Jewish American cultural figures of the second and third generation, from Bernard Malamud to the Broadway producer Max Gordon, were apt to remember their childhood homes as devoid of books or anything else in the way of serious art, and so with Roth. Accounts vary as to the number and type of volumes in the Roth home library. Sandy claimed there was nothing but a “second-rate encyclopedia,” whereas his cousin Florence, who used to babysit, definitely remembered a bowdlerized edition of Shakespeare that Herman had won as a sales prize from Met Life. “I can think of four books that were in the house while I was in grade school,” Philip told an interviewer in 2011: three novels by Sir Walter Scott that a nice person had given Herman while he recuperated from peritonitis (“just what my father needed”), as well as Berlin Diary, by William L. Shirer. Bess’s labors left her with little time for reading, but according to Philip she managed “five or six books a year” borrowed from the pharmacy’s rental library—“not junk but popular novels that had acquired moral prestige, like the works of Pearl Buck, her favorite author.” And Herman, of course, read newspapers: the Newark Evening News, regrettably Republican (“by the standards today it would be The Daily Worker”), and the left-wing PM.

  Even more than Pearl Buck, Roth’s mother liked reading monthly women’s magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and Redbook, the better to improve her already considerable proficiency at cooking, child-rearing, sewing, and managing the family budget. Among friends and family she was famous for keeping a preternaturally clean home. “She would dust all day long,” said Sandy, “so that dirt never hit the surfaces of the room.” What her niece Florence disparaged as the behavior of a “control freak” was, to Philip, a laudable “love of order” that included ironclad rules for bedtime: According to Sandy, their childhood curfew was nine o’clock—“not 9:01”—when they’d be “tucked in so tight you couldn’t breathe,” what with the precisely folded “hospital corners” that would someday make her boys the envy of their military barracks. For Sunya Felburg, another niece, the memory of Bess Roth unfailingly conjured the lovely fragrance of lemon oil with which she cleaned her floors; no wonder her sons would appraise their friends’ houses with dubious eyes and noses, holding their water until they could use their own squeaky-clean toilet. As for neighbors on Summit who owned dogs—well, Philip would marvel at such matters his entire life: “I don’t get it,” he said at age seventy-two. “Why don’t you have a monkey or a pig in your house?” In that respect he would always be his mother’s child. Returning from mah-jongg chez Roth, the mother of Philip’s schoolmate Dorothy Brand remarked, “You should see Philip’s drawers! They’re so neat!” Bess had led the ladies into her son’s room and lovingly opened each drawer, so they could see for themselves the beautifully folded underwear and so forth.

  When Bess died, among the few keepsakes Philip took for himself was an old recipe box that seemed to contain the genie spirit of his “uncomplaining and happy mother”: in the upper-right-hand corner of each card, in her meticulous cursive, was the name of whoever had given her the recipe, to which she would always carefully refer as “So-and-so’s recipe” rather than her own. Feeding her boys was perhaps her greatest joy. There was the constant cake-making—marble, banana, angel food, chocolate layer, on and on—and at least two meals a day that included lunch, for which her sons were expected to come home even in high school, when Sandy, at least, would have preferred grabbing a sandwich at the coffee shop with the other “hip” kids; Bess, however, wouldn’t hear of it, and for the same reason as Mrs. Portnoy’s (“how do you think Melvin Weiner gave himself colitis? . . . Because he eats chazerai [garbage, pig food]!”). Dinner always included a cheap but tasty cut of meat, maybe a tongue or brust hammered into tenderness and served with plenty of gravy and raisins or what you will. It certainly wasn’t chazerai, though the writer Isaac Rosenfeld wondered whether the sheer volume of Jewish mothers’ “forced feedings” was the foundation for later “ulcers, diabetes, and intestinal cancer” (“No wonder we had bypass surgeries,” said Sandy)—the price one paid, maybe, for the sense of security a mother’s food provided in a hostile world.

  By 1940 Herman was making a bit less than seventy-five dollars a week before taxes, all of which he turned over to his wife. Because of her wise husbandry, Philip never suspected how poor they sometimes were; later he was “intrigued” by her bank books (“with their deposit and withdrawal numbers printed in red and black”) from the Howard Savings Bank, where she usually managed to put a few dollars aside into a “Christmas Club account” for special luxuries. “Whatever your husband gives you, you take five dollars out of that and you plant it into your own bank account,” she instructed her niece Florence, who was reminded of the advice when her two-year-old son smashed the Roths’ glass-topped coffee table—a Christmas Club purchase Bess had particularly cherished. “She just, for a moment or two, registered her dismay,” Philip recalled; Florence’s face, however, became one of such baroque horror (“I broke something that belonged to Aunt Bess!”) that her sturdy husband, Irv, had to run outside to collect himself.

  As her children got older, Bess was able to bring her skills more and more into the public sphere. She was president of the PTA at Philip’s school when he was in fourth grade, and also president of her local chapters of the Jewish women’s organizations Hadassah and Deborah. (Another of Philip’s keepsakes was his mother’s Deborah badge, a gold four-leaf clover with a zircon in the middle: “Meritorious Award Bess Roth” is inscribed on the back.) For meetings she wore a gray pin-striped suit and silk blouse, and conducted herself with the kind of cheerful poise that came easily in the company of other Jews. “In a predominantly gentile environment, however,” her son noted, “she lost her social suppleness and something too of her confidence, and her instinctive respectability came to seem more of a shield with which to safeguard herself than the natural expression of her decency.”

  She was, in short, “a little too comme il faut,” as Philip was the first to admit. Certainly her extended family understood that Bess was a stickler for manners, and they would sooner break wind at the dinner table than neglect to write her a thank-you note. Bess herself remained the nonpareil. After she and Herman attended Dorothy Brand’s first piano recital, Bess sent the girl a gift of hankies and a thoughtful note about how her husband had been so thrilled by the performance he could hardly stay put in his seat.

  HERMAN WAS AS EXCITABLE as his wife was decorous, and it was probably for the best that he deferred to her in matters relating to their sons’ education. Bess trusted the boys to do their work and get good grades, and it was she who always signed their report cards after careful scrutiny. Herman would intercede only by accident, as it were, like the time he noticed how ten-year-old Philip signed his name: “You call this handwriting? Write your name right!”

  Neither parent was much good at being idle. Bess would allow herself to listen to the radio after dinner, while the boys did the dishes, but it was all but impossible for her to sit still unless she were knitting a sweater or scarf. As for Herman, he worked twelve-or thirteen-hour days, six days a week, which usually meant heading out again after dinner to collect a few more premiums while less industrious men were settling down for the night. Maybe these men were Italian or Irish or German, in which case, if they failed in America, they could conceivably go back whence they came; Jews had no such option. For Herman’s part he was only too aware that he lacked credentials apart from his superabundant vigor, and hence his sons’ abiding image of a man throwing his coat back on and humping out the door with a fat black ledger under his arm, returning around eight or nine o’clock to sit a while longer at the table and survey his day’s transactions. When the boys got up in the morning, for school, he was gone again. Years later, as a literature professor, Philip would often discuss Kafka’s “Letter to His Father,” whereof he once made the following note: “Family as the maker of character. Family as the primary, shaping influence. Unending relevance of childhood.” For him it was consummately so, and hard to say where one parent ended and the other began in the formation of his own character. “The idea that you don’t have to work all the time,” he told a journalist in 1991, “that’s news to me.”

  Herman’s exuberance could be trying. The “bane of my childhood,” said Philip, was shopping expeditions to his cousin Moe’s haberdashery in Irvington. “What’re your school colors?” Herman would demand of his son, in a voice loud enough to be taken as a general canvassing of the store. “Orange and brown,” Philip would meekly reply, whereupon Herman would hail Moe: “Lemme see something in orange and brown!” Given a measure of his mother’s refinement, Philip was so tortured by these outings that he was never again able to find pleasure in buying his own clothes. “It’s absurd,” he said in 2006. “I don’t own any clothes. I own a blazer and a suit and I’m seventy-two years old and a man of great eminence.”

  Herman took his patriarchal role seriously, and could always be counted on as a “fixer” for the many people he considered family, whether actually related or not. His pal George Finneman’s daughter taught at a school for handicapped children on Twenty-third Street in Manhattan, and desperately wanted an apartment in nearby Stuyvesant Town—a middle-class complex owned by Metropolitan Life, where Sandy would live for many years—but the waiting list was “hundreds long”; the daughter finally called Herman, who got her an apartment within twenty-four hours. “To this day,” said the woman’s father, “our girls respectfully speak of him as Uncle Herman.” His actual nieces and nephews also knew they could count on Herman, especially for “Polonius-like advice-giving,” as Philip put it. When in the midst of some financial or marital woe—even, heaven forbid, considering divorce—they knew the phone would shortly ring and they’d get “a good dose of Herman,” said Sandy. Sometimes it was more welcome than others. Philip considered his father a classic noodge (pesterer), and gave both his endearing and difficult qualities to various fathers in his fiction: Gabe Wallach’s, Swede Levov’s, Marcus Messner’s, to name a few. In 1970, at a time when Philip’s hair was unusually long, his father wrote him: “What do I see when I look at you. ‘Nachas’ [pleasure, proud enjoyment]. . . . Your hair cut does not enhance your beatiful [sic] Physical or Intelligent image.” A fortnight passed without tonsorial alteration, so Herman tried a different tack: “There are unfortunately roveing the streets of New York people who are looking for and inviteing trouble. Anyone with long hair could be a victim of these stuped fascists minded right wingers. . . . Yours for a new Hair Do / Dad.”

  Herman was a dutiful son, and every Sunday morning, without fail, he took his boys to visit their paternal grandmother, Bertha, then on to Dora Finkel in the afternoon. Later Philip would think of his father as “the man in the middle”—the middle child of seven, the first born in America, a man whose burden it was to mediate between the traditions of his parents and “the demands of the future,” as his Americanized children would have it. Unlike his brothers Ed and Bernie—who rarely bestirred themselves to attend Reform services at B’nai Jeshurun—Herman remained at least putatively Orthodox, taking his family on High Holidays to the nearby Schley Street Synagogue, where men sat downstairs and women upstairs, though the rabbi was clean-shaven and nobody wore side curls. As for the Roths’ everyday observances: “Orthodox would have said too much and Conservative too little,” as Philip remembered.* For as long as their parents were alive, Bess and Herman were careful to keep a kosher home, to light Shabbat candles every Friday, and to send their sons to Hebrew school (Sandy for five years, Philip for three) so they’d be prepared for their bar mitzvahs. That was as far as it went, though, and most of it was later dropped. In Patrimony, Philip is startled and a little crestfallen to learn that his father abandoned his tefillin—the small leather boxes containing bits of scripture that Orthodox men place on their forehead and arm while saying prayers—in a locker at the YMHA, rather than bequeath it to one of his sons (“He probably thought I would have scoffed at the very idea . . . and forty years earlier he would have been right”). “This action says more about the relation of non-observant Jews to their ancient faith in America than anything I have ever read,” Alfred Kazin wrote in his review of the book. “And Philip Roth didn’t even have to make this up!”

  The most potent embodiment of family solidarity—key to Jewish survival at any time, all the more so in secularized America—was the Flaschner Family Association, consisting of some 150 families from Newark and Boston, where annual conventions were alternately held. The Flaschners—who considered themselves very balabatische (respectable, well-mannered), so noted in their written history—were connected to the Roths via Bertha’s mother, and Herman was deeply proud of this thriving clan with its own quarterly newspaper, directory, and communal services such as a Happy Day Fund for the sick and an Education Fund to help members send their children to college. Both Herman and Bernie served terms as president in the early forties, and little Philip looked forward to conventions where he met his “exotic cousins from distant Boston”; such gatherings were a particular comfort during the war, given the many Flaschner relations in the service, all of them solemnly remembered when everyone rose to sing the family song (to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne”):

  We are the Flaschner Family

  Made Up of Young and Old,

  To Carry On for Friendship’s Sake

  Like Silver and Like Gold . . .

  For Herman it was especially heartening to see how many of his cousins were flourishing as Americans—their children going on to college to become doctors and lawyers and businessmen. He’s loaded, Herman liked to say, perhaps his highest commendation.

  IN THE LATE THIRTIES, Herman had been made an assistant manager at the Newark office, a position (indeed the highest possible position, with little exception) held mostly by Jews, whose families became the Roths’ closest friends. The women had their mah-jongg circle, the men kibitzed over pinochle in their kitchens, and during summer holidays the families would gather for picnics at South Mountain Reservation, a park about ten miles west of Weequahic, playing softball and horseshoes and listening to ball games “on somebody’s static-ridden portable radio.”

  On Saturday evenings the men would sometimes take their sons to the Russian shvitz bath on Mercer Street, in the old Jewish slum where Herman had grown up. “I was seven, eight, nine years old,” Philip remembered, “and it was a great adventure to see all these naked men. . . . All this physical abandon that had nothing to do with sex. No Adonises were there.” The shvitz was a “haven,” then, from the orderly world of work and wives—a place to sit around amid a “concerto of farts” and tell bawdy jokes, all but oblivious to the variety of bellies and tuchases and balls hanging out. A generation before, Herman had gone with his father for the foremost purpose of cleanliness, since there was only an outhouse and no hot water at home, but nowadays it was all splendid animal indulgence—a steam bath, a good beating with oak leaves to get the blood running, a massage with wintergreen oil, a communal nap. One of the “boys” in Herman’s circle was a butcher who brought steaks and chops to be cooked in the bath’s kitchen and served with big platters of mashed potatoes and onions, all of it washed down with a gallon of Chianti. Around midnight, sated and braced for another hardworking week, the men dispersed.

  Even more than his parents, Philip’s most constant companion was his brother. Throughout boyhood they slept side by side in twin beds, walked to and from school, and kept each other company on weekend nights when Bess and Herman were out and Sandy babysat. So inseparable were they—or rather, so attached was Philip—that Sandy’s friends used to say if he ever stopped short, his little brother would “disappear right up his ass.” Almost every Saturday, Sandy took Philip along on a bus to the Roosevelt or Rex Theater to watch movies all day. Around Easter one year, when Philip was seven, the Rex had a contest that involved guessing the number of jelly beans in a big glass jar; the winner received a chocolate bunny. “Tell me a big number,” Philip said to his brother, who’d just given his own guess, and Sandy obliged. Later they came out of the movie and Philip’s name was on the marquee: “WINNER OF THE CHOCOLATE EASTER BUNNY: PHILIP ROTH!” “That was my brother’s life with me,” said Philip retrospectively.

  At the time (perhaps later too) Sandy begrudged him nothing: “That’s the way things were and it suited me fine.” Philip, in turn, considered Sandy the “kindest, gentlest older brother” imaginable; he couldn’t remember ever having a fight of any consequence, though Sandy would get exasperated with his brother’s crazy high spirits in their parents’ absence—playing indoor tag, jumping from one bed to the other—and finally fall down and play dead until Philip got scared (“San? San—? Oh c’mon San!”). Mostly the boys amused themselves with radio, a ubiquitous presence growing up: there was a portable in the kitchen that Bess listened to while she cleaned and cooked, a big console model in the sun parlor, and finally, blissfully, a radio on the table between the brothers’ beds that they played at low volume after lights-out (“the height of my childhood transgression”). For the rest of his life Philip kept a little radio next to his bed, whereas Sandy would entertain himself, and others, by singing the pop tunes of his youth and imitating voices from his favorite programs.

  “There was something of the dreamy fantast in my brother,” Philip reflected a few years after Sandy’s death, citing (among other things) the way he used to “tap dance like mad on the open parquet floor” when he was a boy. “But did he take lessons then? No. The fun was dreaming about it.” In fact—as Sandy’s third and final wife, Dorene Marcus, remembered—he’d wanted to take tap lessons as early as the age of five, but Bess had always refused: “And the reason was,” said Marcus, who’d heard the woeful story many times, “he didn’t have any ‘stick-to-it-iveness.’ ” His mother’s skepticism was, of course, part of a larger narrative: “She adored Philip and did not adore him,” said Marcus, summing up the “thread” that ran through all her husband’s memories of childhood. Philip himself allowed that the five-year difference between them had been unfortunate in some respects (“by the time he’s seven, I’m two and still getting all this baby attention”), and, yes, perhaps his own connection with Bess had been stronger, but all the same she had adored both her boys. Why, when Sandy was away at navy boot camp, his mother would stare desolately at his empty chair in the kitchen and start crying whenever one of his favorite songs, “Mam’selle,” came over the radio. Philip told this story to Sandy toward the end of his life (and later at his funeral), and Sandy looked “wonder struck.”