SANDER L. GILMAN

THE FANATIC:  PHILIP ROTH AND HANIF KUREISHI CONFRONT SUCCESS

AS JEWS ATTEMPT TO ENTER into the multicultural world of High Culture in the course of the nineteenth century the idea of Jewish economic success retained a sinister tinge. Even many Jews saw worldly success as a force that alienated them from their own culture and identity. Had not groups on both the Left and the Right from the 1890s onward warned about the collapse of Jewish culture or indeed its transmutation into an empty copy of the world in which the Jews of Europe lived? The Jew whose identity was defined by “business” became the antithetical image of the cultured Jew. Social transformation in the Western Diaspora became a mark of cultural collapse. No true creativity would be produced by such acculturated Jews, only the desiccated products of capitalistic social Darwinism.

Such a dichotomy between success and art was present in America as well. In Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot (1909), America is a potential paradise for Jewish hybridity, but a hybridity that would result in a new American High Culture, a “New World Symphony,” not Jewish economic success. (Though Zangwill actually promises economic success for his protagonist when he has him offered the first violin chair in an orchestra.) Jews in the world of American multicultural letters were depicted almost always within a “naturalist” mode. Jewish poverty was more interesting than Jewish economic success because success seemed to entail a loss of both identity and moral values—if Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) is to be believed.

Economic success in this world always meant transformation. In some cases it marked leaving the world of a Jewish religious identity for that of a Jewish ethnic identity, as in Samson Raphaelson’s short story and play Day of Atonement, as well as in Alan Crosland’s 1927 film The Jazz Singer, made from that play. There ritual represented the religious (and musical) past now seemingly traded in for a world of lower cultural and therefore moral value. American popular culture and jazz were just that, even though it was in popular culture—think of Irving Berlin—that the Jews truly entered into the multicultural arena of America. That, in The Jazz Singer, a Cantor’s son might be confronted with the choice of either making his Carnegie Hall solo violin debut or singing in synagogue on Yom Kippur is a highly unlikely scenario as these would not have been seen as “alternatives” in quite the same manner.

The question of Jewish “success” continues to be raised in the 1940s by Budd Schulberg in What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) and Saul Bellow in Dangling Man (1944). In 1951, Oscar Handlin, in The Uprooted, imagined a world in which the experience of the Jewish migrant—and Handlin was the son of Jewish migrants—posed the test case for the result of all imigrant experience, which was alienation: “the migrant’s alienation was more complete, more continuous, and more persistent. Understanding of the reactions in that exposed state may throw light on the problems of all those whom the modern world somehow uproots.”  Georg Simmel’s stranger, “the person who comes today and stays tomorrow,” was the prototype for American Jews, as the “migrants were American history,” according to Handlin. In 1950 the American-Jewish sociologist David Riesman published what came to be regarded as the definitive study of American conformity, The Lonely Crowd. What comes out of the “melting pot” seems not to be creativity but alienation. The Jew is the businessman destroyed by the system: Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (1949), not the composer of the new American symphony. Willy Loman is in no way explicitly “Jewish,” for the critique of the destructive forces of capital and competition has transformed the “Jewish” experience of the false promise of success into the American experience of failure.

In 1959, Philip Roth published a collection of short stories that secured his reputation as perhaps the most radical critic of Jewish success, but with a twist. Goodbye, Columbus was an immediate “hit” in that it seemed to capture the conflicts of American Jewry (and other “ethnic” groups) in the era of good feeling that was the age of Eisenhower.  Roth, who claimed to be most influenced by his reading of Franz Kafka, presents a world in which transformation is by definition a failure of will and identity. Many of the stories of Goodbye, Columbus are versions of Kafka’s tales of failed metamorphosis. The notion of the transformation of the “stranger” into the citizen is set in the title story when the protagonist, Neil Klugman (nomen est omen: the smart one), makes an ironic pass at the woman who fascinates him at the country club (see Francis). She asks him to hold her glasses while she dives into the pool. A poor boy from Newark working in a public library, Klugman is attracted to Brenda Patimkin, the nouveau riche daughter of a bathroom fixture manufacturer, as a sort of water sprite (see Waxman). She is perfect in every way. However, her perfection reveals itself on their first date—after she is finished playing tennis—to having been a constructed part of the world of Jewish transformation:

 “I don’t like to be up close, unless I’m sure she won’t return it.”
 “Why?”
 “My nose.”
 “What?”
 “What?”
“I had my nose fixed.”
“What was the matter with it?”
“It was bumpy.”
“A lot?”
“No,” she said, “I was pretty. Now I’m prettier. My brother’s having his fixed in the fall.”
“Does he want to be prettier?”
She didn’t answer . . .

This becomes an ironic motif in the tale—Neil constantly asks Brenda whether she wants to have something else “fixed”—Roth’s image of a supposedly malleable Jewish identity in 1959.