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At it Again: Philip Roth's Dirty Old Jew

Mon, December 17, 5:00 to 6:30pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Federal 1 Complex

Abstract

Philip Roth has described SABBATH’S THEATER (1995) as the ‘freest experience’ of his literary career. This liberty is expressed through Mickey Sabbath, the novel’s protagonist, and his lack of anxiety regarding his identity as a Jewish man. The protagonist’s insouciance concerning his Jewishness signals a turning point in Roth’s oeuvre. The bulk of Roth’s literary output is cluttered with Jewish men anxiously fretting over their ‘Jewish difference.’ Roth’s protagonists have frequently internalized antisemitic conceptions that have historically defined Jewish men as ‘weak’ and ‘effeminate.’ In PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT, for example, Roth brings modern antisemitism’s conception of the ‘Jew’ to life: Portnoy is a shikse-defiling, hypochondriac, serial masturbator, with a chronic lust for non-Jewish women. All of his actions and desires are centered around escaping his (stereotypical) Jewish family and becoming an ‘American.’
SABBATH’S THEATER represent a significant turning point in Roth’s career, as the author dispenses with Portnoy’s self-loathing, and disregards the familial turbulences Nathan Zuckerman faced in THE GHOST WRITER (1979). Mickey Sabbath is a Jewish American; his identity is of little significance to his existence. Rather, Sabbath is tormented by grief and mourning for those he has lost. His alien status in the novel stems from his sexual excessiveness, and unlike Portnoy, his libido is not rooted in a desire to escape Judaism. Rather, Sabbath’s sexuality serves to express his Americanness.
This paper draws attention to the ways in which Roth subverts what Anette Kolodny has described as the ‘pastoral impulse’, in which American writers have metaphorically defined the land as female. Sabbath’s lover, Drenka Balich, identifies Mickey Sabbath as an ‘American’, and I argue that Drenka’s identification metaphorically defines the land through Mickey’s Jewish penis. I consider how this identification reflects the social and ‘racial’ evolution of Jewishness in America. In doing so, I highlight how Roth, through his grotesque sexual excessiveness and subversion of antisemitic stereotypes, rejects the ‘whitening’ of Jewishness in America, and celebrates Jewish otherness as a mode of Americanness.

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