CHAPTER
One
DURING A TRIP TO ISRAEL, IN 1984, ROTH TOOK HIS friend David Plante—a gay, gentile writer—to the Orthodox Quarter of Jerusalem, Mea She’arim, where the two stood on a corner watching Hasidim milling about in their black coats and hats, the boys with their heads shorn except for long side curls. Almost everyone, young and old, wore thick eyeglasses. “You could be in a shtetl in Poland in the eighteenth century,” said Roth, whose grandparents had grown up in such a place. One Hasid passed by with a towel over his shoulder, and the writers followed to where the man met other Hasidim for their afternoon bath. “Wait till I get this around,” Roth chuckled to his companion, “—Plante standing outside a bathhouse trying to pick up a Hasid.”
For Roth, levity was better than nostalgia in the face of this living reminder of his family origins. He could hardly remember his grandparents ever speaking of the old country, of the people they’d left behind, and was left to surmise that the shtetls of Galicia weren’t really like the Broadway version of Sholem Aleichem, what with winsome Jews “singing show tunes that brought tears to your eyes,” as Roth put it. His father’s parents came from an especially bleak corner of that bygone world—Kozlów, near the city of Tarnopol, which is perhaps best remembered (among Jews anyway) as the site of the Khmelnytsky Uprising in the seventeenth century. Throughout the Middle Ages, Polish landowners had employed Jewish agents to collect rents and taxes from the peasantry, who meanwhile were reminded every Sunday, in church, that the Jews had killed Christ. “Pole, Yid, and hound—each to the same faith bound,” read the legend commonly nailed to trees where a Pole, Jew, and dog had been hanged. Almost every Jew in Tarnopol was killed or expelled in the massacre, and the city itself was burned to the ground.
By the nineteenth century, Galicia was the northernmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose 1867 constitution allowed freedom of religion and equal rights for all subjects. Such liberality did little to improve the lot of Galician Jews, however, whose population exploded with refugees fleeing pogroms in neighboring Russia. Some fifty thousand a year died of starvation, and by the 1880s Galicia had both the highest birth and death rates among the old Polish territories, with only half its children living to the age of five. “Often the relations between the social strata of the shtetl came to little more than a difference between the poor and the hopelessly poor,” wrote Irving Howe. Galician Jews usually lived amid a welter of grim huts and cobbled streets winding every which way to a crowded marketplace—a dreary insular world menaced by disorderly gentiles. Solace was found in ritual and piety. A good Jew’s life was finely regulated by 613 mitzvoh, commandments, everything from reciting blessings for one’s homely pleasures to lighting candles and slaughtering chickens just so. Children were cowed with tales of dybbuks and golems, their marriages were arranged, their baser impulses rigorously suppressed. No wonder the more intelligent among them learned to laugh at the wretched way God’s chosen people saw fit to live.
The law was embodied by rabbis, and one of these in Kozlów was Roth’s great-grandfather, Akiva, who also had a reputation as a storyteller. His son Alexander, called Sender, was studying to be a rabbi when he married, in 1886, Bertha Zahnstecher, whose Flaschner connections on her mother’s side would stand the family in good stead once they came to America. Over the course of twenty-five years, Bertha bore nine children with Sender—two of whom, Freide and Pesie, died in infancy; of the surviving seven, Philip Roth’s father, Herman, was the first to be born in the New World.
Roth knew even less about his mother’s side of the family, and virtually nothing about their origins in the old country. What may be gleaned from basic genealogical data is that Roth’s maternal grandfather and namesake, Philip (Farvish) Finkel, was also born near Tarnopol in the town of Bialy Kamien (White Stone), the second of five brothers. As for Roth’s maternal grandmother, Dora Eisenberg, she grew up roughly 250 miles away near czarist Kiev, and was almost certainly moved to emigrate, with three sisters and two brothers, to escape the vicious anti-Semitism that prevailed throughout the empire after the assassination of Alexander II, in 1881, by a revolutionary group that czarists claimed (falsely) to be dominated by Jews.
The worst of these pogroms took place in Kiev, where gentile mobs ran amok through Jewish neighborhoods, ransacking shops and the Brodsky vodka warehouse. As if constant terror weren’t enough, the May Laws of 1882 effectively prohibited Jews from owning property or pursuing higher professions such as law, government, teaching, or the officer corps. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the czar’s reactionary adviser, proposed a formula for purging the Jews: “One-third conversion, one-third emigration, and one-third starvation.” Such was the nightmare some 2.5 million Russian Jews would flee, many seeking refuge in America, between 1881 and 1920.
What Philip Roth heard, growing up, was that both his grandfathers had emigrated to escape conscription. Military service wasn’t as punitive for Jewish subjects of the benign Austrian emperor, Franz Joseph, as it was under the czars, but even the relatively lenient three-year period of active duty was longer than most Galician Jews were willing to be parted from family and religion. Nor was the society of gentiles any more comfortable in the army as elsewhere; in Joseph Roth’s novel about the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, The Radetzky March, a drunken gentile officer insults a Jewish army surgeon, Max Demant—“Yid, Yid, Yid!”—leading to a duel and the doctor’s death.
It was common for husbands to emigrate alone and bring their families over later. Sender Roth departed aboard the S.S. Westernland on March 5, 1898, more than two years in advance of Bertha and their three boys. One of Bertha’s Flaschner uncles had prospered as a shoe merchant in Brockton, Massachusetts, and offered to sponsor Sender’s plan to set up as a rabbi in Boston. Aboard the boat, however, Sender apparently had misgivings—rabbis were hardly as revered in America as in Europe, never mind the question of livelihood—and decided to debark at Ellis Island. A landsman aboard the boat had assured Sender that he could get them jobs at a hat factory in East Orange, New Jersey; moreover, Sender’s sister Fannie and her husband, Nathan Cohen (later Kuvin), lived in nearby Newark and agreed to let Sender stay with them until he saved enough money to pay his family’s passage.
When Philip Finkel received his draft notice, he changed his name to Bara and arranged to follow his older brother, another Nathan, to Elizabeth, New Jersey. The ruse was also adopted by other Finkel brothers; the last to emigrate, Marcus, was listed as “Barer” when he finally departed from Rotterdam aboard the S.S. Rijndam on September 4, 1920.* His last permanent address was given as Zloczow, near Tarnopol, where Jewish refugees from Bialy Kamien had settled after the shtetl was destroyed by fire in 1902.
As for the remaining Jews of Galicia, almost every one of them would perish in the Holocaust—a catastrophe predicted as early as 1923 by the poet Uri Zvi Greenberg, a Bialy Kamien–born Zionist who considered mass extermination the “tragic but almost inevitable outcome of Jewish indifference to their destiny.” What became of the remaining eighteen thousand Jews in Tarnopol was typical: five thousand were slaughtered within a month of the Nazi occupation in June 1941, and another thousand were shot in a nearby forest the following March; the rest were packed into a ghetto—Galicia’s first—whence they were transported to the Bełżec death camp, among others, before final liquidation on June 20, 1943.
BERTHA ROTH LEFT her mother and sisters behind when she emigrated on November 3, 1900—also aboard the Westernland—with her sons Kiwe, Mojsche, and Abraham, aged twelve, nine, and three, respectively, and renamed Charlie, Morris, and Ed when they arrived in Newark. Like most Eastern European Jews, they settled amid the slums of the Third Ward, on Broome Street, one block parallel to the sprawling commerce of Prince Street. This re-creation of a shtetl market in America—nicknamed “Baghdad on the Passaic”—was a jumble of pushcarts and stalls hawking everything from live carp, pastrami, and pickles to all sorts of clothing and gadgets, the vendors roughly grabbing at pedestrians to come over and have a look at their wares.
“Do you remember the story you told me about Grandpa?” the nineteen-year-old Philip Roth wrote a dying Bertha in 1952. “It was a sad and wonderful story about some men that were going to sell Grandpa some property on Baldwin Avenue. And you told me that when Grandpa came to them with the money—and it was a Sunday too—when Grandpa came with the money, which was all he had ever saved, they took the money from him.” Despite getting fleeced by goyim in his first attempt to escape the seedy rental flat on Broome, Sender was soon able to buy a house on nearby Rutgers Street. Four more children were born during their fourteen years there—Herman in 1901, Rebecca (Betty) in 1903, Bernard in 1905, and Milton in 1912—while any number of penniless relatives just off the boat, as many as twelve at a time, also came and went. Bertha dutifully cooked and cleaned for them. A stolid balabusta (good homemaker) who spoke hardly a word of English, Bertha was given to scrubbing the outside wooden stairs on her knees when otherwise at a loss.
Sender was hardly one to discourage her diligence, and at least one of his children—Philip’s kindly Uncle Bernie—despised the old man for the way he treated their saintly mother. But then, Sender himself was no idler: over the years he’d steamed so many hats that one arthritic hand was frozen in a kind of four-finger victory salute. At least he wasn’t alone in his labors. Four sons would leave school at an early age to join him in the hat factory, like most children of immigrants in the Newark of that era. Charlie, Morris, and Ed were all working by the age of twelve, whereas Philip Roth’s father, Herman (“Little Hymie”), was allowed to remain in school until the statutory age of fourteen. Herman’s eighth-grade education was manifest in his erratic spelling and punctuation, as well as a lifelong tendency to capitalize at random (“Why does your father capitalize all these letters?” Neil Klugman asks Brenda, an immigrant’s daughter, in Goodbye, Columbus). “What’s interesting,” Roth observed of his father, “is that not in all his years in a responsible managerial position with an important American corporation—nor in all his years of reading the newspaper from cover to cover every single day—did anything about writing English, anything large or small, sink in. Strange, no?” And yet this too was a goad to Roth’s literary vocation: “You are the family voice,” he wrote in a hectoring memo to himself. “Not pushing these men aside, but giving voice to their inarticulateness.”
“The Newark scramblers” was how Philip described Herman and his brothers, three of whom—Charlie, Morris, and Milton—he never knew except as family legends. The prodigious Morris left home early and started his own businesses: a movie theater and a shoe-store-cum-factory where tips were put on laces as per his own patent. Morris owned one of the first automobiles in the city and hired a live-in nanny to take care of his four children while his pretty, spendthrift wife, Ella, pursued a hectic social life. His older brother, Charlie, also opened a successful shoe store in another part of town (the better to avoid direct competition with Morris), and also married young and had four children.
At the age of twenty-nine, in 1920, Morris’s appendix burst and he died of peritonitis; his wife remarried a bounder named Block, who helped her spend the rest of her late husband’s money before deserting her. The four children were raised by various relatives, with Bertha claiming Morris’s only son, Gilbert. Sixteen years later, Charlie died of pneumonia in the arms of his brother Herman, who idolized him. Herman’s older son, Sandy, eight at the time, never forgot the warm spring day he saw his father shambling back to their house on Summit Avenue, where he collapsed against a porch banister and burst into tears. The boy had never seen his father cry.
Charlie’s death, in 1936, was all the more unbearable given that it followed, by four years, perhaps the greatest tragedy of all—the death of the family wunderkind, Milton, at age nineteen. Milton was born twenty-five years after his oldest brother and already had a number of nieces and nephews, roughly his age, who regarded him as a brilliant, lovable brother figure. Milton had graduated high school at the age of sixteen (as would his nephew Philip) and was a senior at the Newark College of Engineering—the first Roth to go to college—when he complained one day of a terrible stomachache and was given an enema by his well-meaning mother. His niece Florence—who’d played violin with Milton and considered his death “the worst tragedy of [her] entire life”—used to say he died of stupidity, given that an enema was hardly the best way to treat what would prove another case of peritonitis.
It was the scourge of the Roth men, whose appendixes tended to be retrocecal—that is, located behind their large intestines, where swelling went undetected until it was too late. Herman was another victim, in 1944, but was saved, barely, by the new sulfa powder. That was the first time Philip would see his father cry: Herman had been given less than a fifty-fifty chance, and returned from the hospital traumatized and thirty pounds lighter (“his shrunken face disclosed itself to us as a replica of my elderly grandmother’s”). The next generation would be likewise afflicted.
AS A CHILD Philip never knew his many Finkel cousins in nearby Elizabeth. Eventually he met a few of them, and thereby cultivated a vague idea of Finkel prosperity—at least in comparison with the “farshtunken” (stinking) Roths in Newark—but was never quite sure why his sweet-natured maternal grandmother, Dora, had broken all connection with her late husband’s family.
On the dining room sideboard, in Philip’s childhood home, were portraits of his two namesakes, both dead before he was born: his revered Uncle Milton, of course, who looked a bit like George Gershwin, and his Finkel grandfather, Philip, a dapper, stoutish, dark-haired fellow with a little mustache. Philip and Dora had met and married a few years after immigration, and both spoke a fair amount of English; otherwise Philip was every inch the forbidding, Old World, Orthodox patriarch. His third daughter, Mildred, would forever cringe at the memory of her father grimly swinging a live chicken over their heads on the eve of Yom Kippur, and even the more obscure holidays were observed to a nicety. Many years later, Philip Roth sought out an older Finkel cousin, Ann Maltzman, who surprised him by remarking how much she’d adored his “gentle” grandfather as a little girl.
Philip Roth’s mother, Bess (Batya), was born in 1904, the second of five children. At the time, her father owned a grocery and meat market and was flush enough to employ a Russian immigrant named Anna as a live-in servant. By all accounts the extended families on both sides were close, at least for a while, an impression borne out by the startling repetition of names among the offspring: Dora and her two Eisenberg sisters all had daughters named Bess, and the Finkel brothers sired a variety of Mildreds, Ethels, and Emanuels. Elizabeth was mostly an Irish Catholic town, and the cousins confined their socializing almost entirely within the family. The oldest Finkel, Nathan, was likely the most successful: Listed as a “peddler” in the 1903 city directory, he soon had his own real estate business and owned what a grandson described as a “mansion” (since razed) at 1350 North Avenue. He also helped his brothers emigrate, whereupon each did his part to help the others get started. A younger brother, Joseph, began as a butcher in Philip’s shop before opening his own grocery on the same street.† The youngest, Michael, was a wholesale butter and egg man, and Marcus, the last to arrive from Europe, owned a flourishing service station and was said to go around in a chauffeur-driven Rolls.
Philip Finkel’s career took a curious turn in 1909, when he was suddenly listed as a dealer of “coal, hay, masons’ material” at 250 Second Street. His new venture was short-lived, however, and by 1915 he was back on First Street as a grocer—this around the time an advertisement appeared in the October 1 issue of the New York Lumber Trade Journal: “Nathan Finkel & Son are conducting a retail lumber yard business at Elizabeth, N. J. Mr. Finkel is well known in Elizabeth, having been engaged in real estate there for more than a score of years. The yard is at Second Street and Port Avenue”—i.e., 250 Second Street, where Philip’s yard had been. The nature of this appropriation—whether benevolent, hostile, or a little of both—is unknown. The Finkel “Son” in question was Nathan’s oldest, Julius, who was all of nineteen at the time, and had already been collecting rents for his father as a student at Battin High School. In the event, both Nathan and Julius soon returned to real estate full-time, while the coal/lumber business was taken over by Nathan’s younger son, Emanuel, who ran it more or less successfully, as Finkel Fuel, until his early death from a heart attack.
After Philip Finkel died, his widow and children almost never mentioned the other Finkels. Philip Roth always assumed a slight class superiority on his mother’s side of the family, given her high school education and the evidence of his two grandfathers’ portraits: Philip Finkel appeared to be a middle-class European, whereas Sender was a seedier-looking greenhorn in his shiny, wrinkled, ill-fitting suit. Roth’s imagination was fired in earnest, however, in 2012, when a Finkel cousin he’d just met (reaching out to such people, at last, in his retirement) showed him a 1927 portrait of his mother in her stunning, lace-train wedding gown, cradling a vast bouquet and standing at the bottom of a rather impressive staircase. “I was dumbstruck,” said Roth. “ ‘What hall is this? They rented a hall?’ ” No, the cousin replied, it was his grandfather Philip’s house—all of which was starkly at odds with the relative penury of his grandmother Dora’s situation while Roth was a child, to say nothing of his own struggling parents. What little he knew, what little he could find out from a few Finkel cousins, was that a falling-out had taken place among the brothers, who were known to have “crazy tempers” on top of the usual patriarchal bossiness. Roth heard something, too, about Finkel Fuel on Second Street, and thus conceived an idea (“I have pieced this story together out of bits and pieces of information that have come my way over the years”) that the brothers had all been coal barons together. “For some reason [Philip Finkel] said ‘I’m getting out,’ ” Roth speculated, “and they gave him his share. He was a rich man”—the wedding gown! the grand staircase!—“so let’s say his share was $100,000. . . . That was money in 1927, and he put his money in the stock market. So we know what happened.”
Not exactly. What Roth didn’t know until even later in life was that his Finkel grandfather dabbled in coal only briefly and was mainly a grocer of whatever means—until 1924, that is, when he belatedly got into the real estate business with Nathan. Perhaps this was the association that led to a definitive breach, but all that a few surviving Finkels can say for sure is that “the family sort of disintegrated,” as Anne Valentine put it. Nor is it unreasonable to guess that the Finkel brothers failed to rally around Dora when her husband died of Crohn’s disease on June 24, 1929, at age fifty-one—after which the stock market crashed, the Depression began, and Dora and her children moved into a rather shabby two-story at 830 Sheridan Avenue.
As for Finkel Fuel, such as it was: after Emanuel’s death it fell into the hands of Marcus’s sons, Louis and Joseph, and presently dwindled away. Louis killed himself, and the other Finkels (“miserable and nasty” people, according to one of Marcus’s granddaughters) were carried off in droves by heart disease. Bess was always careful not to hurt her mother’s feelings by mentioning the in-laws, though she got back in touch with many of her cousins after Dora’s death in 1951, especially once she and Herman had retired to Elizabeth in the sixties. Amy Buxbaum (the grocer Joseph Finkel’s granddaughter) remembered Bess and her mother, Milly (yet another Mildred), chatting on a bench together almost every day, waiting for Amy to get out of school. But Bess had been dead more than thirty years when her famous son finally cobbled together—by his own lights—the whole riches-to-rags family romance, and by then it was no use to him. “Too bad,” he said. “A family of rich relatives and powerful uncles (one chauffeur-driven in a Rolls-Royce!) never to come under the scrutiny of the little budding novelist.”
THE HIGH STYLE OF Bess Finkel’s wedding on February 20, 1927, didn’t last. Four years earlier she’d graduated from Battin High and found work as a legal secretary, meanwhile living at home with her parents and older sister, Ethel, whom she helped care for the younger girls, Milly and Honey, and their adored brother, Mickey (yet another Emanuel). During these years Herman Roth had worked as a “shoe dog” in his brother Charlie’s store, and after his marriage he opened his own shop on Bloomfield Avenue in Newark. The Roths’ first son, Sanford (Sandy), was born December 26, 1927, and a couple of years later the shoe store folded in the Depression. By 1930 all three Roths and four Finkels (Ethel had married and moved out) were crammed into the little house on Sheridan Avenue in Elizabeth, and for a few months Herman took odd jobs such as city marshal and short-order cook.‡ Finally, through a friend, he was hired as an insurance salesman for Metropolitan Life.
Herman’s impressive thirty-six-year career began at rock bottom, working his childhood streets in the Third Ward, nowadays populated mostly by poor black families. “He went around the shvartzes and got the pennies,” was how his niece Florence indelicately described the task of selling burial insurance six days a week,§ especially on Saturday when household heads were likely to be home. It was hard work, but Herman was a fervent believer in the Met Life philosophy—an umbrella for a rainy day—all the more so in these years before FDR’s social net. Also, philosophy or no, Herman was determined to do what it took to get his few-penny premiums. Philip sometimes accompanied him on Saturdays (“This is my boy—”), listening intently while Herman chatted with customers and inquired, by name, about this or that family member. “Well, she died three years ago,” someone might say, in which case Herman (having expressed a seemly regret) would mention that the deceased’s burial policy was still in effect and therefore a premium was due. “And they’d pay him,” Philip recalled. “Insurance man comes round, you pay him. That’s the deal.” Decades later, a man named Bernard Disner—who regarded Herman as a revered mentor in the insurance game—related one of his boss’s favorite mantras: “Bernie, you don’t have enough larceny.”
On March 19, 1933, Philip Milton Roth was born at Beth Israel Hospital, where “every boy [he] knew had been born as well and, at the age of eight days, ritually circumcised in the hospital sanctuary.” By then his family was living, along with most of the city’s second-generation Jews, amid the tidy tree-lined streets of the Weequahic section, built some twenty years earlier on the former Lyons Farms at the southwest edge of Newark, the old boundary between the Hackensack and Raritan Indian lands. Weequahic (“head of the cove”) was so named by its main developer, Frank J. Bock, who fortuitously attracted a preponderance of Jews with advertisements for “cheap high-class building plots” and “No Saloons.”
By the time Philip was born, the family had moved from a slightly dingier place on Dewey Street to 81 Summit Avenue, a two-and-a-half-family house whose modest façade would one day be distinguished by a historical plaque. The Roths’ apartment—two bedrooms and a pleasant sun parlor on the second floor—was the nicest of the four they would occupy in Weequahic; the monthly rent was $38.50 (“I think we could get it now for the same,” Roth said in 2010), and it was a quick walk to Chancellor Avenue School and Weequahic High, two of the best public schools in the state. Their block of almost identical gabled houses with little brick stoops and patches of lawn ran along a high crest of the city (hence Summit), and on snowy days the children would gather at the corner of nearby Keer Avenue and swoop two blocks downhill to Leslie Street. The only better sledding in the area was arguably at the 311-acre Weequahic Park, designed by the Olmsted brothers and featuring a lake, golf course, and harness-racing track.
Though he grew up during perhaps the most anti-Semitic decade in American history, Roth noted that his own part of Newark “was as safe and peaceful a haven . . . as his rural community would have been for an Indiana farm boy.” Weequahic was bounded by gentile townships such as Irvington, once a hub of the pro-Nazi Bund and later, for Alexander Portnoy, a vaguely anxious paradise of ice-skating shiksas. Newark itself comprised a constellation of self-contained ethnic villages—Down Neck, Woodside, Vailsburg, Forest Hill—each with its own identity, its own little shops and churches, clustered around a thriving downtown business district. But none of these, not even Weequahic, was entirely homogeneous. One of the Proustian bouquets Sandy Roth would associate with childhood was the “stench of horseshit” on warm days as he passed St. Peter’s, the big Catholic orphanage on Lyons Avenue where the nun-harried children grew their own vegetables and hung on the fence staring at passersby. Along with the hundred or so orphans, a few local Catholic kids also attended the grammar school at St. Peter’s—including Tony Sylvester, the son of an Italian family who lived next door to the Roths on Summit, one of three gentile families on the block. Tony and Philip played together as kids, and on Christmas the Roth boys would admire the Sylvesters’ tree, but there was no socializing among the parents aside from basic civility. On Jewish holidays, for instance, Tony’s mother would make him wear nice clothes and admonish him to behave with special respect.
Their common aim was to work hard and make a place among the American middle class. “You give the wrong idea with that diddle-diddle music,” Roth irritably wrote the BBC producer Alan Yentob, a friend, after watching the man’s 2014 documentary, Philip Roth Unleashed. Roth pointed out that he didn’t hear a klezmer band until he was almost sixty, so it hardly made sense, in the program, to evoke his childhood ambience thus—as opposed to playing tunes from the American songbook, preferably as performed by Roth’s beloved Billy Eckstine and Newark’s own Sarah Vaughan. “During all my growing up in the Weequahic neighborhood I never saw a skull cap on the head of anybody in the street or on the head of anyone in all the houses of friends and relatives that I drifted through almost daily as a youngster. What you fail to communicate was the triumph of secularism in a mere two generations.”
Roth’s later nostalgia for the place was hardly universal. Across the street on Summit was Betty Anne Bolton—“the most beautiful girl in Newark,” said Roth, “our Gene Tierney”—who got out as early as she could, fleeing to France while still in her teens.¶ “I wanted something different from the way these people were living,” she said. “Everybody interested in money; just married, children—a boring suburban life.” There was a time when Roth would agree; like the literary idols of his youth, Thomas Wolfe and Sherwood Anderson, like myriad writers the world over, Roth would long to escape (as his alter ego Zuckerman put it) “the boredom, the righteousness, the bigotry, the repetitious narrow-minded types” of his hometown—then spend the rest of his life thinking about it.