In History's Grip: Philip Roth's Newark Trilogy (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture) - Hardcover

Kimmage, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804781826 ISBN 13: 9780804781824

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

In History's Grip concentrates on the literature of Philip Roth, one of America's greatest writers, and in particular on American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. Each of these novels from the 1990s uses Newark, New Jersey, to explore American history and character. Each features a protagonist who grows up in and then leaves Newark, after which he is undone by a historically generated crisis. The city's twentieth-century decline from immigrant metropolis to postindustrial disaster completes the motif of history and its terrifying power over individual destiny.

In History's Grip is the first critical study to foreground the city of Newark as the source of Roth's inspiration, and to scrutinize a subject Roth was accused of avoiding as a younger writer—history. In so doing, the book brings together the two halves of Roth's decades-long career: the first featuring characters who live outside of history's grip; the second, characters entrapped in historical patterns beyond their ken and control.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Michael Kimmage is Associate Professor of History at the Catholic University of America. His is the author of The Conservative Turn (2009).

Michael Kimmage is Associate Professor of History at the Catholic University of America. His is the author of The Conservative Turn (2009).

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In History's Grip

Philip Roth's Newark TrilogyBy Michael Kimmage

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8182-4

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................xiIntroduction........................................11. Newark...........................................292. Leaving..........................................633. At History's Mercy...............................97Conclusion; or, Kafka in Newark.....................133Notes...............................................171Index...............................................195

Chapter One

Newark

And so to the king himself all Ithaca looked strange ... the winding beaten paths, the coves where ships can ride, the steep rock face of the cliffs and the tall leafy trees. He sprang to his feet and, scanning his own native country, groaned, slapped his thighs with his flat palms and Odysseus cried in anguish: "Man of misery, whose land have I lit on now? What are they here—violent, savage, lawless? or friendly to strangers, god-fearing men? Where can I take this heap of treasure now? and where in the world do I wander off myself?"

The Odyssey, Book 13

The riddle of Newark, in the Newark trilogy, is that it defines everything, fixing the pattern, furnishing the real names, and shedding light on the darkness of mutable selves, while being itself a place of metamorphosis. In the trilogy's grammar, Newark is the subject of the sentence, and the trilogy's protagonists—the Swede, Ira, and Coleman—are its direct objects, set in motion by a moving city. For those intent on leaving Newark, as these three heroes are, it is an easy enough place to leave, more Sherwood Anderson's or F. Scott Fitzgerald's Midwest, which can be left, than Faulkner's Mississippi or Hawthorne's New England, which cannot. Those who stay in Newark must contend with the demise of their city and live in an Atlantis not fully sunk beneath the water. Newark disappears and its presence is ubiquitous. In keeping with its riddle, the city reappears (often uninvited) in the psychic landscape of its many children, far away from New Jersey as they may be. Newark is the unchanging terrain of childhood, and it resembles the Old World topography that marked immigrants as immigrants, telling them and others who they were, leaving imprinted upon them the quirks of speech and manner, the communal memory, the moral and religious passions that made them Irish American or Jewish American or Italian American. Newark's power is strongest in those areas of life where memory matters most, but the remembered city is at odds with the city one can visit, youth and adulthood separated by an abyss of urban change. The remembered city is the lost city, and the lost city is the spur to memory in the novels, if not for all the characters in them. By virtue of its impermanence, Newark is an elusive hometown and all the more unforgettable for being so elusive.

Founded in 1666, Newark is among America's oldest cities. Its original name entails the usual obscurity: it may refer to Newark-on-Trent, a small English town, or it may signify "New Ark" or "New Work," since the city was founded by Puritans from Connecticut who were seeking a new beginning on new soil. It is a city bound up with newness of some kind. If little of great note happened in Newark, it was never isolated from colonial or from national history. In the seventeenth century, the city was a site of conflict when the Puritan founders were unable to guarantee religious homogeneity and rival factions fought with one another. During the Revolutionary War, Newark was home to Loyalists and Revolutionaries and to the tensions among them. In the War of 1812, residents of Newark feared British conquest, which came to New York in the North and to Washington, DC, in the South. In 1815, Seth Boyden arrived in Newark, an entrepreneur who began the city's leap into the twentieth century. His leather-making business, a business associated with the city of Newark and central to American Pastoral, foreshadowed later industrial developments. An overall expansion of commerce transformed Newark from a provincial town, between Philadelphia and New York, into a modern metropolis. An anonymous early nineteenth-century letter to a Newark newspaper described the changing city; the letter writer had left Newark in 1819 and returned in 1834. "The numerous streets, spires and wharves, proclaim that the population and commerce have spread further and wider, and the hum of business declares that the march of improvements has not yet ceased," observed the letter's author. This is nineteenth-century boilerplate interrupted by a sudden note of sadness: "With all these [changes] I do not feel so much gratified as if I had found it in the same condition as I left. ... I cannot realize it as my home ... every face I meet is a stranger."

Participation characterizes Newark's nineteenth-century history. Newarkers "were heavily represented" in the settlement of the West; some two hundred Newarkers joined in the gold rush of 1848–1849; Newark did its bit in the Civil War; the financial panics of 1857 and 1873 wreaked havoc in Newark. Most of all, Newark participated in the industrial age, connected to points west by the Morris Canal, to the larger world by central railroad lines and by direct access to the Atlantic Ocean, not to mention its proximity to New York City. "Arguably no other U.S. city was so closely associated with industry and manufacturing," Brad Tuttle writes. The growth of industry invited immigrants, Germans and Irish first, followed by Italians, Jews, and blacks, who migrated to Newark from the South. By 1917, approximately thirty thousand blacks were living in Newark, mostly from Georgia and Alabama. "It seems impossible that a Negro is left in Dothan, Alabama," a Newark social worker observed in the 1960s. Between 1880 and 1910, roughly two hundred thousand immigrants arrived in Newark from Europe. In the words of Philip Roth:

As soon as they [recently arrived immigrants in Newark and in other industrial American cities] could climb out of the slums where most of them began in America, more or less penniless, the immigrants formed neighborhoods within the cities where they could have the comfort and security of the familiar while undergoing the arduous transformations of a new way of life. These neighborhoods became rivalrous, competing, somewhat xenophobic subcultures within the city.

For European immigrants the general trajectory was toward assimilation, "the arduous transformations of a new way of life." For Newark's black residents, the barriers of exclusion were radically higher; transformation was more impossible than arduous. If anything, multicultural Newark—in one of the few Northern states that voted against Abraham Lincoln in 1860—harbored a virulent brand of racism. Newark was no ethereal Concord, Massachusetts. "Hard-working, coarse-grained, bribe-ridden, semi-xenophobic Irish-Italian-German-Slavic-Jewish-Negro Newark"—a phrase from Roth's novel Indignation—participated in a fuller and less beautiful image of American nationhood.

Newark's twentieth-century rise and fall were vertiginous. The first four decades were scarred by the Great Depression and the Second World War, but they also witnessed monumental industrial and economic efforts, the construction of an Irish-Italian-German-Slavic-Jewish-Negro metropolis. If "Newark was the great...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804781826
• ISBN 13: 9780804781824
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 216
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland