He was an eighty-seven-year-old man still fuelled by childhood dreams and traumas, powering around the house on a rolling walker, cursing and singing and explaining. At one point during my stay, Roth asked me to drive him to the doctor. But Roth, despite his own dramatic detour, did not remain in outer darkness. But he still put in five hours a day, helped by Percocet, beer, a ferocious will, and the ministrations of several young assistants.
Roth would not die like a pomegranate, with all his seeds inside. In his own eccentric pursuit of it, he made one of the most haunting journeys in American literature. Roth was born in in the Galician town of Tysmenitz, now part of Ukraine.
His father, Chaim, left for America that same year, and little Herschel, as he was then called, and his mother followed in His wife had married him only under family pressure, after disgracing herself by falling in love with a Gentile.
How this buried region seeps into the upstairs world is part of the drama of the novel. Who puts id in is de poppa. Yaw de poppa. He could feel her guiding it under her dress, then through a pocket-like flap. Her skin under his palm.
Revolted, he drew back. One glance at their tough, hostile faces, smirched by the grime and rust of the junk heap and screwed up into malicious watchfullness was enough. There was none except back to the dock. Roth came to despise this representation of his childhood, which he felt was a falsification. Though Harlem had a large Jewish population, the Roths lived in a substantially Irish neighborhood. As Roth later saw it, this was where he learned to hate himself as a Jew, believing the frequent taunts that Jews cared only about money, and envying the Irish toughs who teased and beat him.
