognize and, in his bizarre but necessary way, tries to restore.

Eli is without question a modern assimilationist Jew. But he is also a sensitive, caring person who knows only too well that an argument has two sides, that while defending one side you often wish you were on the other. In this story Roth shows both sides vividly and powerfully. If Eli changes sides at the end, he does so in full knowledge of what he is doing and why. If he is carried off finally with a hypodermic needle in his arm, Roth shows that changing sides may not be so easy after all; that the mores of a community cannot be violated with impunity; that society will have its revenges. "Okay, rabbi," one of the men in white coats calls out to Eli in the hospital. "Okay okay okay okay okay okay. . . . Okay okay everything's going to be okay." But everything is not "okay"; the drug soothes Eli's soul, but insofar as it does not touch it "down where the blackness had reached," nothing is ultimately resolved. In this way Roth's comedy reveals both its depths and its complexity and shows him at the very beginning of his career, despite his years, to be a surprisingly mature writer.