At the same time, Roth put forth an idea that he has revisited in a number of other books: Jews tend to sanctify stories about the Holocaust and to elevate the storytellers by virtue of their victimization without subjecting either to any literary scrutiny. In "Writing about Jews," an essay reprinted in Reading Myself and Others (1975), Roth rejects the claims of those who "argue or imply that the sufferings of the Jews throughout history, culminating in the murder of six million by the Nazis, have made certain criticisms of Jewish life insulting and trivial."Ī few years later his novella The Ghost Writer (1979) enlarged the discussion about a writer's freedom to express his ideas, and, to a degree, offered Roth a fictional forum in which he could continue to debate his views.
#The ghost writer free
He argued then and has repeatedly stated since that a writer, indeed any artist, must be free to express his ideas. His detractors insisted that his identity as a Jew and his identity as a writer were irrefutably connected he had a responsibility to portray Jews in ways that would not nourish the souls of anti-Semites.
When Philip Roth wrote Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and Portnoy's Complaint (1969), he could not have predicted the hostile response by some American Jews who feared Roth's unflattering portraits of Jewish life might foment latent anti-Semitism in the wake of the Holocaust.
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