CHAPTER
Three
IN THE EARLY YEARS OF THE T WENTIETH CENTURY, THE Orthodox population of Newark’s Third Ward would occasionally celebrate life in America with a parade along Prince Street, a mass of bearded and behatted men marching proudly to “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Saul Bellow told Roth that his father used to look forward to paying taxes in such a wonderful country, and Roth replied that Herman had felt the same way, even in times of relative poverty; he also loved voting, at least during FDR’s presidency.
Philip Roth was born two weeks after Roosevelt’s first inauguration, and about seven weeks after Hitler became chancellor. That March of 1933, some two thousand Newark Jews gathered at the YMHA’s Fuld Hall to protest the Nazi regime while, across the Hudson, ten times as many filled Madison Square Garden. Probably Roth’s first inkling of Nazi persecution was news of Kristallnacht, on November 9, 1938, when ninety-one Jews were killed and thirty thousand arrested in the mayhem that destroyed thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses in Germany. Six months later, the British House of Commons issued its White Paper of 1939, effectively closing Palestine to all but a fraction of European Jewish refugees; Cynthia Ozick wrote Roth in 2004 that her grandmother had begun “weeping and literally beating her breast” when she read the news in the Yiddish paper.
Jewish support of Roosevelt was almost unanimous. Not only did he staunchly oppose the Nazis, but he appointed a Jew to the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter, and surrounded himself with Jewish advisers such as Bernard Baruch and Henry Morgenthau. For Jewish immigrants and their still-struggling children, the New Deal came close to the socialism many espoused amid an often brutally capitalistic society. “The Jews have drei veltn,” said the Tammany Hall politician Jonah Goldstein: “die velt, yene velt, und Roosevelt” (three worlds: this world, the other world, and Roosevelt). Among the iconic imagery of Roth’s wartime boyhood were Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers illustrating FDR’s Four Freedoms—Freedom of Speech and Worship, Freedom from Want and Fear. “There isn’t a face in any of the four illustrations that isn’t imbedded in my memory,” said Roth, “right down to the man’s face looking backwards out of the picture”—a Thanksgiving feast—“in the lower-right-hand corner of ‘Freedom from Want.’ ” His mother’s greatest heroine was Eleanor Roosevelt, whose column, “My Day,” was her most essential reading; when Philip, in his midtwenties, spotted Mrs. Roosevelt in a Madison Avenue store, he couldn’t resist telling her of his mother’s admiration, then promptly phoned home to tell a tearful Bess about their meeting.
Anti-Semitic demagoguery flourished during the thirties. The German American Bund marched in New York wearing Nazi uniforms and waving swastika flags along with the Stars and Stripes. At a 1939 Bund rally in Madison Square Garden—as well attended as the Jewish anti-Nazi protest six years before—Bund leader Fritz Julius Kuhn railed against “Frank D. Rosenfeld” and his “Jew Deal,” which he characterized as a Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy. Roth remembered his father cursing only twice during his childhood, and in both cases the boy was alerted to the existence of anti-Semitism: once while they were listening to the fascist priest Father Coughlin on the radio (“filthy bastard!”), and once when they drove past the Bund beer garden in Union, New Jersey, a memory Roth included in The Plot Against America.
On December 7, 1941, a Sunday, the eight-year-old Philip was playing with friends in the alley next to his house on Summit Avenue, when his father called from the sun parlor window, asking him to come upstairs; the news of Pearl Harbor had just come over the radio. In Newark and elsewhere, Jews flocked to recruiting stations to prove their patriotism, and Philip became suddenly aware of a reality beyond Weequahic “of powerful forces, unknown, uncontrollable, unpredictable, and menacing, that could threaten our secure familiar little world at any moment.” Almost daily the headlines blasted some fresh catastrophe—WAKE ISLAND FALLS; BATAAN FALLS; CORREGIDOR FALLS—and every night the Roths listened tensely to the war news given by commentators such as Gabriel Heatter, H. V. Kaltenborn, and especially Walter Winchell: “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. North America and all the ships at sea,” Winchell announced in his stentorian nasal, a telegraph key rattling in the background, “let’s go to press. . . .” On a warm day, Roth remembered, you could walk the streets of Weequahic and hardly miss a word of Winchell’s broadcast as it poured out of every window.
Daily life was consumed with the war effort. Roth and his friends saved newspapers and foraged for discarded cigarette packs, from which they carefully peeled away the foil until they had a ball big enough to bring to school, the drop-off place, along with their newspapers. Everybody worked on at least two victory gardens, an individual patch in the backyard and a communal garden tended with the neighbors. Because of gas rationing, the Roths made the three-mile Sunday trip to Elizabeth on foot, skirting a cemetery and crossing a bridge over the railroad tracks. Both parents were conspicuous in their volunteerism. Herman was an air-raid warden, walking the streets at night shouting, “Turn your light out! Pull your shades down!” Bess sold war bonds at Chancellor Avenue School with other PTA mothers—passing out collection booklets to the students and encouraging them to buy twenty-five-cent war stamps; once they filled their booklets with seventy-five stamps, a total of $18.75, they could redeem it for a bond that would mature to a value of $25 in ten years.
Philip was conscientious about writing “newsy” V-mail letters to his older cousins and uncles in the service, and would always keep a tender memory of what they’d looked like in their uniforms. Every day, walking to school, he was reminded of their absence by the “terrifying symbol” of tragic sacrifice that appeared in several windows along the streets of his neighborhood: a Gold Star flag. According to a plaque that was later mounted outside the auditorium, fifty-seven students from Weequahic High were eventually killed in the war.
WHEN THE RENT WAS RAISED on the Roths’ Summit Avenue apartment, they moved three blocks away, in May 1942, to a somewhat seedier place at 359 Leslie Street—another second-floor flat in a two-and-a-half-family house that Bess made clean and pleasant. Moving day was especially memorable for Philip: as he departed 81 Summit that morning, his mother reminded him to go to their new apartment for lunch. So automatic, though, was his two-minute trot from school to their old back door (and perhaps he was rushing, à la Portnoy, to catch his mother in midtransformation from her teacherly guise) that at first he didn’t realize his mistake when he found the door ajar and heard men’s voices; he peeked inside and everything was gone! “Instantaneously I reasoned that there had been a German invasion and my mother had been abducted—or worse.” Abruptly his memory was jogged when he saw the men painting the walls, and he bolted over to Leslie, where his lunch, as ever, was waiting for him on the oilcloth cover of their kitchen table.
He was always in a rush to get to school, his speed hindered only by a traffic cop at the corner of Chancellor and Summit. Eileen Lerner remembered their class as a close-knit, promising group of kids, and Philip was “right up there”; indeed, when her mother once pointed out that she herself had gone to school with a famous person—orchestra leader Shep Fields—Eileen had a hunch that someday she’d say the same of Philip Roth. Both Chancellor Avenue School and Weequahic High were on a yearly two-term schedule that allowed some students to enter and graduate in January, and in fourth grade Philip skipped his second term (“4B”) and became a fifth grader; four years later he’d skip 8B to begin high school at age twelve. (“There are still things I don’t know because of those two half-years,” he mused in 2012. “Lay and lie.” He laughed. “I might spend my retirement . . .”) Before leaving his fellow fourth graders behind, Roth gave a rousing performance that fall as Columbus, stalking downstage in his cape and pointing dramatically into the audience: “Land ho!” he declared, while the others stood mumbling “mutinously” behind him. A revelatory moment: “Knowing that my mother was in the audience,” he said, “I remember feeling all the power that was in me.”
When asked in later years what his son was really like as a kid, Herman Roth accurately replied, “Philip was an all-American boy who loved baseball.” In that respect he was exactly like his friends. While doing homework or lying in bed, he kept his ball, bat, and glove close at hand—the standard “fetishes” of a Weequahic boyhood “that validated our own spotless credentials as American kids.” Later he’d channel his old fervor into a sprawling comic novel about a hapless, itinerant ball team, the Ruppert Mundys—a tribute, in part, to afternoons spent at Ruppert Stadium watching the Triple-A Newark Bears with his father and brother. Among major league teams he favored the Brooklyn Dodgers, and loved listening to the radio announcer Red Barber re-create the excitement of away games with the aid of ticker tape and a little stick to evoke the crack of a bat. Roth would later attribute his Dodgers fandom to the influence of John R. Tunis’s baseball novels (The Kid from Tomkinsville et al.), but his old neighbor Tony Sylvester pointed out that practically every man jack in Weequahic was pro-Dodgers (“Ducky” Steinberg, a boy on their block, was so avid he tossed his radio out the window when they lost). Roth’s most cherished memory of his team was the day he and a friend, Bob Lapidus, journeyed all the way to Ebbets Field (“we might have taken Conestoga wagons along the Oregon Trail to get there”) to see the great Jackie Robinson. “I saw you go eight for nine against the Pirates in a doubleheader in 1947,” said the “awestruck” Roth in 1972 (around the time he was finishing The Great American Novel), when he ran into Robinson at a book party for Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer.
On summer days Roth would leave home first thing in the morning and walk two blocks to Chancellor Playground—“the field”—where he’d grab a softball out of the equipment box and throw it around with new arrivals, until enough boys had gathered to form teams. The playground director, Louis “Bucky” Harris, was a kindly middle-aged man who coached football at Weequahic High during the school year; usually he’d play third base and coordinate five-inning round-robin games that went on all day (with an hour off for lunch), until five or five thirty.* On Sundays, after dinner, the boys would rush back to the field to watch a colorful group of men play for teams sponsored by Newark manufacturing companies—and this, too, was “bliss”: a lot of working Joes and the odd sports celebrity like Allie Stolz (“the local pug”) laughing and bantering in the evening twilight. In The Facts Roth eulogized “the field,” which would vanish amid construction of Untermann Field in the late 1940s: “If ever I had been called on to express my love for my neighborhood in a single reverential act, I couldn’t have done better than to get down on my hands and knees and kiss the ground behind home plate.”
He was less reverential on the subject of Hebrew school, which he began attending at the age of ten, three afternoons a week, for his grandparents’ sake. In those days there were no fewer than seventeen little shuls in Weequahic, mostly named after their streets, and Roth’s studies at the Schley Street Synagogue’s Talmud Torah took him two blocks in the opposite direction from the hallowed field. It was, said Roth, the only school where he failed to excel: “I didn’t know what we were reading or hearing: Abraham, Isaac—what is this stuff? Is it history? Fairy tales? . . . They lived in tents. I couldn’t figure this out; Jews in the Weequahic section, they didn’t live in tents.” On the other hand, it would have been “unnatural” for a Weequahic boy not to attend Hebrew school, and Roth “had no interest in being abnormal and unnatural”; also, it was what one did to become a man, and that he coveted dearly.
Talmud Torah was also the only school where Roth was a discipline problem, though he was hardly exceptional in that respect. The class bristled against the boredom of reciting the aleph-bet by making fun of their hapless refugee melamed, Mr. Rosenblum, whose effigy was hanged “more than once” from a lamppost outside the classroom window. Even for a heder, the grungy little yellow-brick building was “a shit school,” as Roth unrepentantly remembered—a place reeking of the boys’ uproarious farts, the pickled herring gobbled by an old sexton, and cat piss in the basement where the man kept his pets (“in fact his name was Katz”).
One boon of Talmud Torah, so Roth claimed, was that he “learned to be funny” there; he was also guided by the Borscht Belt shtick of Henny Youngman, by Jewish radio comedians such as Eddie Cantor and his beloved Jack Benny. Roth was, in fact, widely regarded as a smart aleck—“drawn to the rhetoric and postures of ridicule,” as he later put it. Marty Castelbaum described Roth’s style as “giving you the shiv”; a terrible athlete, Castelbaum was usually exiled to right field during softball games, and one day he made a weak throw that dribbled its way to second base. Trotting back to the bench once the inning was over, he was met by Roth and their friends. “Well, here comes Carl Furillo Castelbaum!” said Roth, referring to the golden-armed right fielder for the Dodgers. “How does it feel, Carl, to be able to throw to second in only three bounces?”—etc. Forever after, the boy was known as Carl Furillo Castelbaum.
DURING THE WORST of the summer heat, much of Weequahic removed itself to Bradley Beach, an outpost of the neighborhood on the Jersey Shore. The Roths usually went for a couple of weeks, at least, and sometimes Bess and the boys would take a place on Lareine Avenue for the whole summer, while Herman visited on weekends. The same two families usually shared a rental cottage with the Roths: Bill and Lena Weber and their son Herbie, who was Sandy’s age, and Joe and Selma Green, whose pretty daughter, Ruth, was three years older than Philip. As a matter of ritual, the parents would stop on the way down in Asbury Park, two miles to the north, and weigh their children on the big scale; at the end of the summer, returning, they’d do the same and “squabble over whose kid had gained the most,” said Sandy.
On Lareine the three families became one, the mothers cooking breakfast in a communal kitchen and then letting their kids run loose on the beach all day. The first year, when he was four or five, Philip stayed with his mother while Sandy and Herbie Weber went swimming or, on rainy days, to the local theater, watching Tarzan movies that left them bellowing like the Jungle King every time they barreled into the water. Later Philip was allowed to tag along, and Sandy was conscientious as ever about teaching him how to ride the waves, or taking him fishing along the Shark River Inlet between Belmar and Avon. At night, too (“as if he hadn’t had enough of a kid brother all day long”), Sandy would include Philip when the older boys ventured onto the boardwalk to play pinball and talk about girls. According to Sandy, Herbie Weber was a “veritable Scheherazade” when it came to telling fanciful stories about his make-out exploits, and once, when the three were lined up at a urinal, he made little Philip laugh so hard that he wheeled around and soaked Herbie’s white flannel trousers.
When he was sixteen, Sandy got a job running the Pokerino concession at the arcade (“sort of the peak of my career as a human teenager”), and at night he and his Weequahic pals would gather at a pavilion off the boardwalk and dance the jitterbug. After the war it would be Philip’s turn to dance and canoodle, inhaling the heady bouquet of sea salt in a girl’s hair: “I think I kissed more kisses between the ages of thirteen and seventeen than I will kiss the rest of my life,” he wrote in a 1959 paean to Bradley Beach, “Beyond the Last Rope.” As a boy, meanwhile, he pined for their lovely housemate, Ruth, albeit fruitlessly given the age difference; besides, Bess Roth seemed to hope she could interest Ruth in her older son. Already the girl called Bess “Mom” and confided in a way she couldn’t with her actual mother, while Bess gently warned her not to eat Hostess Cup Cakes once she began to fill out as a woman. “She was always cuddling me and making sure I grew up right,” Ruth Green Stamler remembered. “She didn’t have a daughter—it was me.” As much as she might have liked to have Bess as a mother-in-law, though, she simply couldn’t get excited about Sandy—a nice enough playmate when they were little, and later a skinny, quiet fellow bent over his drawing pad, quite unlike the burly shagitz (gentile) football player she began dating in high school (to Bess’s dismay).
Eventually Ruth fell out of touch with the Roths, though her children knew she’d been friends with a boy who went on to become a world-famous writer. One day, in 2009, her daughter read a newspaper piece about Roth, who said he wished he could see more of his childhood friends; without telling her mother, the woman wrote a letter care of his agent, and a few weeks later Ruth Stamler got a phone call at her home in San Diego: “Hi, Ruthie!” After a pleasant chat—Roth asked her to write down memories of his mother—the two agreed to meet for lunch the next time she was in New York with her son, an entertainment lawyer who had clients there. “Bess and Herman, are you looking down on this?” she said, sitting opposite Roth that October, at Nice Matin, a café down the block from his Upper West Side apartment. For two hours they pored over photos from their days on the beach, and finally just sat clutching hands. “I keep looking for ‘Ruthie,’ ” Roth wrote afterward. “Want her to transform herself into Ruthie.” As for Stamler’s impression, she remembered having a “lovely afternoon” but wondered why her childhood friend had looked so sad the whole time, for all his sweetness, and decided it had something to do with his lifelong obsession—“all these thoughts that he had to get out and put on paper.” “Lonely after she left,” Roth wrote. “The little girl who shared our childhood summers at the shore. . . . The two survivors. Frightening. The last two left who lived in that summer house from 1938 on. A man and a woman beyond sex.”
THE “LONGEST, SADDEST DAY of my young American life,” said Roth, was April 12, 1945, when FDR died of a cerebral hemorrhage just as the war in Europe was coming to an end. Roth was among the crowd in downtown Newark who stood, bereft, as the funeral train “passed with lumbering solemnity” during its trip from Washington to Hyde Park. When V-E Day came less than a month later, the Roth family sat around the radio listening to Norman Corwin’s long demotic masterwork, On a Note of Triumph, whose opening lines were fixed in Roth’s mind for all time:
They’re finally done in, and the rat is dead in an alley
back of the Wilhelmstrasse. . . .
It went on like that for sixty-two pages, as Roth learned when he bought the book—the first he ever owned—and endeavored to memorize it. Corwin was his “first writing idol”: the author of an American epic that a patriotic young man, formed by the war, craved; he was the precursor to Roth’s next idol, Thomas Wolfe, and Wolfe in turn would lead to his all-time hero, Saul Bellow. But he never forgot Corwin, and the two became friends some fifty years later, when Roth got in touch while writing I Married a Communist. The novel was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Corwin, almost ninety years old, happily attended the ceremony on Roth’s behalf in case his novel won (it didn’t).
The Roth family stopped going to Bradley Beach in the early years of the war, when the little towns along the Jersey Shore were blacked out, the beaches littered with detritus from torpedo warfare and patrolled by Coast Guard dogs sniffing the air for Nazi saboteurs. The Roths’ first summer back was 1944, and they were there again in August 1945, when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrendered a few days later, and that night people poured into the streets of Bradley Beach banging pots and pans and honking their horns. Kids formed a conga line along the boardwalk, and Philip was among them, his jubilation tempered somewhat by the sight of older people sobbing on benches—“probably the parents of boys who had been killed,” he thought. “The war was over and it was a wonderful thing, but not for them. They would have this grief forever.”
For years he and his schoolmates had been indoctrinated in the principles for which the country fought: justice, equality, freedom for all. Once a week they spent an hour singing hymns for every branch of the armed forces, and occasionally the anthem of the Chinese Communists (“which tells you something about the politics of the teachers in that school”), with its stirring rebuke of Japanese imperialism that so delighted Roth: “Indignation fills the hearts of all of our countrymen! A-rise! A-rise! ARISE! . . .” The prewar ways of racial and religious prejudice, it seemed, would evaporate in view of this great collective struggle. And yet: that first summer back in Bradley Beach had been blighted by the incursion of “lumpen kids” from Neptune, a nearby gentile town, who swarmed over the boardwalk yelling “Kikes!” and beating up any Jewish kids they could get their hands on. Such hatred was learned at home, burnished for generations, and perhaps impervious to history.
A gang of violent urchins was one thing, and the more subtle anti-Semitism practiced by the gentile executives at Metropolitan Life was another, but the latter was just as unfair and destructive in its insidious way. Herman Roth was under pressure not only to work harder at his everyday duties but also to appear “a nice and regular guy,” as Philip noticed, a man who knew his place and followed the rules. For this he’d been rewarded with a promotion by his district manager, Sam Peterfreund, perhaps the only Jew (other than the treasurer) who’d managed to penetrate the company’s august leadership. Herman was painfully respectful toward the man he always called Boss, a big dapper bald fellow with “a slightly mysterious German accent” whose occasional appearance at the Roths’ dinner table was “like the Second Coming,” Sandy recalled: “Everybody hung on his every word, and it was all bombast.” As for Philip, he might have shared a measure of his father’s awe, but the rule to which Peterfreund was a rare exception was rank injustice (“Indignation!”), and by the age of twelve Philip was determined to become “a lawyer for the underdog,” an ambition echoed by the motto he’d written in his eighth-grade autograph book: “Don’t step on the underdog.”†
And he was affronted by more than just the plight of his fellow Jews. Along with Newark’s first and only Jewish mayor, Meyer Ellenstein—whose two terms began the year of Roth’s birth—the boy was adamantly opposed to goyish bigotry against black people. Reform-minded blacks and Jews, to be sure, enjoyed considerably better rapport than in subsequent decades: black newspapers vigorously editorialized against Nazi persecution, and the Jews of Newark joined forces with black citizens on the local Interracial Council, the Socialist Party, and the Congress of Racial Equality. Mayor Ellenstein had placed advertisements in Southern newspapers alerting blacks to the availability of jobs in his thriving industrial city and supported their efforts to desegregate City Hospital. In Weequahic, however (where Ellenstein also lived), blacks were all but invisible; indeed, the only place Roth ever saw his family’s sweet-natured maid, Viola Johnson, was either in their house or on the corner, waiting for a bus back to the Third Ward. Viola came once a week, and Roth remembered that his mother went out of her way to treat the woman kindly, even preparing food for Viola’s family when she was sick and couldn’t work. Sandy took a somewhat less idealized view: Viola, like all the maids in Weequahic, was grossly underpaid and invariably called “the shvartze” in her absence. According to their cousin Florence—whose family shared Viola—Aunt Bess was “very democratic” about sitting down in the kitchen and eating lunch with Viola, after which she’d wash the woman’s plate and silverware with scalding water (“Oh, you know how hard it is to get mayonnaise off silverware these days,” Sophie Portnoy explains to her maid, when caught in the act of her furious scrubbing).
As an instance of his prodigious altruism, Alex Portnoy remembers the time he “led [his] entire eighth-grade class in refusing to participate in the annual patriotic-essay contest sponsored by the D. A. R.”—this because the Daughters of the American Revolution had barred black contralto Marian Anderson from performing at “Convention Hall” in Washington, D.C. Many years later, the president of Roth’s eighth-grade class at Chancellor Avenue School, Edward Sable, wrote a letter gently correcting Roth on a few points: “In Portnoy’s Complaint, Portnoy was the class president and Marian Anderson the performer. Marian Anderson’s situation mirrored the one of [black pianist] Hazel Scott seven years later”—i.e., in late 1945, when the actual boycott took place. “She also was not allowed to perform at Constitution [not “Convention”] Hall.” As for the student who led the boycott in Hazel Scott’s behalf, it was Edward Sable himself. “Eddie tells me in Portnoy’s Complaint that I organized it,” Roth remarked, “but I didn’t say I did it, I said Portnoy did it. I wasn’t going to have it in Portnoy’s Complaint that Eddie Sable did it.” But in earlier interviews Roth had, in fact, claimed that the boycott had been his idea (also that the performer in question was Anderson): “I had a friend named Eddie Sable who was class president,” he said in 2004, “and I said [to Sable], ‘We can’t participate in this essay contest.’ ”
Roth was disabused during a long phone chat with Sable in 2010. Sable explained that the letter proposing a boycott had been drafted by him and his older brother, then shown to their eighth-grade teacher, Sophia McCaffery, who wanted nothing to do with it; Principal Albin Frey, however, approved it without hesitation, and the thirty-six members of the eighth-grade class voted unanimously in favor of sending it to the newspaper. CHILDREN SHUN DAR CONTEST, read the headline in the Newark Star-Ledger: “Essays on ‘Why the DAR is Undemocratic and un-American’ will shortly bombard DAR headquarters.” The Star-Ledger mentioned four students who had met at Sable’s house to work out the details: Richard Sobel, Leon Ninburg, Ronald Traum, and Sable himself, the last of whom received threatening letters and phone calls after the article appeared, but also a heartening endorsement from Mrs. James Otto Hill, president of the Interracial Council: “We highly commend your actions taken in regards to the un-American ‘lily-white’ policy of the National Daughters of the American Revolution.” Roth, like Portnoy, also remembered that he and five other classmates had been honored at the CIO Political Action Committee convention that December, when the celebrated left-wing columnist Dr. Frank Kingdon approached the children onstage and said, “Boys and girls, you are going to see democracy in action here this morning.”‡ Whatever his vagueness about other details, Roth was fairly certain his fellow classmates on the dais included a Russian immigrant named Anita Zurav, who had “wonderful breasts” and carried a copy of The Daily Worker.
On January 30, 1946, Roth graduated from Chancellor Avenue School,§ and for the morning ceremony he and Dorothy Brand (“the smartest girl in the class”) had written a morality play titled Let Freedom Ring! The two main characters were Tolerance and Prejudice, and a surviving fragment of the script includes the latter’s opening monologue, in which he traces his villainous role in American history and concludes, “I am going to try to make pre[judice]. part of your ideal as it was part of the Nazi ideal.” The rest of the play is lost, but its authors remember that it involved Prejudice (Roth) and Tolerance (Brand) visiting the homes of various minority families, whom Prejudice naturally disparages in advance, only to be enlightened by Tolerance, who points out, say, that Italians don’t all smell of garlic and indeed aspire to get good educations and so forth. At last Prejudice slinks off in defeat, while Tolerance leads the class in singing Frank Sinatra’s popular tune about racial and religious harmony, “The House I Live In.” At Roth’s seventy-fifth birthday tribute at Columbia University, he referred to the play as his true “beginning” as a writer: “It isn’t perhaps entirely far-fetched to suggest to you that the twelve-year-old boy who coauthored Let Freedom Ring! was father to the author who wrote The Plot Against America.”