{"id":10612,"date":"2018-05-30T07:25:43","date_gmt":"2018-05-30T14:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=10612"},"modified":"2018-05-30T07:25:43","modified_gmt":"2018-05-30T14:25:43","slug":"roth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=10612","title":{"rendered":"Rot(h)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It was difficult to escape the glowing obituaries of Philip Roth who died this month at age 84. They were ubiquitous, one more fawning than the next. I started seeing red – pun of course intended, since Roth is a name derived from\u00a0rot<\/em> the German word for red. The name was often connected to places with smelters,\u00a0feuerroth<\/em> or fiery red.<\/p>\n

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Fiery he was, in his search of identity issues, his willingness to defy the Jewish Orthodoxy around\u00a0loshon hora<\/i>, the evil tongue, which prohibits not just spreading lies but telling truths about fellow Jews that might be harmful to them. As he himself put it:<\/p>\n

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\u201cI had informed on the Jews. I had told the Gentiles what apparently it would otherwise have been possible to keep secret from them: that the perils of human nature afflict the members of our minority.\u201d And indeed, in his novels he offered a psychogram of Jewish-American males in conflict with the WASP majority, with other minorities, particularly African Americans, and within the Jewish communities themselves, the struggle between generation.<\/p>\n

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Never was he more fiery though, than in the preoccupation with sexuality and the disrespect towards women whether they be mothers or wives or daughters or lovers. \u00a0Being called on that by serious writers, feminists, intellectuals or plain old readers seemed to fall on deaf ears and was met, if at all, with condescension and a buckling down to write the next ever more objectifying piece. The review below captures it well.<\/p>\n

The Grapes of Roth<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n