Weequahic High embodied the postimmigrant ardor for education, if not quite for culture per se—as Roth put it, “It wasn’t a culture of books; it was a culture with a tremendous respect for books.” The main aspiration, though, was professional success and the dignity that attended it (“Help, help, my son the doctor is drowning!”), and at Weequahic High the gravity of that pursuit was palpable. In its first three decades, the school was reputed to have produced more doctors, lawyers, dentists, and CPAs than practically any high school in the country, certainly in New Jersey, and the flip side of the coin was an almost giddy disdain for the pointless, goyish violence of contact sports—a spirit captured by the school’s unofficial fight song, a portion of which Roth included in Portnoy:

  Give a yell, give a yell

  A good, substantial yell

  And when we yell, we yell like hell

  And this is what we yell

  Ikey, Mikey, Jake, and Sam

  We’re the boys who eat no ham*

  We play football, we play soccer

  We keep matzohs in our locker

  Aye, aye, aye, Weequahic High!

  White bread, rye bread

  Pumpernickel, challah,

  All those for Weequahic,

  Stand up and hollah!

  So famously bad was the football team that its only victory, Roth’s sophomore year, sparked a riot of sorts. Indeed, until fullback Fred Rosenberg plunged two yards into the end zone for the 6–0 margin, the Weequahic Indians had never beaten Barringer High in their fourteen-year history; as time expired, the Barringer side of City Stadium began streaming ominously toward the Jewish seats. Roth remembered making it out to the parking lot and onto a bus, which was surrounded by “ten or fifteen of the enemy . . . hammering their fists against its sides.” The driver pulled away just as Roth slammed his window down on some viciously prying fingers.

  Before Untermann Field was completed in 1949, a football game was about the only reason for leaving a neighborhood where everything was a few steps away and almost every face was familiar. Roth lived right around the corner from his favorite hangout, Halem’s candy store, where he could always find friends around the pinball machine indulging in “wise guy talk and sex talk”; another candy store, George’s, was right across the street, and doubled as a bookie joint. A little farther along Chancellor was a “Hot Dog and Chazerai Palace” (as Mrs. Portnoy would have it), Syd’s, where Sandy and Philip worked part-time filling paper bags with greasy delicious fries, served with a wooden fork. As Sandy remembered, all the mothers—not just his—had misgivings about Syd’s, and Philip would pay a final tribute to the place in Nemesis, wherein Mrs. Beckerman laments the polio death of a boy who “wanted to be another Louis Pasteur” but instead “had to go to eat in a place crawling with germs.”

  Roth’s best friend, Marty Weich, lived at 287 Leslie, about a block away on the other side of Lyons Avenue. Tall, handsome, polite—“every mother’s dream of the Jewish prince,” said their friend Bob Heyman—Weich was a good student and a dutiful son, rushing to his parents’ kosher butcher shop after school (in college too) so he could help make deliveries. He was even a good athlete, the only one of Roth’s circle who made a varsity team, basketball, a sport that was nonviolent and hence respectable. The two boys had met in Lowenstein’s homeroom at a time when Roth was enamored of the Sweet Science—a legacy of wartime boxing nights at Laurel Garden, where he and Sandy had blown their allowances betting a nickel on each fight (“one of us taking the black guy and the other the white guy or if both fighters were of the same race we bet the light trunks versus the dark trunks”). Challenging the larger, gentle-looking Weich, Roth promptly flung off his gloves (elasticized but unlaced) when Weich began to “flail the shit out of [him].”

  Many years later, while writing Indignation, Roth consulted Weich about the niceties of kosher butchery (“Flick two chickens, Markie”). And in the previous decade, the two had discussed a far more somber aspect of Weich’s history, one that they’d skirted back in their school days. As everybody in the neighborhood had known, though, Marty’s older brother Bertram (“Chubby”) had been shot down and killed during an air raid over the Philippines in 1944. His parents were destroyed by the news: his mother took to bed and wept for months (“stupefied, finished”), and his father, a genial man who used to love kibitzing with customers, fell silent and rarely spoke again except to family. This was the basis for the tragedy in Sabbath’s Theater—the death of Sabbath’s brother, Morty—and, fifty years later, when Roth asked for details, Weich still couldn’t discuss it without crying. (“The crying was a lesson,” said Roth. “I bet my money on Sabbath’s grief . . . that’s what propels his philosophy, his attitude: everything you love disappears.”) Weich remembered the terrible day he came home from school, age twelve, and saw the rabbi’s car and immediately knew the worst. When his friend Bernie Swerdlow came around to the back stairs for a visit, Marty burst into tears and shut the door on him.

  Swerdlow was another member of Lowenstein’s homeroom at the Hawthorne annex, and it was he who told Roth about Chubby’s death when they first met. Swerdlow lived between Roth and Weich on Lyons, behind a tailor shop owned by his Russian immigrant parents—a family even more beset by tragedy than Weich’s: an older brother, Charles, had died two years before Bernie was born, while another brother, Sol, was schizophrenic and eventually lobotomized. As for Bernie himself, he suffered from colitis so severe that he had to leave school for two years and wear a colostomy bag. Unlike Weich (but very like Mickey Sabbath), Swerdlow rebelled against his misfortunes with an almost antic perversity—“a little devilish guy,” said Bob Heyman, who would “talk, talk, talk, talk.” Once, when Doc Lowenstein couldn’t get him to shut up, he yanked Swerdlow to his feet and slammed him against the lockers outside his classroom. The boy expected a “right hook,” but instead Lowenstein asked him what grammar school he’d attended, and thereby discovered that Swerdlow had come from a school for the handicapped, Branch Brook.

  With Lowenstein, at least, Swerdlow probably didn’t touch on his precocious erotic career at the school, among disabled girls, and never mind the girl who lived upstairs from his parents’ shop and gave hand jobs! Such were the tales he told his pals with relish, and Roth paid close attention, later writing about Portnoy’s “lascivious classmate, Smolka, the tailor’s son,” to say nothing of the colitis-stricken, french-fry-eating Melvin Weiner. When Swerdlow miraculously went on to finish medical school (“he tried to screw female orderlies in the stairwell,” said Heyman) and become a psychiatrist—just like Marty Weich—he copped to being the model for Melvin Weiner (but not Smolka) in an interview with the Star-Ledger: “I am using the book [Portnoy] as an RX,” he told the newspaper. “I have patients—all males—with problems concerning their mothers and a relationship with guilt, and an inability to function as they should. . . . [Roth] used me so why shouldn’t I use him?”

  Stuart Lehman was another friend with a blighted childhood—a matter too fraught to discuss at the time, though Roth would eventually canvass him as well, while writing Nemesis. Like Bucky Cantor’s mother, Lehman’s had died when he was a small child, and his father (for reasons unknown) had declined to raise him, leaving him in the care of his grandparents. Lehman’s friends called him “the Tiger” because he was so consummately the opposite: sweet and unassuming, he loved spending time at the Roth house, where he had a pair of de facto siblings and parents, too, since Herman and Bess doted on him and were forever encouraging him to stay for dinner (“Eat up! Eat what’s on your plate!”). When his grandfather died in 1954, just after Stu and the others had finished college, Bess wrote him a condolence note: “If, in a small way, we can make up to you for this loss, you know you have only to ask it of us. From the time you came to our home, as a friend of Philip’s, you have always seemed a part of the family.”

  Somewhere toward the temperamental center of things was the puckish Bob Heyman, who lived in a one-family house on the more affluent part of Keer, below Maple Avenue; his prosperous father owned a necktie company, Beau Brummell Ties, and their next-door neighbor was the Apple King of Newark. Heyman’s parents and maternal grandparents were all born in America—his mother was a first cousin of Milton Berle, who would attend Bob’s wedding and meet Philip and the others—and they comported themselves, said Roth, with “no taint of Jewishness.” The family attended the grand Conservative temple on High Street, Oheb Shalom, and belonged to a suburban swimming club that Roth would use in the opening scene of Goodbye, Columbus. Perhaps the most potent status symbol was the finished basement chez Heyman: a spacious, pinepaneled rec room with its own bar, hi-fi, and bathroom. One day the exuberant Roth was there, singing along with the Four Aces, when he thrust his fist upward on the last word of “Tell! Me! WHY!” and put a hole in the ceiling. Alarmed, the boys ran to the hardware store for a bag of plaster and tried to patch it up, but Mr. Heyman was bleakly unimpressed by their work. “He’s a wise guy,” the man observed of the culprit.

  Perhaps he was aware of Roth’s spot-on imitation of his Brooklynese hocking (nagging, berating) of his son, Robert, or “Robbit!” (For a time Heyman had a Japanese girlfriend who thought Roth and the others were saying “Rabbit”; thus she and her friends took to calling him Usagi—or even Usagi-san—rabbit in Japanese.) But the boys themselves were delighted by Roth’s shtick: “He was like a spark plug,” said Heyman, “a dynamo, and he made us funny.” For Roth’s part, the most cherished times of adolescence were the long bull sessions with his male friends, in somebody’s car late at night, when they’d laugh about their sexual frustration and plan the illustrious conquests to come—“something like the folk narrative of a tribe passing from one stage of human development to the next.” In 1982, Roth sat on the edge of a card game in Miami Beach, chatting with his widowed father and their old friends from the neighborhood; one of his playmates’ mothers took his hand and said, “Phil, the feeling there was among you boys—I’ve never seen anything like it again.” Roth replied (“altogether truthfully”) that he hadn’t either.

  WHILE ROTH WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, his father went deeply into debt after the failure of a frozen-food distributorship he’d started with friends. By then Herman had despaired of advancing further at Metropolitan Life, and the roughly $125 a week he made as an assistant manager seemed more meager than ever with two sons heading to college. The money he borrowed for the new business† went mostly toward the purchase of a big refrigerated truck, which he took out at night to make deliveries and hustle business; on weekends he drove to Philadelphia and attended to paperwork at the company’s office. But it was no use: by then Birds Eye had been marketing frozen food for more than fifteen years, and Herman’s enterprise foundered among the 140 or so competitors that had sprung up in the meantime.

  As luck would have it, Metropolitan Life was finally feeling pressure brought to bear by FDR’s Fair Employment Act, and Herman was belatedly promoted to manager of the Union City district, about twenty minutes northeast of Newark. As Philip recalled, it was “the worst office in New Jersey,” full of “goyish drunks,” but if anyone could rout these miscreants out of bars and back to work, it was Herman. (“Big-shot goyim,” says Levov’s hard-driving father in American Pastoral, “the presidents of companies, and they’re like Indians with firewater.”) “Every nickel will be paid back” was the mantra with which Herman goaded himself over the next few years, becoming “a figure of considerable pathos and heroism in my eyes,” said Philip in 1974, “a cross of a kind between Captain Ahab and Willy Loman.” It was a hard time for both parents, and Sandy remembered a series of “mild but distressing” arguments arising from the constant niggling over money—even the odd quarter for ice cream after the movies. Because Herman was a renter with no collateral to speak of (and because the Met would have fired him if they’d caught wind of a second job), he’d had to borrow most of the money from his brothers, Ed and Bernie, to whom he hated being beholden.

  Certainly it didn’t help, at the time, that Herman’s brothers were more successful than he. The owner of a cardboard box company, Ed had bought a one-family house in Irvington that his daughter, Florence, touted as “very elegant” by Roth standards, what with its fireplace flanked by built-in bookcases (“my father enrolled me in Book-of-the-Month Club when I was thirteen”) and fancy Victrola (“there was no Victrola at Bess and Herman’s”). Philip admitted that ownership of a one-family house put Ed “one step up” on the socioeconomic ladder, but the implication that his eldest uncle was a reader or otherwise refined was “over the top,” given the man’s sixth-grade education and slum-street manners. “He had a big voice and small brain,” said Sandy, and even Ed’s daughter conceded his foul temper and tendency to snipe: “When I went to high school, if I got a B, [he’d say] ‘Why didn’t you get a B+?’ If I got a B+, [he’d say] ‘Why didn’t you get an A?’ ” He was, in short, a less benevolent version of Herman; their niece Marilyn (Betty’s younger daughter) always regarded the latter as a kind man, whereas her most salient memory of Ed was the time she’d slugged him for being mean to her mother (“I was a tough Newark girl”).

  Philip found his uncle entertaining in small doses, and Ed seemed to have a soft spot for his promising nephew. The highlight of their relationship was a 1948 trip to Princeton for a football game against Rutgers. Before kickoff, Ed took Philip to see the white clapboard cottage of a family hero, Albert Einstein, on Mercer Street. Ed made a point of warning Philip about Princeton’s anti-Semitic elitism, and both cheered for the state university, Rutgers, and its great Jewish All-American, Leon Root.‡ At Ed’s funeral in 1973, his nephew professed to be “stunned” when Aunt Irene, the widow, flung her arms around Philip and said of her “rough, aggressive, temper-ridden” husband, “Philip, nobody understood him.” “It wasn’t just writers who felt misunderstood!” Roth wrote a friend. “As a Kafka reader I oughtn’t to have had to be reminded.”

  Uncle Bernie was the most successful of all, and easily the most worldly. Though he owned a small insurance company and lived in an elegant one-family house in upper-middle-class Maplewood, he was hardly a complacent Jewish bourgeois—on the contrary, he’d been an actual Communist in his youth, and was careful to point out to his nieces and nephews that they must never refer to his live-in maid as a shvartze. Bernie’s relations with the men in his family were bound to be problematic, going back to his decision to marry a portly young woman with prematurely gray hair, Byrdine Block, who came from a relatively affluent family of German Jews. “She’s not really Jewish,” Sender reportedly observed, while Herman indelicately wondered why his little brother wanted to marry a woman who “looks old enough to be your mother.” Eventually the brothers reconciled, but things fell apart again twenty years later, when Bernie declared that he was divorcing the mother of his two daughters and marrying a younger woman. Bess and Herman “were as stunned as if they’d heard that he’d killed somebody,” and naturally gave their support to Byrdine, a warm and gracious woman who was one of Bess’s knitting pals besides. When Bernie compounded the scandal by leaving his second wife a week or so after the honeymoon, Herman again saw fit to console the wronged woman.

  “Bernie was on a different plane than Herman,” said his son-in-law, Don Aronson, who was persuaded to wear Paul Stuart clothing by the stylish Bernie (as was Bernie’s nephew Philip). For a while Bernie went through a Reichian phase and would sit in an orgone box—which, however, left him feeling enervated rather than revitalized, until it transpired that he’d placed the box above a doctor’s office and was being bombarded by X-ray radiation. At Duke University he underwent periodic fasting cleanses, and one night he phoned his daughter from Princeton and reported in a strange, halting voice that he’d joined an LSD experimentation group. “He was a man ahead of his time,” said his granddaughter Nancy Chilton, who noted that Bernie had collected Nakashima furniture well before it began appearing at the Metropolitan Museum; he took her to Nakashima’s woodworking studio in New Hope, Pennsylvania, when she was ten, and also on shopping expeditions for antique clocks.

  As for that scandalous first divorce: Bernie and Byrdine remained such good friends that she was sometimes introduced as his “other wife”—this in light of his taking a third wife, Ruth, whom Byrdine and their daughter Margery had both insisted he marry, overcoming his reluctance after the fiasco of his second marriage. Meanwhile he kept his exasperation in check vis-à-vis the moralizing Bess and Herman, not least because he was fond of their children. “Sandy was his usual charming self,” he observed in passing after a 1966 visit with his brother’s family, though the main subject of his letter was the already rather famous Philip, a person of “dignity, refinement and beauty” whom Bernie had come to regard as a kindred soul. (“They’re all celebrity fuckers,” Sandy remarked of this common preference among the family.) “In my own way,” Bernie continued, “my feelings reached out towards Phillip [sic], and I found in him a rare human being. I can now understand a quality that must stem from the very marrow of his bones, that makes him the obvious genius that he is, and I just feel that his writings in the future will be even greater than that of the past because of this rare quality that I sense is within him.” One assumes Bernie felt vindicated three years later, with the worldwide success of Portnoy, which incidentally gave him and Byrdine a piquant new moniker for Herman’s wife: “Mrs. Portnoy.”