MacKenzie asked Roth for permission to give his phone number to the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and on April 10 they got in touch (“Oh to be a liberal now that spring is here,” said Roth), inviting him to meet with two ADL representatives for lunch. When the day came, Roth was relieved to find himself with sympathetic fellows who only wanted to make him aware of certain complaints and answer whatever questions he might have. Roth told them how bewildering it was to be accused of anti-Semitism, all the more given his youthful ambition to study law and defend the rights of Jews, possibly on behalf of B’nai B’rith. When he asked what kind of complaints they’d received, he was shown a letter from the current president of the Rabbinical Council of America, Emanuel Rackman: “What is being done to silence this man?” the rabbi had written. “Medieval Jews would have known what to do with him.”

  Perhaps the worst part, for Roth, was explaining to his parents—so soon after the Maggie debacle—the “outcry” over his New Yorker story that had led to his meeting with the ADL. “What outcry?” said Herman. “Everybody loved it. What is the outcry? I don’t get it.” Herman, especially, had been apt to pluck issues of Commentary and The Paris Review from where they were proudly displayed on a side table, reading passages aloud to guests; he was gobsmacked that actual rabbis had seen fit to brand his son a self-hating Jew. As for Bess, she would get an earful over the years from her Hadassah and Deborah friends who were “only too happy” to mention the latest outcry. “Philip, are you an anti-Semite?” she finally asked him one day, over coffee. “Ma,” he said. “What d’you think?” “No!” “Well, there’s your answer.”

  What with one thing and another, then, Roth was in no mood to mince words when Rabbi Rackman wrote him directly and—without mentioning his letter to the ADL about medieval justice—suggested he’d done Roth a favor by forbearing to go over his head and explain things to The New Yorker (“I do not want to compound the sin of informing”). “I am indeed sorry that you are outraged at my story, ‘Defender of the Faith,’ ” Roth replied on April 30. “Grossbart no more stands for all Jews than Hamlet stands for all Danes, Othello for all Negroes and/or Moors, Raskolnikov for all students or all Russians. Nor does Marx, the hero, stand for all Jews.” Roth wondered why Rackman and certain other detractors hadn’t bothered to mention Sergeant Marx, “a man of stern moral conscience . . . I suggest it doesn’t serve their purpose”—a purpose similar, Roth wrote, to that of “the late Senator McCarthy”:

  He who criticizes must be silenced—that is a terrible tenet to have to live by, Rabbi, and I should imagine even more terrible to a spiritual leader, a person who as a helper and friend is apt to be engaged by men’s problems of conscience even more than the rest of us. . . .

  I resent deeply and cannot forgive you your insulting letter which demands of me a kind of Jewish patriotism which is akin to the kind of American patriotism demanded by Senator McCarthy a while back. I resent and cannot forgive you the charge you make that my story was conceived and written out of an “anxiousness to receive better fees.” . . . I am willing to be morally responsible for every word I write, and I will take whatever action seems to me necessary to defend my integrity. That, after all, Rabbi, was what my story was about. . . .

  It was presumptuous of you, Rabbi Rackman, to speak of yourself to me as “a leader of his people.” You are not my leader, and I can only thank God for it.

  ON MARCH 23, 1959—six weeks before publication of Goodbye, Columbus—Roth mentioned to his advertising contact at Houghton, Anne Ford, that it might be “profitable to pour a little gas on the fire” by running an ad in The New Yorker: “I am a little interested in selling this old book, my bride having expensive and delectable taste.” Ford understood this to mean that the young first-time author wanted to emphasize, explicitly, that he’d been attacked as a self-hating Jew, and wondered whether such an approach might “boomerang” to their common disadvantage. The next day Starbuck dashed off a note assuring Roth that nobody “thought you meant anything so crude as to advertise the controversy” and regretted that the book’s ad budget ($1,500) was, in any case, committed elsewhere. Roth was indeed exasperated by the misunderstanding but pushed Starbuck to “keep [his] hand in with the [New Yorker] ad”—that is, a conventional quote ad that didn’t refer to his alleged anti-Semitism per se. Starbuck, as ever, did as he was told, but Roth was “flabbergasted” when the ad in question failed to attribute its main quotation to Alfred Kazin (“his name carries immense weight”), whose glowing review in The Reporter was headlined Tough-Minded Mr. Roth: “Several weeks ago I was awakened,” Kazin wrote, “while reading The New Yorker, by Philip Roth’s ‘Defender of the Faith,’ a story with such extraordinary guts to it that I went around for days exhilarated by the change of the literary weather.” Kazin had been a hero ever since Roth had read On Native Grounds, and the most thrilling part of Roth’s prepublication cocktail party on May 6—at the East Thirty-fifth Street penthouse of Barbara Krohn, a Houghton editor, and her husband, David (later Roth’s ophthalmologist)—was Kazin’s presence. His parents and Sandy also came, and Maggie managed to behave herself (“Of course she did—all this was exactly what she had hoped to obtain with the urine fraud”).

  As Saul Bellow would acknowledge in his Commentary review, Goodbye, Columbus was a milestone of sorts (“the hero of Jewish fiction two decades ago knew nothing of Jewish suburbs, country clubs, organized cancer fund drives, large sums of money, cars, mink, or jewelry”), and he and Kazin were joined by a host of other critics in weighing its impact. Roth read and reread every syllable of these reviews, no matter how provincial, but of course it was Bellow’s notice that meant more, perhaps, than any of the thousands that would follow during Roth’s long career: “Goodbye, Columbus is a first book but it is not the book of a beginner,” Bellow began. “Unlike those of us who came howling into the world, blind and bare, Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair, and teeth, speaking coherently. At twenty-six he is skillful, witty, and energetic and performs like a virtuoso.” No wonder the piece helped mitigate the impression of coldness Bellow had made on Roth when they’d met, most recently, at the Hillel House in Chicago (“I think he suspects me of wanting to usurp his position,” said Roth, “in which he is entirely correct”). Fortunately—given a friendship that would take decades to find its feet—Roth never saw the unexpurgated version. As the “outraged” Bellow wrote Dick Stern, the review had gotten “some of its teeth drawn” by the magazine’s editors just prior to publication, so that his actual opinion of the book was considerably at odds with the printed version.

  Leslie Fiedler’s review in Midstream was almost pure rhapsody: “Newark, our Newark,” he announced, had finally produced a laureate (“how can he be only twenty-six?”) who was, perforce, “as vulgar, comical, subtle, pathetic and dirty as itself.” Moreover this had happened in the nick of time, since the Newark that Fiedler had known in his youth was already passing into history. Fiedler could hardly have known just how forsaken Newark would become in the years ahead, or how vividly Roth would portray its glory and decline, but the final paragraph of his review heralds something of this: “Newark! A Florence it will never be in the minds of men, nor a Baghdad nor a Paris; but after Roth, we can hope that perhaps it will survive on library shelves ravaged by ambitious boys as another Yonville or Winesburg, Ohio.”

  Irving Howe, the consummate New York intellectual, gave a somewhat more grudging appraisal in The New Republic: “Mr. Roth’s stories do not yield pleasure as much as produce a squirm of recognition: surely, one feels, not all of American Jewish life is like this, but all too much of it is becoming so.” Howe commended the author’s “deadpan malicious accuracy” in sketching the Patimkins, which, he conceded, was “ferociously exact”—indeed, “too exact, too close to surface realities, there is not enough imaginative transformation. Mr. Roth is dedicated to a kind of mimetic revenge.” Roth was affronted by the “slippery” ambivalence of the review (albeit not as affronted as thirteen years later, when Howe would retract almost everything positive from these early impressions): “I figure fuck Howe anyway,” he wrote the Bakers. “It isn’t my fault that people aren’t eating as much chopped liver as they used to.”

  As a first-time author, Roth took himself even more seriously than his impressive roster of critics—admitting to friends that he was in the habit of phoning bookstores and asking if they carried Goodbye, Columbus, then hanging up; also, he and Maggie made a point of taking their nightly strolls along bookstore-heavy streets so she could ask the same question in person. The book was on the brink of a third printing (4,312 copies sold in the first three weeks), and would ultimately sell almost 13,000 in hardback—“phenomenal for a book of stories by a jackoff from the woods,” as Roth noted. That August he got a fan letter from Kirk Douglas, and in Charm magazine the rugged young author was featured in a photo spread—along with two first novelists (Nora Johnson and Sylvia Ashton-Warner)—solemnly playing with Allegra the cat: “[Roth] has a handsomely remote manner that seems to belie his writing,” the caption read: “a lusty, often comic and frequently terrifying portrayal of bourgeois Jewish life in America.” In The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman mentions his appearance in a Saturday Review piece on America’s “young, unknown writers,” for which he’d been photographed with his cat, Nijinsky; sensing (correctly) that his revered mentor, E. I. Lonoff, considers such publicity unseemly, he explains: “ ‘The girl who came around to take the pictures’—and whom I had tried unsuccessfully to throw onto the floor—‘said she’d just take the picture of the cat for Betsy and me.’ ”

  In later years Roth would all but disown his first book (“a very, very weak piece of writing”) and, groping to explain its appeal to the august likes of Bellow, Kazin, and Fiedler, would suggest that “they didn’t know there were people like that.” In a belated “hatchet piece” that appeared in the Fall 1960 Partisan Review, a young Jeremy Larner† had made rather the same point: “Each of these knowledgeable men [Bellow et al.] verifies Roth’s portrait of the Jewish upper-middle class and sets forth qualified but positive claims for his merits as a novelist”—however, Larner added, such “non-bourgeois intellectuals” as Bellow were “mistaken on both counts” because of their “basic ignorance of the people Roth writes about.” Larner, with cocky aplomb, proceeded to enumerate the various ways Roth had mischaracterized his social types. At the time Roth was rightly astonished (“Jee-sus”) by the “jerkiness” of Larner’s review, though again it anticipated certain of his own misgivings. “Neil [Klugman] is nothing more than the allegorical Poor Boy . . . he does not seem to exist outside of his frustration with the Patimkins,” said Larner, and in 2004 Roth agreed: “There’s no character there; he’s just an attitude.” In almost every respect Roth was harder on his title novella than even his most savage critics, and he’d forever nurse particular chagrin over the Gauguin-loving black child at the library (“mawkish Mr. Roth at his most lovable”) and the winsomely kvetching Aunt Gladys (“facile and a cliché”). Yet for many years he would often be informed, wistfully, by critics and everyday readers alike, that he’d never quite “fulfilled the promise” of his first book.

  This was all the more galling given that a substantial part of the book was the despised “Eli, the Fanatic.” Already, in December 1959, Roth suspected (as he wrote Miss Martin) that the story lacked “depth,” and in the apparent hope of correcting this defect, he rewrote its ending for the paperback and Literary Guild editions—thus making it, if not deeper, at least more touching. In the original version (the one that would survive for posterity via the Library of America) we are given Eli’s third-person thoughts, briefly, as he visits his newborn son in the maternity ward while wearing the greenhorn’s suit and hat: “He’d make the kid wear it! Sure! . . . A smelly hand-me-down, whether the kid liked it or not!” In the revised version, however, Eli delivers a first-person speech to the baby: “ ‘I’m your father . . . I’m wearing a black hat and a black suit . . . and special underwear. In a little while Dr. Eckman’ll make me take off the whole business . . . But I’ll keep the suit at home . . . and I’ll wear it again. I promise. Every year on the nineteenth of May, I’ll wear it. I promise.’ ” Eli goes on like that, telling his infant son that he too will wear a black suit and hat, and they’ll walk together that way: “ ‘And you’ll make your son wear it. . . . And your son’s son’s son . . . and we’ll never forget . . . Remember!’ ”‡ In due course Roth would dreadfully repent of this ending, and for the rest of his life he remained aghast at the story’s enduring appeal—even among such estimable people as the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Arnold Eisen, who volunteered to Roth that he “loved” the story and had taught it for years; as Eisen remarked to an interviewer: “Roth was way ahead of anyone else in recognizing that [the Holocaust was] the shadow in the closet of American Jewish life.”

  Another notable aspect of “Eli” is the potent way its hero embodies a theme reflected in the other stories, too, and throughout the work that would follow: the individual in revolt against the community, the I against the They—the refractory author’s persistent mulling of Kafka’s pensée “In man’s struggle against the world, bet on the world.” Because of the world and its expectations, Roth had cultivated “a certain insidious softness” (as he put it) in his work and person—hence the Capote-like apprentice who’d wished to be admired for his sensitivity and “powdery prose,” hence “the Nice Accommodating Jewish Boy” who’d married Maggie and whom Roth would endeavor to squeeze out of himself “drop by drop” à la Chekhov and his serfdom. Roth persisted, in short, to refine his own values independent of those the world was apt to impose. As he remarked in 2016, “You might say that right down through Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral to Indignation and Nemesis the implications and ambiguities and contradictions inherent to goodness—and badness—has been the master obsession.”

  The more hard-nosed he became, the less he liked Goodbye, Columbus. “I wish this kid’s book would disappear,” he sighed in 2004—nine years before the Library of Congress designated it as one of the “Books That Shaped America,” a distinguished list of American works chosen “for their impact on millions of individual lives and on the course of the nation.”

  A CODA: Three weeks before publication of Goodbye, Columbus, Roth received a letter from Samuel S. Goldberg of Goldberg & Hatterer: “Our client, Miss Maxine Groffsky, informs us that you have written a work of fiction in which she is not only recognizably portrayed as are members of her family but, in addition, she claims you have traduced and maligned her.” Goldberg suggested that his client be allowed to inspect the manuscript prior to publication “so that matters complained of may be considered and removed”; he’d also alerted The Paris Review of Groffsky’s complaint, even though the novella had already appeared there, as Groffsky was surely aware. Indeed, it seemed likely she was acting at the behest of her family, whose reputation in Maplewood—so rumor went—had been as blackened as that of Thomas Wolfe’s family and friends in Asheville, North Carolina.§

  A quarter century later, Roth attended a speech given at the Jerusalem YMHA by Abba Eban, the Israeli foreign affairs minister, calling for peaceful negotiation with the PLO. Afterward Roth was accosted by a woman who introduced herself as Irene Groffsky, Maxine’s younger sister, who wanted to tell him to his face, at long last, just how much she hated him for ruining her family’s life—etc. On she went. When she was finally done, Roth replied, “Irene, if you can find it in your heart to forgive Yasser Arafat, surely you can find it in your heart to forgive me.” But apparently not; the woman stormed off without a further word.

  * Roth’s fiction did not reappear in Esquire until 1962, the year Bamberger resigned.

  † Larner went on to win the 1973 Best Original Screenplay Oscar for The Candidate, starring Robert Redford.

  ‡ During one of our first-ever chats, Roth mentioned how much he hated the story, and I asked him about this alternative ending (which I’d encountered, shortly after college, in an anthology). A look of horror flashed over his face when reminded of this version.

  § Maxine Groffsky was cordial but firm when she declined my request for an interview. To the best of Roth’s recollection, he submitted Samuel Goldberg’s letter of April 13, 1959, to the Houghton legal department and heard nothing further.

  CHAPTER

  Fourteen

  AT THE END OF JUNE—JUST BEFORE MOVING TO AMAGANSETT, Long Island, for the summer—Roth and Maggie took a road trip (in Herman’s Cadillac) to visit friends in Chicago and Maggie’s family in South Haven, a town that seemed as exotic to Roth as Bombay: “what made me so curious was that it was the backdrop for the grim saga of gentile family suffering that was hers.” They stayed at the home of Daddy Herb, Maggie’s grandfather, and his second wife (“Aunt Hervey”), and indeed slept in the very room Maggie had occupied for most of her childhood, after Red Martinson had proved incapable of keeping a roof over their heads. Roth liked the easygoing Herb, and the two sat out on the porch at night chatting about one thing and another (“never had no desire to visit no furrin country,” said Herb, when Roth mentioned their plans to live in Europe). Maggie’s mother, Evelyn, lived in a basement apartment close to her job at the South Haven Tribune; she neatly hoarded piles and piles of newspapers on every surface of her smoke-filled apartment, where two nicotine-addicted dogs (forever gobbling up her cigarette butts) kept her company in lieu of her long-gone husband. Roth liked Evelyn, too, and hardly recognized the chastened “victim” her daughter had described.