Philip Roth's Holocaust Novel

Makes "The Producers" look like "Schindler's List"!

Creatures, what are you supposed to do when people are demanding that you have tender and selfless emotional reactions, and you are actually having them, but the thing is that you’re Philip Roth?

This is the dilemma of The Ghost Writer, which I knew of as, “the one where Philip Roth gets weird and sordid about Anne Frank.” Obviously it’s bad, right? Obviously this was a terrible idea, and even I, on record as a Roth-symp, would avoid it. But I didn’t, and I’m glad.

It’s divided into four parts, telling the stories of three people. The narrator is mostly, with one important digression, Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s frequent authorial stand-in. Here he’s at an early point in his career. The first section is called “The Maestro” and it describes his evening with an older Jewish writer, E.I. Lonoff. Lonoff’s work is completely different from Roth’s/Zuckerman’s grabby, hysterical, irresponsible style: Lonoff writes about “thwarted, secretive, imprisoned souls”; he’s skeptical, “mildly ironic,” “cryptic, muted, dreamy”; he hymns the beauties of repression, the glory of refraining; his romance is resignation. Zuckerman’s reaction to this reclusive master is swooning to the point of homoeroticism. It’s an utterly unexpected and endearing note in Roth. He turns out to be very good at admiring someone unlike himself—who knew! This will be important later.

Because Zuckerman finds Lonoff with two women: the maestro’s unhappy wife, Hope, and Amy Bellette, a young and mysterious refugee. Zuckerman, of course, is an absolute drooling cartoon tomcat about Amy. He takes some time away from his usual evening hobby, defensive rumination on his father’s claim that his autobiographical fiction betrays their family and the Jewish people, to eavesdrop as Lonoff and Amy have a thwarted, repressed, resigned encounter that is technically not adulterous. This whole section felt very wheel-spinning for me, maybe in 1979 we had not heard this whole shandeh for the goyim routine a million times from Roth but—no, come on, we totally had. The Lonoff plot, such as it is, peters out in the usual marital disappointments; the Zuckerman plot will play out through eight more novels. What is distinctive to The Ghost Writer is part three, “Femme Fatale,” in which we leave Zuckerman’s “I” behind, and an omniscient narrator tells us what the back cover doesn’t say, but I already guessed from the book’s reputation: Amy Bellette is Anne Frank.

I haven’t read The Diary of Anne Frank. I learned later that there was a mini-movement among American Jewish families to steer children away from Jewish narratives centered on the Holocaust. I don’t know that anyone around me made an intentional effort in that direction, but I am grateful that in my early ideas of Jewish life, Brooklyn loomed larger than Belsen. There’s something fake about that, it’s a very big graveyard to whistle past, but I’m glad I didn’t grow up wondering which of my neighbors would hide me if it happened here.

Because of this sheltered upbringing, I never had the experience Roth plainly had, of being startled by what the Diary is really like. Anne Frank appears first in this novel as a cudgel: a local judge, a titan of the Newark Jewish community, tells Zuckerman he should stop writing about squalid familial battles over money and go and watch the Broadway production of the Diary. “If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the thirties, would you have written such a story?” To the judge, Anne Frank is a symbol of Jewish nobility, Jewish purity. She is everything the Jewish people must aspire to. She is the only story worthy to be told.

And The Ghost Writer, as its title maybe implies, is among many other things an outraged cry that that isn’t what she wrote. The actual Diary is not intended to edify. Anne discovers her sexual being; she wrestles with Jewish identity, and doesn’t have much to say about Jewish religion. Roth treats her as a writer above all, and a kindred spirit. This is a book about two writers Zuckerman adores, two masters (or incipient masters) of his craft. His praise for her writing is specific and astonished and, I’m gonna say this, I know we’re supposed to pretend there’s a clean separation between narrator and author but this is Zuckerman—it’s sincere.

There are two passages in this book where Anne Frank experiences her own diary as a work in the public eye. In the first one, having survived and made her way to America, she discovers that her diary has been published in Dutch; she orders it via international mail and, when the package finally arrives, she finds a park to sit and read in. This is one of the tenderest scenes I think Roth ever wrote. There is so much longing in his writing here—if only he could give it to her, this moment of seeing her own talent, this later life.

And in the second one, she watches it performed on Broadway and realizes that all these people need her to be dead. It’s her death that makes her poignant for them. Meaningful. Worthy. (My Catholic readers may hear echoes of a sordid cultural relationship to another murdered girl, Maria Goretti.) Her death at the hands of Jew-haters makes her an embodiment of the Jewish people’s role as the Suffering Servant in Isaiah. Her Holocaust death cleanses her of sexuality, doubt, and genius.

Roth always knows what he’s doing, even when he’s not in control of it. He knows that he, too, is creating a useful Anne Frank. There’s a devastating gallows comedy bit where Zuckerman fantasizes about taking her home to meet his parents, the ultimate self-defense. Roth knows that the project of this book is inherently self-absorbed. And yet it’s also a tribute, a plea on her behalf and not just his own. Everything at once: to imagine that she survived is fake, it’s not a fiction but a lie, which is why Amy Bellette’s story is not as straightforward as it’s first presented; and yet that dream of survival is also a way of exposing all that is real in her, all that is individual and in danger of being discarded by cultural memory. I suspect Roth enjoyed knowing that he found a way to serve someone else’s memory while also adding to his own reputation as the outrager of South Orange. How nice, you know, to find a way to be gentle while also degrading oneself, a dead girl’s memory, and the Jewish people!

You can feel how desperately Roth wants to take a side in the argument: to assert that Anne Frank is a specific individual and not merely a part of The Jewish People. Part of The Ghost Writer’s power is that, because he is working with a real historical person to whom he transparently feels actual responsibility—he feels it even though everyone is telling him to feel it!—it often reads as though Roth is being backed into corners. And one corner he gets backed into is that he can’t unhook any of these three writers’ stories from the pressures of Jewish belonging. He can’t, in the end, honestly say that to be inescapably a Jew is to be merely a Jew. He can’t honestly say that the individual story is the important one and the story of a people is imposed by hostile forces from outside the sovereign self.

But that isn’t where I want to leave this book. I want to go back to a girl in a park, holding a book, choosing a bench to read on. “She sat first on a bench in the shade, but then got up and walked on until she found a perfect spot in the sunshine.”

Photo of Philip Roth’s personal library, donated to the Newark Public Library along with a couple million dollars (who says Mr. Sabbath did nothing for Israel?), by Kenneth C. Zirkel. Via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.