In the following passage, Philip Roth
is talking to a friend, Joanna, about his father.
"Did I ever
tell you what happened when he was mugged a couple of years ago He could have
got himself killed. ’
"No. Tell me."
"A black
kid about fourteen approached him with a gun on a side street leading to their
little temple. It was the middle of the afternoon. My father had been at the
temple office helping them with mailing or something and he was coming home. The
black kids prey on the elderly Jews in his neighborhood even in broad daylight.
They bicycle in from Newark, he tells me, take their money, laugh, and go home".
"Get in the bushes," he tells my father. "I’m not getting in any bushes," my
father says. "You can have whatever you want, and you don’t need that piece to
get it. You can put that piece away." The kid lowers the gun and my father gives
him his wallet." Take all the money," my father says, "but if the wallet’s of no
value to you, I wouldn’t mind it back. "The kid takes the money, gives back the
wallet, and he runs. And you know what my father does He calls across the
street, "How much did you get" And the kid is obedient--he counts it for him.
"Twenty-three dollars, "the kid says." Good," my father tells him-- "now don’t
go out and spend it on crap."
Joanna laughed. "Well, he’s not
guilty, your father. Of course he treats him like a son. He knows that the Jews
in Bialystok were not responsible for the New England slave trade."
"It’s that--it’s more. He doesn’t experience powerlessness in the usual
way."
"Yes, he’s oblivious to it,"she said. "He won’t give in to
it. It makes for terrific insensitivity but also for terrific guts".
"Yes, what goes into survival isn’t always pretty. He got a lot of mileage
out of never recognizing the differences among people. All my life I have been
trying to tell him that people are different one from the other. My mother
understood this in a way that he didn’t. Couldn’t. This is what I used to long
for in him, some of her forbearance and tolerance, this simple recognition that
people are different and that the difference is legitimate. But he couldn’t
grasp it. They all had to work the same way, want the same way, be dutiful in
the same way, and whoever did it different was
meshugge--crazy." |
