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June 3, 2021 1:03 pm A contemporary photograph shows the ruins of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Okla., after a white mob and local law enforcement attacked and killed hundreds of the neighborhood s Black residents, June 1921.(Library of Congress) Advertisement (JTA) My grandpa once told me a story about when my great-grandparents were on a steamship emigrating from Ukraine to Cuba in the 1920s, shortly before my grandpa was born. As the story went, my great-grandmother saw a Black man for the first time and she screamed and hid. My grandpa told the story to me only once, when I was probably about 10 years old, but the image of my great-grandmother seeing a Black man and screaming stuck with me. ....
Philip Roth on 2005 Credit: AP The first major biographical work on Philip Roth portrayed one of America’s greatest novelists as a borderline-sociopathic philanderer. It was hardly an impartial book but it certainly had a claim to insider knowledge. The author was Roth’s estranged wife, the actress Claire Bloom. The publication of Bloom’s Leaving a Doll’s House in 1996 galvanised Roth into launching a search for an official biographer: somebody who would give readers the facts of Roth’s life from the horse’s mouth rather than that of his former stablemate. As Roth later explained, if he had failed to appoint an official biographer there was a danger that somebody else would come along and fill the vacuum, writing a biography without consulting him and taking Bloom’s “serious and libelous distortions of reality and her numerous significant omissions as a starting point”. Late in his life he recalled: “I thought: ‘Someone’s gotta correct thi ....
Philip Roth 2002 (Dennis Van Tine/ABACAPRESS.COM) The reviews of Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth: The Biography have been pouring out on both sides of the Atlantic. What is striking is how badly written the British ones have been and how smart the American ones are. What makes the British reviews so much worse? First, the bizarre omissions. Tim Adams’s review in The Observer of Bailey’s biography doesn’t use the words “Jew” or “Jewish” once. This is extraordinary. Not only was Roth Jewish, he wrote constantly about Jews, from Anne Frank and Kafka to his own fictional characters Portnoy and Zuckerman. Roth couldn’t have been more Jewish. It’s not just the Jewish subject matter. Above all, it’s the voice, that distinctive mix of high and low, funny and serious. “If Yahweh wanted me to be calm,” he writes in ....
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Philip Roth: The Biography, by Blake Bailey. W. W. Norton. 912 pages. $40. I ’ve never understood what others make out of non-fiction. Me, I used to make fiction out of it, but that was a while ago and I’m talking about regular people. I’m talking about you people, who apparently even now keep buying and library-borrowing, perhaps even reading, masses of these vast, fact-teeming books whose genre swears to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God. What exactly do you want from them? I can’t imagine you read history for the same reason I did, to cherry-pick period details to use in novels. And what about biographies? Do you read them out of curiosity, envy, jealousy? Do you read them only for comparison? That’s what I did, back when I was alive: I read other lives ....