764
The twain
does
meet-poor Jew–
ish boys
do
marry rich Jewish
girls; but after the marriage they
don't know what to do with
themselves. While their fathers
were necessarily absorbed in
the struggle to raise their
families above the pariah style
of life which confronted im–
migrant minorities, the children
find this problem solved, and no
longer challenging. The bright–
est of them have no desire to
enter the family business, and
often the family doesn't really
expect it of them. They are the
ones who must achieve some–
thing important in terms of the
American community-at-large.
The successful Jewish family is
willing to provide its children
with lavish educations, send
them to Europe, prod them with
lessons, tutors and bribes, hoping
that they will develop into
scientists, doctors, engineers, or
professors. The children respond
to this pressure as individuals,
choosing and re-choosing and
not-choosing among the various
pains of freedom. Not the least
of their problems is that they
reject the values of their par–
ents along with their occupa–
tions, and suffer in consequence
from a schizoid distrust of the
very things they are accustomed
to need. Sooner or later, most
of them sell out to their need
for material comforts; others
never do. But the process makes
them entirely more complicated
and devious than Mr. Roth
would have them - fine sub–
jects, indeed, for a novelist of
insight and compassion.
In view of the preceeding cor–
rections, it is hard to under–
stand Irving Howe's business
about how the uninformed
reader might find
Goodbye,
Columbus
a caricature, but to
him it is all ferociously exact.
Nor Saul Bellow's exhortation to
keep up the good work. Ap–
parently Howe and Kazin and
Bellow accept without question
the accuracy of Roth's portrait–
ure. But when one thinks of
it, why should they know the
world Roth is ostensibly describ–
ing? All of them are non–
bourgeois intellectuals who have
made their careers in literary
and academic circles. The
people I'm talking about are
merely their students.
Once the setting of
Goodbye,
Columbus
is seen to be arti–
ficial, the plot, too, appears
contrived and trivial. Alfred
Kazin, however, describes it as
the story of "a romantic and
credulous youth defeated in love
by a b rut a
II
y materialistic
society, like Fitzgerald's Gatsby."
The comparison is far-fetched.
Gatsby's fate is moving because
Gatsby is noble, fantastic,
creative; Neil Klugman
is
only
a symbol. Whereas the structure
