It happened like this: I was walking along Washington Place, east of Washington Square Park, in the Village. A block I’d traversed countless times before, only a stone’s throw from my apartment. It was early spring, still cold. I came upon a huge pile of white carnations just piled — heaped — on the sidewalk. Upon closer inspection I noticed that each was affixed with a small sticker name tag. And then, for the first time, despite having passed it quite often, I saw the bronze plaque affixed to the building just above eye level. It was the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, the very sidewalk where dozens of barely postpubescent immigrant girls had landed in a charred heap after having leaped from the all-consuming fire, where now their names were affixed to ostensibly representative cheap white carnations. A hundred and fifty of them, Esther Goldsteins and Yetta Fichtenhultzes and Gussie Rosenfelds and Ida Jakorskys and Rosie Shapiros and Celia Gettlins and Annie Novobritskys and Unidentifieds, commemorated on the anniversary of the catastrophe that at once embodied and betrayed their naive, perhaps even as-yet-unarticulated American dreams. It was perfect. I immediately whipped out my oh-so-writerly Mole-skine notebook (thirteen bucks at your local independent bookstore) and began to copy down the names and some notes, impressions of my oh-so-writerly wheels a-spinning.
I got to work that very day, March 25. I went to the library, looked around online, gathered information about the fire, about New York at the turn of the (last) century, etc. I put together a bibliography. I envisioned something grand, something all-encompassing, something at once contemporary and historical, intricately crafted to reveal a core of overlapping themes of American Judaism, the century-bookending phenomena of people falling en masse from tall burning buildings in lower Manhattan, my own rampant postadolescent malaise and fear, housed not three blocks from the site in a two-bedroom I shared with my fiancé until I broke my engagement and kicked him out a few months later. It was going to be great. The potential was endless and unbelievably exciting. I was out for some Safran Foer blood, man. I would get a grant, I would go to an artists’ colony, I would sell first serial to the Paris Review, I would have a stunning black-and-white portrait taken by Marion Ettlinger, I would sell the collection in a massive two-book deal which would warrant a clipping in Shtetl Fabulous magazine, that glossy, much-hyped bimonthly effort to turn cultural Jewish identity into the coolest shtick on the block, the new black. I could not have been more excited, more — if you’ll excuse the expression in this context — fired up.
Anyway, it goes without saying that I love you. I first read you in high school. (Goodbye, Columbus—don’t remember it so well, but the chick who played Brenda in the movie was pretty hot, wasn’t she?) I flipped through Portnoy shortly thereafter, disgusted and bored. It enraged me like it had enraged all the good dumb Jews thirty-odd years earlier. I was so idiotic, Philip. This, admittedly, had less to do with your much-maligned opus than with the relatively few years that had elapsed since the end of my own unfortunate, romantically unsuccessful tenure at a particularly vile Jewish sleep-away camp. All I could see in Portnoy was the specter of those pathetic fucking Jewboys who didn’t want to fuck me, Philip. That was my tragedy at seventeen: No one wanted to fuck me. My Camp Ramah might as well have been your Newark, fifty years later and in Southern California, for all its Jewish insularity and provinciality. The people with whom I came of age in that pseudo ghetto aspired to meet, screw, and marry one another (but not me!) without ever moving in any respect beyond the psychological, emotional, and intellectual borders of those well-funded, gorgeously landscaped sixty acres. They have motherfucking alumnae weekends, Philip. I get letters soliciting donations.
“Roth,” I would spit contemptuously whenever the subject of your books came up, “Yuck.” Yuck because in the defensively perceived shiksa-obsession and sexual dysfunction and casual dismissal of Jewish women and mockery of everything religiously, spiritually meaningful in Judaism itself, I was transported right back to Ramah, to being ignored and overlooked, to being made to feel freakish for my aesthetic, my sensibility, my desire for connection and friendship and love, to the weekly advent of the Holy Sabbath as purely an opportunity for us girls to look our prettiest and amass sexually explicit Shabbat-O-Grams from heavily-gelled-and-cologned boys, to the years-long, unrequited torment of a crush on a smarmy staff rabbinical student whose engaging smirks of dismissal I took as signals of subverted lust. Yuck because in Roth were Justin Steinberg and Eric Landsman and Ron Frank, those United Synagogue Youth fuckwads with their hemp necklaces and hackey-sacks and Phish tickets and body-hair aversion, and universal fetishization of Asian women. I didn’t matter. I was powerless. I was overlooked. I had to hate you. I had to play that easy, tired “misogynist” card. Hating you made me feel better about myself — my Jewish-ness, my femininity, my mattering, the possibility that somewhere, sometime, someone would want to fuck me. In that way, of course, the trajectory of my (one-sided) relationship with you is not unlike that of the world at large, do you see? Because after some years of relaxing into myself and accepting my innate worth and spending lots and lots of my parents’ money on therapy and electrolysis, after finding many men who did indeed want to fuck me (who, in fact, wanted very much to fuck me! So there!), I could pick up The Human Stain and then Operation Shylock and then The Ghostwriter and then American Pastoral and then Sabbath’s Theater and read you simply as the fucking astonishing genius that you are. Substitute the assimilation and success and general relaxing-into-the-safety-and-prosperity-of-the-second-
half-of-the-twentieth-century of American Jewry for my own sexual liberation at the hands of (mostly) non-Jewish men, and there you have a rather interesting parallel in terms of our collective eventual appreciation of the writer Philip Roth, no? At present writing, The Plot Against America is number one on the Los Angeles Times best-seller list. Mazel tov.
So. I am a young Jewish writer who idolizes you, cherishes your books, and reads them slowly, considers you the father of us all. Ah, yes: the father of us all — but not actually a father yourself, Philip, so far as I know. Why is that? Do you yourself know? Is there an answer? I realize that life is more complicated than that, but still, I wonder. Again and again I find evidence of child longing in your books. In The Counterlife, especially, our tenuous link, we find pregnant Maria aglow with Zuckerman’s life growing inside her, the narrative changing and changing until she vanishes from reality, taking Zuckerman’s potential offspring with her. When she reappears at the end of The Facts, she’s still pregnant (more so, even), but there is no fruition, no birth.