[In the following essay, Duban explores connections between Roth's story “Eli, the Fanatic” and Nathaniel Hawthorne's “The Minister's Black Veil.”]

To be a Jew in the twentieth century
Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse,
Wishing to be invisible, you choose
Death of the spirit, the stone insanity.
Accepting, take full life. Full agonies:
Your evening deep in labyrinthine blood
Of those who resist, fail, and resist; and God
Reduced to a hostage among hostages.
The gift is torment. Not alone the still
Torture, isolation; or torture of the flesh.
That may come also. But the accepting wish,
The whole and fertile spirit as guarantee
For every human freedom, suffering to be free,
Daring to live for the impossible.

—Muriel Rukeyser¹

In Philip Roth's The Counterlife (1986) the narrator envisions alternate identities for himself and the novel's other personae. One of his literary creations, a young Zionist, asks, “What is fanatical?” The Zionist answers his own question in terms that recall a central issue in Roth's “Eli, the Fanatic” (1959): “What is fanatical is the Jew who never learns! The Jew oblivious to the Jewish state and … the survival of the Jewish people That is the fanatic—fanatically ignorant, fanatically self-deluded, fanatically full of shame!”²

Attentive to that variety of shame, this study explores the odd compatibility of Eli Peck's reborn Judaism, in “Eli, the Fanatic,” and the revivalistic sense of sin felt by Parson Hooper in Hawthorne's “The Minister's Black Veil” (1836). At issue is more than a possible new “source” for Roth's story. Rather, the eerie consistency between the two tales may well illustrate one of Roth's earliest uses of parallel identities—a device featured, beyond The Counterlife, in The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988) and Operation Shylock (1993)—to structure the psychological, ethical, and (in this case) intertextual worlds and dilemmas of his literary characters.³

Despite the different religions and time frames experienced by Hooper and Eli, both stories dramatize the embarrassment of either Protestants or Jews who feel that they have outgrown fanatical expressions of faith. Crucial, I suggest, among the correspondences linking these tales, is Hooper's awareness of the tie between human depravity and the Crucifixion, for that concern has vital implications for “Eli, the Fanatic,” which is set in the year 1938. The implied christology of Hooper's true sight of sin, along with Hawthorne's dramatization of the irreverence of Hooper's community, haunts Roth's sense of psychological impulses responsible for Holocaust brutality, as well as his literary rendering of the evasion of that horror by Jews ashamed of the gift of Judaism.⁴

Pertinent to this alignment of Hawthorne and Roth is one critic's “concentrationary” reading of “Eli, the Fanatic”: “Roth's story … is about a basic human unwillingness to see the horror, to accept the Holocaust's non-redemptive truth, to risk discomfort, to escape the self-imposed boundaries of conventional happiness.”⁵ I would add that the post-Holocaust Judaism of Eli's assimilationist community forecloses “excruciating” cognizance of human nature, acknowledged as depraved by Parson Hooper, and by orthodox Christians generally. For Roth, I propose, Christian belief in “original sin” aptly glosses the impulse behind genocide—an impulse that one of Roth's literary characters (albeit from a psychological rather than a theoretical angle) elsewhere calls the product of “archaic mythical forces, a kind of dark subconscious the meaning of which we did not know, nor do we know it to this day.”⁶ In “Eli, the Fanatic,” however, the Jews of Woodenton steer clear of such ponderous meditation when they seek to rid their neighborhood of a boarding school for orphaned Holocaust survivors. Progressive outlooks resulting in Jewish self-shame allow them to flee the anguished responsibility of peering behind the veil to discern in the Holocaust a dark subconscious that challenges evolutionary progress in the realms of human nature and ethics. Like Eli's wife, Miriam, who reveres “order” and who dabbles in Freud—“I had a sort of Oedipal experience with the baby today”⁷—they at best regard the id as matter for refined intellectual dalliance. Despite the fate of their European brethren, the Jews of Woodenton refuse to recognize in the Holocaust the utter subversion of reason implied by a primal ruthlessness betokening unmitigated evil.

Such is the subtext of Roth's account of Eli Peck, the Jewish attorney enlisted by Jews to combat the settlement of an orthodox boarding and religious school, a yeshiva, in the “modern community” (“EF,” [“Eli, the Fanatic,”] 249) of Woodenton. Although the school serves as a home for displaced refugee children, the Jews of Woodenton seek to close the academy. Especially troubling to them are the excursions through town of an adult Hasid, an assistant at the yeshiva. He is a greenhorn dressed in a black coat, black pants, and a round-topped, wide-brimmed black Talmudic hat. The established Jews of Woodenton resent the negative impression he makes upon their Unitarian neighbors, “well-to-do Protestants” (“EF,” 262). Eli, though, wavers: while his friends instruct him to eliminate the school by enforcing zoning laws, Eli seeks, through negotiations with Mr. Leo Tzuref (whose name evokes the Yiddish word tsuris, or heart-felt personal grief),⁸ simply to have the greenhorn wear American garb to assuage the community.

That “compromise” (“EF,” 261) reveals Eli's ambivalence about his religious heritage: possessing a conflicted Jewish identity, Eli would settle for the yeshiva's keeping a low profile; the greenhorn need only abandon garb that reminds Eli and his fellow assimilationists of ill-fitting, old-world religion. To speed that metamorphosis, Eli donates a suit to the greenhorn; Eli, in turn, inherits the black hat, black coat, and black pants. Feeling strangely moved to try on these gifts, Eli resolves to wear the black clothing during a sojourn through Woodenton hospital. There he is subdued by interns who, regarding him as insane, administer a sedative that calms his nerves, but only superficially.

To some extent, Eli's eccentricity is explained by Roth's own commentary in a 1966 interview. Using “Eli, the Fanatic” and “Defender of the Faith” as points of reference for his novel Letting Go (1962), Roth says, “The central problem is, really, ‘How far do you go? How far do you penetrate into the suffering and the error and the mistakes … in other lives?’” The suggestion is that people can go too far. Still, read in the context of the post-Holocaust setting of “Eli, the Fanatic,” Eli's transformation approaches a more flattering dilemma mentioned by Roth in that same interview. Referring, in part, to the challenge faced by Eli, Roth defines the quandary: “‘What kind of man am I going to be?’ More broadly, ‘What kind of person am I going to be? What kind of life am I going to live?’”⁹ Regarded from that quite dignified perspective, Eli's decision to don black clothing at once symbolizes an awakened pride in his Jewish heritage, a dutiful yearning to convey that spirit to his new son, and—in something of a transfusion of orthodox Christian sentiment into twentieth-century Judaism—recognition of human depravity, but as confirmed for Eli by the brutality and genocide visited upon the greenhorn.¹⁰

Indeed, the Holocaust triggers a somber connection in Eli's mind between the greenhorn and Eli's new son. Whereas the greenhorn has been rendered impotent by the Nazis (“And a medical experiment they performed on him yet! That leaves nothing, Mr. Peck. Absolutely nothing!” [“EF,” 264]), Eli and Miriam are able to create a child. Because Eli's thoughts float to his progeny throughout the Woodenton crisis, Eli's resolve to don the black clothing has implications for whatever is left of the “children” of Israel. Reference to “everything else lost between 1938 and 1945” (“EF,” 287) suggests that Woodenton ought to memorialize victims of the Holocaust through revitalized pride in Judaism. Thus, when Eli exclaims, “I have a son. I want to see him” (“EF,” 297), the story addresses both the crisis over human nature posed by the Holocaust and the responsibility faced by Eli and other “modern” Jews relative to the transmission of religious identity.¹¹

A modern Jewish tale? Yes—but not without vital kinship to “The Minister's Black Veil,” a parallel world that Eli might have found oddly familiar. The narratives are—if we may borrow a Jungian term that Roth uses in Operation Shylock—“synchronistic phenomena.” In that novel the narrator Philip Roth meets the impostor Philip Roth, at which point the latter exclaims,

How can I exist, a duplicate of you? How can you exist, a duplicate of me? You and I defy causal explanation. Well, read Jung on “synchronicity.” There are meaningful arrangements that defy casual explanation and they are happening all the time. We are a case of synchronicity, synchronistic phenomena.¹²

Relative to “Eli, the Fanatic,” this imaginative construct illuminates what may be the consummate aesthetic achievement of Roth's encounter “The Minister's Black Veil.”

In Hawthorne's story of early New England, Parson Hooper covers his face—much to the chagrin of the less devout congregants—with a piece of black crepe betokening sin: “If I hide my face for sorrow,” says Hooper, “there is cause enough, … and if I cover it for secret sin, what mortal might not do the same?”¹³ For Hooper, the veil symbolizes the imputed sin of Adam and Eve and is linked to a crucified Christ suffering vicariously for fallen humanity. While Hooper is obviously eccentric in the way he publicizes his newborn conviction of sin, his theological insight is, from a Calvinistic perspective, sound. Like Eli, though, Hooper is summarily deemed fanatical and insane: “‘Our parson has gone mad!’ cried Goodman Gray” (“MBV,” [“Minister's Black Veil,”] 38). Aptly named, Goodman Gray is separated by a telling “shade” of optimism from Hooper's orthodox assessment of human nature. Goodman Gray and other eighteenth-century progressive Christians shy away from an emblem of human corruption (hence the added pun, “good man”) as readily as Eli's neighbors evade psychological proximity to the Holocaust by resenting the black clothes worn by the greenhorn—and, later, by Eli. In Roth's tale, Miriam typifies that proclivity to resist the horror; she “wasn't able to face the matter” of the greenhorn. Desiring “calm circumstances” and “domestic happiness,” she more than anything else values “order and love in her private world” (“EF,” 261). In that sense, she is quite representative of the Jews of Woodenton. Read side by side, therefore, “Eli, the Fanatic” and “The Minister's Black Veil” depict—beyond the odd and unsettling actions of Hooper and Eli—communities incapable of appreciating the varieties of religious or wartime experience that confirm the profound depths of human diversity. Therein resides the more vital correspondence between two works dealing with fanaticism.

This synchronistic analysis finds support in Roth's references, over several decades, to the writings of Hawthorne, including that of his narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, in The Human Stain: “The trick is to find sustenance in (Hawthorne again) ‘the communications of a solitary mind with itself.’ The secret is to find sustenance in people like Hawthorne, in the wisdom of the brilliant deceased.” Since Zuckerman's quoted phrase derives from the preface to Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, we would do well to recall that “The Minister's Black Veil” is the fourth tale in that volume, apparently savored by Roth.¹⁴

References to Hawthorne's fiction also exist in Roth's The Great American Novel. The narrator of that work, in Melvillean form, begins, “Call me Smitty” and then acknowledges “My Precursors, My Kinsmen”—with observations, among others, about “The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.” While Smitty's rustic commentary about Hawthorne's narrative suggests his enamorment with that novel and its bold heroine, Smitty's mention of “My Kinsmen” reverberates with reference to Hawthorne's “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832); hence, the ease with which Roth evokes either the longer or shorter works of Hawthorne. As Roth remarked in 1973, “Smitty is to my mind correct in aligning himself with Melville and Hawthorne, whom he calls ‘my precursors, my kinsmen.’ They too were in search of some encapsulating fiction, or legend, that would, in its own oblique, charged, and cryptic way, constitute the ‘truth’ about the national disease.”¹⁵ To the degree that the nation's malady comes to encompass assimilationist mindsets resentful of orthodox mannerism and resistant to the apprehension of evil, the synchronistic concerns of “The Minister's Black Veil” and “Eli, the Fanatic” illuminate the psychological and theological dimensions of both works.

Shared character types and events lead to related quandaries. Whereas Hooper unsettles his congregation with a black veil, Eli becomes mesmerized by the “deep hollow of blackness” associated with the greenhorn's black hat: “that hat which was the very cause of Eli's mission, the source of Woodenton's upset” (“EF,” 253). Moreover, like members of Hooper's congregation who urge their minister to remove his black veil, Eli speculates—early on, at least—that if the greenhorn would “take off that crazy hat everything would be all right” (“EF,” 259). Thus, while berating fanaticism, both communities denigrate black dress symbolic of orthodoxy and its seemingly privileged insights.

Especially akin to the evasive complacency of Woodenton is the aversion to orthodox sentiment in Hawthorne's tale of Reverend Clark and Elizabeth.¹⁶ Granted, to some extent their protests against the black veil imply a legitimate lament against Hooper's eccentric, erratic, and sometimes hurtful behavior. A minister should, after all, not ruin a wedding; nor is there any mandate for celibacy among Protestant clergy: Hooper fails to realize that, if there is a time for tears, there is also a time for joy. Still, when pleading with Hooper to remove the black veil, Elizabeth and Clark overlook the general state of sinfulness that the veil symbolizes. No longer attuned to Calvinistic notions of human corruption, they misapprehend the significance of the veil. For instance, Clark asks, “is it fitting that a father in the church should leave a shadow on his memory, that may seem to blacken a life so pure?” (“MBV,” 51). By suggesting that posterity will associate the veil with a specific lapse in character, Clark fails to recognize how, from an orthodox Protestant perspective, the original (and infinite) sin of Adam and Eve, imputed quite generally to mankind, provides an objective correlative for Hooper's and Christ's shared anguish about human depravity.

Elizabeth likewise resists: “Beloved and respected as you are,” she tells Hooper, “there may be whispers, that you hide your face under the consciousness of secret sin. For the sake of your holy office, do away this scandal!” Little wonder that Hooper proffers a “sad smile” (“MBV,” 46) in response to Elizabeth, since neither she nor the other progressive Christians in Milford “get it.” Precisely for the sake of his holy office he wears the veil. The sin betokened by the veil is not specific; it is, rather, common—notwithstanding the wish of meliorist Christians to harbor less passionate outlooks on the duty of a minister and on the vicarious suffering of Christ.

In Roth's tale, Eli similarly starts out as someone who would spare himself awareness of absolute evil—in his world, as implied by the Holocaust. Cut off geographically from Nazi butchery, Eli fails to apprehend the Freudian slip that reveals his discomfort when conversing with Tzuref: “It's the commuting that's killing … Three hours a day … I came right from the train” (“EF,” 250). For the victims of the Holocaust, after all, life was far worse at the end of train rides.¹⁷ Evading that true sight of sin in the twentieth century, Eli resembles both Clark and Elizabeth in his initial musings about the greenhorn's black clothing: “If he'd take off that crazy hat everything would be all right”; or, as Eli later writes to Tzuref, “All we say to this man is change your clothes” (“EF,” 259, 274). Moreover, so emphatic are the references to blackness in Roth's tale (“the glassy black of lining, the coarse black of trousers, the dead black of fraying threads, and in the center the mountain of black: the hat” [“EF,” 285]) as to summon readers to a Hawthornian universe to ponder the metamorphosis of Hooper into Eli and the alignment of Christian recognition of general sin with the psychologically unfathomable evil of twentieth-century genocide.

Because “Eli, the Fanatic” targets suburban evasion of Holocaust ruthlessness,¹⁸ the Hawthornian analogue amplifies Roth's concerns. Like Hooper, Eli becomes “draped in black” (“EF,” 286) and (with telling pun, relative to the depravity of human nature) is briefly mistaken for a priest: “Pardon me, Father” (“EF,” 294). Thus, after donning the greenhorn's black hat, Eli feels its “terrible weight” (“EF,” 285), which becomes a converting force similar to insights that lead Hooper's more devout congregants (because of the veil's “one desirable effect”) to swear that “before he brought them to celestial light, they had been with him behind the black veil” (“MBV,” 49). They there apprehend the relation between human corruption and a suffering Christ. Like them, Eli experiences the blackness of darkness, but—in his synchronistic universe—only after wearing the military socks given to the greenhorn by a GI liberating a concentration camp: “that he'd had to stoop to accepting these, made Eli almost cry” (“EF,” 287). That reflection awakens Eli to “the horror,” in effect causing him to don his own black veil betokening the sorry state of human nature.

Because, in their disheartening religious counterlives, neither Hooper nor Eli garners community support, both “The Minister's Black Veil” and “Eli, the Fanatic” illustrate the problems faced by Jews and Christians in the battle between liberalism and orthodoxy. Beyond having emancipated themselves from the rituals of Catholicism—“What, make a bunch of Catholics out of them”—the Christians of Woodenton have abandoned even rigorous Protestantism; “there's a good healthy relationship in this town because its modern Jews and Protestants” (“EF,” 277). Little wonder that, en route to his wife and son, Eli passes the “Unitarian church” (“EF,” 294) rather than one that is Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Congregationalist.

It was Unitarianism, after all, that, through denial of imputed or inherited sin, codified the moral argument against Calvinism. Calvinists, in turn, denounced Unitarianism as heretical because blithe views of human nature slighted the significance of the Crucifixion. So current was the debate in the nineteenth century that both Melville and Hawthorne satirized Unitarianism for harboring a lack of gravity and, by regarding imputed sin as obsolete, for denigrating the significance of Christ's passion. Hawthorne implied as much in both “The Celestial Railroad” (1843) and in his Story Teller tales; Melville, in The Confidence-Man (1857) and in the parody of liberal Christian optimism suggested by the Serenia chapters of Mardi (1849).¹⁹ Since, in Roth's story, “both Jews and Gentiles alike have had to give up some of their more extreme practices in order not to threaten or offend the other,” and since Eli is early impressed by the “comfort and beauty and serenity” (“EF,” 262, 261) of that modern arrangement, “Eli, the Fanatic” has pertinence (beyond its concerns about Jewish assimilationism) for modern Christian and modern Jewish temperaments that marginalize evil. In this respect the people of Woodenton resemble characters in Roth's When She Was Good who possess “a deep innocence about the nature of evil. They don't expect it should really be there.” Phrased otherwise, sugar-coated assimilationism approaches what, in a different context, Roth calls “the triumph of the untragic. Brenda Patimkin dethrones Anne Frank. Hot sex, fresh fruit, and Big Ten basketball—who could imagine a happier ending for the Jewish people?”²⁰

It is precisely the restoration of “the tragic” that accounts for the implied christology of Roth's “Eli, the Fanatic” and the tale's synchronistic relation to Parson Hooper's true sight of sin in “The Minister's Black Veil.” Granted, Eli is pejoratively referred to as “rabbi” (“EF,” 286) at the hospital; still, Eli's name (which means “my God” in Hebrew) and his exclamation “for Christ's sake” (“EF,” 286) when he sees his black clothing in a mirror permit us to apprehend a crucifying moment in the tale's conclusion. There, Eli's awareness of sin remains undiminished and unconsoled while he is carried away, lanced by the needle of mental ease: although “the drug calmed his soul,” it “did not touch it down where the blackness had reached” (“EF,” 298). Unlike the complacent Jews of Woodenton, Eli perseveres in confronting the infinite nature of evil pondered by Hooper in “The Minister's Black Veil” and (Unitarian optimism about human nature notwithstanding) confirmed by the Holocaust. Thus, an unexpected merging of “Judaeo-Christian” contexts exists in the counterlives of Parson Hooper and Eli Peck, while the community resistance they encounter highlights the embarrassment over orthodoxy shared by modern Jews and modern Protestants who abandon black veils and hats for the over-easy glove of religious nominalism. As suggested by Hawthorne and Roth, the ensuing mental ease affronts the tears of Christ over nineteen centuries, and the gift of Judaism in the twentieth.

Notes

1. “To Be a Jew in the Twentieth Century,” in Beast in View (Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1944), 62. This poem is one of nine others in a sequence entitled “Letter to the Front.”

2. The Counterlife (1986; reprinted, New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 114-15.

3. On Roth's various negotiations of the self's multiple forms, see Elaine M. Kauvar, “This Double Reflected Communication: Philip Roth's ‘Autobiographies,’” Contemporary Literature, 36 (1995), 412-46; Ada Savin, “Entre pacte autobiographie et pacte romanesque: le dedoublement du double dans The Counterlife de Philip Roth,” in Christian Lerat and Yves-Charles Grandjest, eds., Figures du double dans la litterature Americaine (Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de L'Homme d'Aquitaine, 1996), 75-84; Elaine B. Safer, “The Double, Comic Irony, and Postmodernism in Philip Roth's Operation Shylock,” MELUS, 21 (1996), 157-72.

4. My Hawthornian analysis of Eli's sad cognizance of human nature seeks to widen the aesthetic boundaries of criticism that posits Holocaust concerns as central to the story. See, for example, Murray Baumgarten and Barbara Gottfried, Understanding Philip Roth (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), 58, and Steven Milowitz's Philip Roth Considered: The Concentrationary Universe of the American Writer (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000), 170-71, 191. My attention to “The Minister's Black Veil” aims, as well, to widen the perimeters of mainly “assimilationist” commentaries on the story, such as those of Bernard F. Rodgers Jr., Philip Roth and the Jews (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 38-41. And with respect to literary precedent for Roth's tale, my emphasis on Hawthornian “synchronicity” suggests the need to go beyond a search for mere prototypes—such as Scholem Aleichem's “On Account of a Hat,” as suggested by Baumgarten and Gottfried (56), or Malamud's The Assistant, as detailed by Rodgers (29) and Theodore Solotaroff, “Philip Roth and the Jewish Moralists,” in Irving Malin, ed., Contemporary American-Jewish Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 18-21.

5. Milowitz, 171.

6. I quote “original sin” from the reference to that concept by Roth's character Mary Dawn Dwyer, in American Pastoral (1997; reprinted, New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 396. On “archaic mythical forces,” see Roth's Operation Shylock: A Confession (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993,), 84. See also the connection between the Holocaust and demonism as formulated by Norman Mailer: “[O]ne must postulate an existential equal to God, an antagonist, the Devil, a principle of Evil whose signature was the concentration camps, whose joy is to waste substance, whose intent is to prevent God's conception of Being from reaching its mysterious goal.” The Presidential Papers (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1963), 193.

7. “Eli the Fanatic,” in Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959; reprinted, New York: Vintage International, 1987), 261, 253; cited henceforth parenthetically, and abbreviated “EF.”

8. Baumgarten and Gottfried (55) translate the Yiddish word as connoting “trouble.” While they apprehend the pun, their translation is too rigid. Tsuris more customarily refers to heartbreak resulting from personal problems. That is the connotation implied by the customarily emphasized “such” when it modifies tsuris.

9. Jerre Mangione, “Philip Roth.” Transcription of National Educational Television interview (1966), in George J. Searles, ed., Conversations with Philip Roth (Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 6. Roth more emphatically praises Eli in Mangione, 9, and in Reading Myself and Others (1961; reprinted, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976), 28. That praise calls into question the assertions that Eli's Elijah-like behavior reflects mere “self-indulgence” (Rodgers, 30) and that Eli is “unable to travel any Jewish distance himself” (Cooper, 39). More compelling is the integrity ascribed to Eli's conversion by Baumgarten and Gottfried (57-58) and by Jay L. Halio, Philip Roth Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1992), 34-36.

10. Milovitz (16) notes Roth's use of blackness, in manuscript drafts of a play titled “A Coffin in Egypt,” to characterize Holocaust brutality.

11. For these reasons, the story may feature a pun on the name Peck, with regard to the vulgar sense of the word pecker (as used, for example, by Roth in The Counterlife, 202) to signify a penis. That suggestion finds support in Elliott M. Simon's belief that “Blackness is [Eli's] new covenant, his brit, his communion with God.” See Simon's “Philip Roth's ‘Eli the Fanatic’: The Color of Blackness,” Yiddish, 7 (1990), 46. See, by way of comparison, the first stanza of James Reiss's “ABC, Dog, a Helicopter”: “I'm a Jew, / Now that it's out I feel better. / For too long I've tried to hide this, like a properly zippered-up circumcision.” In Abraham Chapman, ed., Jewish-American Literature (New York: New American Library, 1974), 458.

    Eli's dilemma is perhaps glossed, as well, by the character Shuki, who, in The Counterlife, raises the issue of circumcision with Nathan Zukerman: “it's been a unifying custom among Jews for rather a long time now. I think it would be difficult for you to have a son who wasn't circumcised” (81; see also 369-71 for Nathan Zuckerman's defense of circumcision).

12. Operation Shylock, 79.

13. “The Minister's Black Veil,” in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Volume 9: Twice-Told Tales, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), 46; cited parenthetically henceforth as “MBV.”

14. The Human Stain (2000; reprinted, New York: Vintage Press International, 2001), 44; Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales, 6. Zukerman's reference to “Hawthorne again” relates to his earlier mention of Hawthorne (2).

15. The Great American Novel (1973; reprinted, New York: Vintage International, 1995), 1, 37; “Reading Myself,” Partisan Review (1973), in Conversations with Philip Roth, 76. By the time Roth earned his M.A. in English (see The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography [New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988], 84-85), he would likely have studied a fair amount of Hawthorne's fiction.

16. My perspective on Elizabeth and Clark is indebted to “The True Sight of Sin: Parson Hooper and the Power of Blackness,” in Michael J. Colacurcio, The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales (Cambridge MA.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 314-85, esp. 343-48. Reference in “The Minister's Black Veil” to Governor Belcher's administration allows Colacurcio—and Glenn C. Altschuler, “The Puritan Dilemma in ‘The Minister's Black Veil.’” American Transcendental Quarterly, 24 (1974), 25-27—to see in Hawthorne's tale a commentary on New England's Great Awakening and secular responses to the excesses of revivalistic “enthusiasm.”

17. In Operation Shylock Roth's fictive author, Applefield, describes trains as deceptive symbols of rationality for victims of the Holocaust: “the world appears to be rational (with trains, departure times, stations, engineers), but in fact these were journeys of the imagination, lies and ruses, which only deep, irrational drives could have invented” (84).

18. Milowitz, 171.

19. On Unitarian rebellion against the turpitude implied by the Crucifixion, see, Joseph Haroutunian, Piety Versus Moralism: The Passing of the New England Theology (New York: Henry Holt, 1932), 156-219. See, on nineteenth-century literary satires of liberal Christian subversion of a crucified Christ, James Duban, ‘The Triumph of Infidelity in Hawthorne's The Story Teller,’ Studies in American Fiction, 7 (1979), 49-60; and Duban, Melville's Major Fiction: Politics, Theology, and Imagination (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983), 203-20. See also Roth's Operation Shylock, on “schlockified Christianity” that overlooks the “gore and murder of Christ” (157). Although Roth's novel references Irving Berlin's transformation of Christ's anguish into the mellowness and happiness of White Christmas and Easter Parade, it still suggests Roth's grasp of orthodox Christian perspectives on the relation between human sin and anguished Crucifixion.

20. For Roth's commentary on When She Was Good, see Mangione, 10. On Brenda Patimkin (of Goodbye, Columbus), see Operation Shylock, 132. See also Nathan Zukerman's lament about his brother, Henry, “ensconced in the sort of affluent, attractive Jewish suburb that he'd aspired to all his life, a Jew whose history of intimidation by anti-semitism was simply nonexistent” (The Counterlife, 125).

To the memory of Sylvia Mould Duban