Roth’s doctor at Waterbury, Peter Monoson, discussed the results of his EKG with Roth’s cardiologist at New York Hospital, Charles Smithen, who directed Roth to meet him as soon as possible in the emergency room. During the two-hour trip to New York, according to Bloom, Roth insisted on driving and told her “very calmly” to phone Sandy in Chicago and ask him to come to New York, and also to inform his close friends. As Roth recalled, “She was, as usual, unequal to the stress of the occasion and was hardly what you could describe as supportive. She was mute and timid.” Dr. Smithen was waiting with a wheelchair and motioned for Roth to slow down and have a seat; after X-rays, the patient was wheeled to the ICU and put to bed, where he read Bellow’s new novella, The Bellarosa Connection, with an oxygen prong in his nose. After “a flurry of activity around [his] bed” that night, Roth was informed in the morning that he would have immediate bypass surgery rather than the previously scheduled angioplasty.

  Sandy, who’d endured the same five-or six-hour ordeal a few years before, had already arrived when the surgeon, Dr. Krieger, emerged to say the operation was a success and they were free to visit Philip in the ICU. Except for his ghastly scars—an eight-inch incision, from his clavicle to the base of his ribs, was freshly wired shut, and the interior length of his right leg, where they’d harvested arteries, looked like “the old Pan American highway”—he seemed weary but not terribly worse for wear. “Which of my friends is most frightened it’s going to happen to him?” he asked Bloom. One or two of those friends must have spread the word, since the hospital’s public affairs office soon received inquiring calls from the Post and Daily News. Roth had mainly hoped to shield his father, whom he’d phoned on arrival at the ICU: “I said, ‘Dad, someone has backed out of a job at Yale on a weekend and there’s a seminar and they asked me to come down.’ And he said, ‘How much they gonna give you?’ And I said, ‘Ten thousand bucks.’ He said, ‘That’s not bad for a weekend.’ ” Worried the shock of finding out from the newspaper would kill him, Philip phoned again and told him what had happened. He said he was fine, but Herman was in tears: “I shoulda been there,” he said. “I shoulda been there.”

  Servadio and her son had arrived in New York a few days before, and were wondering why they hadn’t heard from Philip and Claire, when Sandy phoned and told them about the surgery; he also mentioned that Claire was “in an incredible state”—weeping and barely able to speak. A story Philip would never tire of telling—as it seemed, for him, to put the whole relationship in a nutshell—was included in his novel Everyman, wherein the title character’s third wife becomes a “hazard” in times of emergency: “She certainly didn’t inspire confidence on the morning of the [bypass] surgery, when she followed beside the gurney weeping and wringing her hands and finally, uncontrollably, cried out, ‘What about me?’ ” Sandy worried about leaving his brother in her care, and related his concerns to the cardiologist, who refused to release Philip from the hospital until he agreed to hire two nurses, one for day and one for night, to look after him at home.

  Roth became especially close to his day nurse, “a warm, competent, cheery young woman,” he wrote, who “had twice to shout at Bloom in our own house to get her to bring her anxieties under control around me.” As in Everyman, his nurse’s “high-spirited devotion” would lead to an affair once Roth had “recovered his sexual prowess”—a rapport Bloom evidently suspected. Roth’s physical therapist, Lori Monson, arrived one day to give him electrical stimulation for postoperative muscle spasms and was struck by the “attractive young woman” reading beside his bed. As she recalled, “The vibe was pretty intense” when Bloom came home and noticed not one but two young women in the bedroom. On her way out, Monson paused to collect a shopping bag she’d left by the door, and Bloom erupted “Are you taking my things?!”

  THE END CAME, for Herman, when his tumor began to interfere with his breathing and swallowing (“It would be better,” his doctor said, “if he didn’t eat”). Around three in the morning on the day of his death, October 25, 1989,# Herman’s night nurse in New Jersey phoned Philip and said her patient was in crisis; Philip told her to call an ambulance and have Herman taken to nearby St. Elizabeth Hospital, where Philip would meet them in the emergency room. Herman was unconscious by the time he arrived, and Philip had to decide on the spot whether to keep him alive on a respirator (“easily the most wrenching decision of my life”); he declined, and spent the next eight hours watching Herman die. As he wrote in Patrimony, his father “fought for every breath with an awesome eruption, a final display, of his lifelong obstinate tenacity. It was something to see.” When it was over, around noon, Roth chose not to notify the hospital staff; he went on sitting there, holding his father’s hand. About an hour later Sandy arrived, saw he was too late, and burst into tears.

  Because Herman was a semiobservant Jew, the son of Orthodox Jews, his sons arranged for his burial the next day. As with his mother, Philip was too emotional to read his eulogy, and asked Claire to do it (“which she did willingly and quite beautifully”). After a passage from The Facts about Herman’s near fatal case of peritonitis in 1944, and his tearful reconciliation with his brother Bernie shortly before Bernie’s death in 1981, Philip added a note:

  The last one left, the last one gone. Morris. Charlie. Milton. Ed. Betty. Berny [sic]. Herman. I don’t think a day of his life went by when he did not utter one of their names.

  He was a solid man. He was an honest man. His sense of loyalty was monumental. . . . He loved his loved ones as doggedly as he did everything. But he was a fighter as well and fighters don’t endure on love alone. He knew how to hate, and who to hate, and was not shy about letting you know the score. He simply did not understand what it meant to quit or to back away or to give in.

  Afterward Sandy and Philip and the other mourners shoveled dirt over the coffin, then gathered at Herman’s apartment. “I told Claire last night that I’m going to take an ad in the New York Review,” Philip wrote Kazin a week later: “ ‘Unemployed son, 56 years of experience, excellent credentials, seeks new position.’ ”

  Every year for the rest of his life, Roth visited his parents’ graves on their wedding anniversary, February 20, at Gomel Chesed, a run-down old cemetery in Elizabeth where various Finkel relatives are buried. “The visits are emotional but deeply satisfying,” he wrote.

  Generally, after standing beside each of these graves for a while, thinking my family thoughts, I walk around the cemetery, invariably reading the gravestones I pass (any number of the names I use in my books are taken from the gravestones there). In all I spend an hour or so alone in the cemetery—I’ve never in my twenty-one years come upon another mourner there—before I leave to drive back to New York.

  “Good. You lived,” Everyman’s mother tells him when he visits her grave; very like his creator, Everyman “put no stock in an afterlife and knew without a doubt that God was a fiction and this was the only life he’d have,” but nonetheless spoke to his dead parents and heard their replies. Philip Roth, moreover, liked to pray when he was happy, as he confided to his friend Jack Miles, the former Jesuit seminarian: “I used to do this frequently at Yaddo, during the years when I was recovering from everything, and I have embraced trees and knelt on the ground in the rural isolation of Connecticut. Keep it under your hat.”

  * Roth sent a driver to collect them at JFK, since he was attending a concert of Beethoven quartets that evening at the Yale Chamber Music Festival in nearby Norfolk. “Welcome Gaia and Orlando!” read the note awaiting them at his home in Warren. “There is dinner for you in the refrigerator. On the top shelf in the blue casserole is soup to be warmed up. There’s some parmesan cheese in a little envelope, grated, on top of the soup. Add. . . . The new super duper TV requires a technological genius to turn on and off. The Rabbi has the secret and will reveal it to you when he returns from the concert, which should be about eleven thirty tonight. . . . [Signed] Rabbi Philip Milton Roth.”

  † A pseudonym.

  ‡ An allusion to the first alleged incident in 1981. Assuming Felicity was roughly the same age as Steiger, her Guildhall schoolmate, she would have been about twenty-one in 1981.

  § Not yet stepdaughter and wife: Roth and Bloom would finally, bewilderingly, marry on April 29, 1990.

  ¶ Roth found Karen’s manuscript “rough but strong” and sent it to an agent friend, who declined to represent her. “I have chosen a new path for myself,” she wrote Roth three years later. “If you are not completely driven, writing is all but impossible.” She was going back to school to become a psychotherapist, and meanwhile worked part-time as a counselor for homeless children. In 2017, I googled Karen (not her real name) and found her website as a “pre-licensed” therapist.

  # The same day Roth assigned the following paper to his literature class at Hunter: “In his ‘Letter to His Father’ Kafka writes (page 87), ‘My writing is all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast. It was an intentionally long-drawn-out leave-taking from you, yet, although it was enforced by you, it did take its course in the direction determined by me.’

  “Kafka is pointing here to a relationship between his life and his art. On the basis of the fiction of his you have read and what you now know of his life, can you describe this relationship?”

  CHAPTER

  Thirty-Six

  EIGHT DAYS AFTER THE AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI ISSUED his fatwa against Salman Rushdie on February 15, 1989, the BBC announced that the author had “broken his silence” and would review The Facts in The Observer because, as Rushdie remarked in the newspaper three days later, Roth’s “responses to being so vilified” by his own people had been “very moving, even helpful, to this similarly beleaguered writer.” Roth responded with a quote that was published on the front page: The “tiny turbulence” he’d experienced in 1959, with the publication of his first book, was hardly comparable to the “international crisis” precipitated by The Satanic Verses, nor was Roth ever remotely so menaced as Rushdie: “If, however, this brave and enormously talented writer has, in his duress, been able to find some strength in reading about my own apprenticeship in the unforeseen consequences of art, I’m both touched and pleased.”

  A month or two later, at Bloom’s invitation, Rushdie came to Fawcett Street for dinner, along with his then wife, Marianne Wiggins, and, Roth recalled, “about six secret service guys,” who stationed themselves around the house and on the street outside. Privately Roth considered Rushdie “a great writer” and, as a human being, “an interesting shit.” They’d met once before, at a party given by Roth’s former English agent, Deborah Rogers; Roth had just returned from his trip to Israel in November 1984, and enthused chez Rogers about all the lanky Ethiopian Jews he’d seen as a result of the Israeli rescue mission, Operation Moses. “Did they put them in concentration camps?” Rushdie asked, and Roth told him to go fuck himself. “The next time I saw him he was in my living room,” Roth laughed. “I was going to call the Iranian Embassy”—his voice became urgently sotto voce—“ ‘I won’t tell you my name, but he’s here. . . .’ ”

  A year after the fatwa, Roth played another small role in world politics when he visited Prague, post–Velvet Revolution, to interview Ivan Klíma for The New York Review of Books. “It was thrilling to be in unoccupied democratic Prague,” he wrote, almost fifteen years after he’d been harried out of the country by secret police. During his 1990 visit—his last—he remembered a walk he took around Wenceslas Square, where crowds had chanted their ecstatic approval for the revolution. Roth was especially heartened by the sight of pedestrians pausing near a loudspeaker outside the headquarters of Václav Havel’s Civic Forum party, whence was played, on continuous loop, the dull squawking rhetoric of the ousted general secretary of the Czech Communist party, Miloš Jakeš: “Watching people walk back out into the street grinning,” said Roth, “I thought that this must be the highest purpose of laughter, its sacramental reason for being—to bury wickedness in ridicule.” A potently literate people at the worst of times—all the more given the unwatchable diet of state television over the past twenty-one years—Czechs now jammed the bookstores to snap up previously banned works, beginning, of course, with Kafka. The first banned American book to be published in a free Czechoslovakia, however, was Portnoy’s Complaint—this as a rebuke to Soviet-era prudery and also as a fond tribute to its author, the editor of the Writers from the Other Europe series who’d championed the work of dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. Four years later, Roth became the first recipient of the Karel Čapek Prize, an award reserved for Czechs (Havel would not receive his until 2008), with only two foreign exceptions, Roth and Günter Grass. Finally, in 2001, Roth was the first-ever recipient (and only American) of the Franz Kafka Prize, which—not unlike the Nobel—recognizes an author’s oeuvre for its “humanistic character and contribution to cultural, national, language and religious tolerance, its existential, timeless character, its generally human validity and its ability to hand over a testimony about our times.” Such a recognition, said Roth, “beat Stockholm any day.”

  There was, however, one unfortunate result of that trip to Prague in 1990.

  Fifteen years before, Milan Kundera had accepted an invitation to teach at the University of Rennes, in France, and was subsequently stripped of his citizenship by the Czech government. During a visit to London, he and Roth had walked around the city while Roth did his best to commiserate: how awful, he said, that Kundera had lost almost everything when he left his native country—his money, home, parents, language. . . . Kundera shook his head and finally stopped and said, a little impatiently, “Philip! No! I lost sixteen girls!”

  Within a few years, though, things began to look up: The Unbearable Lightness of Being was published in 1984, in French and English translations, and was an international best seller; during a New York Times interview with Roth that year, Kundera admitted he was nothing but relieved to be free of Czechoslovakia’s “eternal political discussions and their stereotyped and sterile content. . . . I understand Hannah Arendt very well when she says: ‘It’s easier to act than to think under tyranny.’ ” One may imagine how such sentiments went over with writers still suffering under that tyranny, whose books, far from being celebrated, were hardly known in the West. “There appears to be a controversy over what might be called [Kundera’s] ‘internationalism,’ ” Roth remarked to Klíma during their interview in 1990, shortly after the post-Soviet publication of Klíma’s Love and Garbage. Roth had meant to defend Kundera from the charge that he’d “betrayed” his country by writing “for” the French or “for” the Americans, characterizing his recent novels as “a strong, innovative response to an inescapable challenge.” Klíma’s original reaction was so caustic Roth implored him to recast it in milder terms (“I had no intention of censoring the conversation—Ivan had had enough censorship”); what Klíma said instead, for print, was that Kundera’s alleged “internationalism” was “only one of the many reproaches” addressed to him, noting the “bitter struggle” that had continued for Klíma and others in Czechoslovakia while Kundera became rich and famous in France.

  Kundera was furious: for years now he’d weathered scathing abuse from less fortunate countrymen such as Klíma, and now Roth, his friend, had effectively invited the man to attack him again in the New York Review. He might have wondered, too, whether his decision to withdraw his books from Roth’s reprint series, in 1985, had something to do with things, and never mind Roth’s relative disdain for Kundera’s best-known book (“The Unbearable etc is everything Milan hates,” Roth wrote Updike: “sentimentality, pornography, and easy politics”). Roth caught wind of his friend’s anger, and tried to explain: “If you think I was stupid and misguided, so be it—I can be stupid too. But don’t be harsh and accuse me of disloyalty. That isn’t fair and it isn’t true. I can only tell you that Ivan Klíma’s answer would not have been quite so moderate had I not argued with him too.”

  But it was no use. Kundera refused to speak to Roth or answer his letters. Finally, after more than a decade of silence, Roth wrote again and begged his friend to let the breach heal before it was too late; Kundera agreed, but by then neither man traveled anymore and it was understood they’d never meet again. “I have completely forgotten [how] to speak English,” Kundera replied in a final note, when Roth asked him to be interviewed for a documentary about Roth. “Do not be angry with me, dear Philip, and count on my faithful friendship.”

  “CLAIRE IS MAKING a heroic, heroinely adjustment to living in America,” Roth wrote Nina Schneider on September 24, 1988. “It wasn’t easy at the start but she’s resilient and, as we all know, a trooper.” So Roth would have the world believe. At least twice a year, though, without telling Bloom or anyone else, he’d drive sixty-odd miles to the Jersey Shore and order the bluefish platter for $7.95 at his favorite dockside restaurant, Ollie Klein’s in Belmar, then wander the boardwalk for a couple of hours wondering what the hell he’d gotten himself into. “Look at those hideous faces!” Bloom observed, familiarly, of an old Jewish couple in Central Park, a remark she repeated to Conarroe while dining at a Chinese restaurant, Shun Lee, near Lincoln Center (“I don’t think she was talking about Episcopalians”). Once, while eating out with both men, she kept decorously whispering the word “Jew”—as ever in public—despite Roth’s assuring her that the word needn’t be whispered on the Upper West Side; by way of proving this, he yelled, “JEW JEW JEW JEW!” once they were out on the street. Rankled by the paucity of Christmas cards from Roth’s friends that year, she cried, “What’s the matter with these Jews!”—whereupon Roth went for a long walk, “wondering how [he] could continue living with this woman.” At a stationery store on Fifty-seventh he bought three Christmas cards and signed them Menachem Begin, Albert Einstein, and Franz Kafka. He left them on the hall table, where she found them the next morning and woke him up with her laughter.