Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Philip Roth
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Dear Zuckerman …
Prologue
Safe at Home
Joe College
Girl of My Dreams
All in the Family
Now Vee May Perhaps to Begin
Dear Roth …
Copyright
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ Prize for ‘the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004’.
Recently Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award ‘for a body of work … of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship’ and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose ‘scale of achievement over a sustained career … places him or her in the highest rank of American literature’. In 2011 Roth won the International Man Booker Prize.
Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America.
ABOUT THE BOOK
How does a novelist write about the facts of his life after spending years fictionalising those facts with irrepressible daring and originality?
What becomes of ‘the facts’ after they have been smelted down for art’s sake? In The Facts – Philip Roth’s idiosyncratic autobiography – we find out. Focusing on five episodes in his life, Roth gives a portrait of his secure city childhood in Newark, through to his first marriage, clashes with the Jewish establishment over Goodbye, Columbus and his writing of Portnoy’s Complaint. In true Rothian style, his fictional self Nathan Zuckerman is allowed the final, coruscating word of reply.
ALSO BY PHILIP ROTH
Zuckerman Books
The Ghost Writer
Zuckerman Unbound
The Anatomy Lesson
The Prague Orgy
The Counterlife
American Pastoral
I Married a Communist
The Human Stain
Exit Ghost
Roth Books
Deception
Patrimony
Operation Shylock
The Plot Against America
Kepesh Books
The Breast
The Professor of Desire
The Dying Animal
Nemeses: Short Novels
Everyman
Indignation
The Humbling
Nemesis
Miscellany
Reading Myself and Others
Shop Talk
Other Books
Goodbye, Columbus
Letting Go
When She Was Good
Portnoy’s Complaint
Our Gang
The Great American Novel
My Life as a Man
Sabbath’s Theater
To my brother at sixty
THE FACTS
ONE DAY IN late October 1944, I was astonished to find my father, whose workday ordinarily began at seven and many nights didn’t end until ten, sitting alone at the kitchen table in the middle of the afternoon. He was going into the hospital unexpectedly to have his appendix removed. Though he had already packed a bag to take with him, he had waited for my brother, Sandy, and me to get home from school to tell us not to be alarmed. “Nothing to it,” he assured us, though we all knew that two of his brothers had died back in the 1920s from complications following difficult appendectomies. My mother, the president that year of our school’s parent-teacher association, happened, quite unusually, to be away overnight in Atlantic City at a statewide PTA convention. My father had phoned her hotel, however, to tell her the news, and she had immediately begun preparations to return home. That would do it, I was sure: my mother’s domestic ingenuity was on a par with Robinson Crusoe’s, and as for nursing us all through our illnesses, we couldn’t have received much better care from Florence Nightingale. As was usual in our household, everything was now under control.
By the time her train pulled into Newark that evening, the surgeon had opened him up, seen the mess, and despaired for my father’s chances. At the age of forty-three, he was put on the critical list and given less than a fifty-fifty chance to survive.
Only the adults knew how bad things were. Sandy and I were allowed to go on believing that a father was indestructible—and ours turned out to be just that. Despite a raw emotional nature that makes him prey to intractable worry, his life has been distinguished by the power of resurgence. I’ve never intimately known anyone else—aside from my brother and me—to swing as swiftly through so wide a range of moods, anyone else to take things so hard, to be so openly racked by a serious setback, and yet, after the blow has reverberated down to the quick, to clamber back so aggressively, to recover lost ground and get going again.
He was saved by the new sulfa powder, developed during the early years of the war to treat battlefront wounds. Surviving was an awful ordeal nonetheless, his weakness from the near-fatal peritonitis exacerbated by a ten-day siege of hiccups during which he was unable to sleep or to keep down food. After he’d lost nearly thirty pounds, his shrunken face disclosed itself to us as a replica of my elderly grandmother’s, the face of the mother whom he and all his brothers adored (toward the father—laconic, authoritarian, remote, an immigrant who’d trained in Galicia to be a rabbi but worked in America in a hat factory—their feelings were more confused). Bertha Zahnstecker Roth was a simple old-country woman, good-hearted, given to neither melancholy nor complaint, yet her everyday facial expression made it plain that she nursed no illusions about life’s being easy. My father’s resemblance to his mother would not appear so eerily again until he himself reached his eighties, and then only when he was in the grip of a struggle that stripped an otherwise physically youthful old man of his seeming impregnability, leaving him bewildered not so much because of the eye problem or the difficulty with his gait that had made serious inroads on his self-sufficiency but because he felt all at once abandoned by that masterful accomplice and overturner of obstacles, his determination.
When he was driven home from Newark’s Beth Israel Hospital after six weeks in bed there, he barely had the strength, even with our assistance, to make it up the short back staircase to our second-story apartment. It was December 1944 by then, a cold winter day, but through the windows the sunlight illuminated my parents’ bedroom. Sandy and I came in to talk to him, both of us shy and grateful and, of course, stunned by how helpless he appeared seated weakly in a lone chair in the corner of the room. Seeing his sons together like that, my father could no longer control himself and began to sob. He was alive, the sun was shining, his wife was not widowed nor his boys fatherless—family life would now resume. It was not so complicated that an eleven-year-old couldn’t understand his father’s tears. I just didn’t see, as he so clearly could, why or how it should have turned out differently.
I knew only two boys in our neighborhood whose families were fatherless, and thought of them as no less blighted than the blind girl who attended our school for a while and had to be read to and shepherded everywhere. The fatherless boys seemed almost equally marked and set apart; in the aftermath of their fathers’ deaths, they too struck me as scary and a little taboo. Though one was a model of obedience and the other a troublemaker, everything either of them did or said seemed determined by his being a boy with a dead father and, however innocently I arrived at this notion, I was probably right.
I knew no child whose family was divided by divorce. Outside of the movie magazines and the tabloid headlines, it didn’t exist, certainly not among Jews like us. Jews didn’t get divorced—not because divorce was forbidden by Jewish law but because that was the way they were. If Jewish fathers didn’t come home drunk and beat their wives—and in our neighborhood, which was Jewry to me, I’d never heard of any who did—that too was because of the way they were. In our lore, the Jewish family was an inviolate haven against every form of menace, from personal isolation to gentile hostility. Regardless of internal friction and strife, it was assumed to be an indissoluble consolidation. Hear, O Israel, the family is God, the family is One.
Family indivisibility, the first commandment.
In the late 1940s, when my father’s younger brother, Bernie, proclaimed his intention of divorcing the wife of nearly twenty years who was the mother of his two daughters, my mother and father were as stunned as if they’d heard that he’d killed somebody. Had Bernie committed murder and gone to jail for life, they would probably have rallied behind him despite the abominable, inexplicable deed. But when he made up his mind not merely to divorce but to do so to marry a younger woman, their support went instantly to the “victims,” the sister-in-law and the nieces. For his transgression, a breach of faith with his wife, his children, his entire clan—a dereliction of his duty as a Jew and as a Roth—Bernie encountered virtually universal condemnation.
That family rupture only began to mend when time revealed that no one had been destroyed by the divorce; in fact, anguished as they were by the breakup of their household, Bernie’s ex-wife and his two girls were never remotely as indignant as the rest of the relatives. The healing owed a lot to Bernie himself, a more diplomatic man than most of his judges, but also to the fact that for my father the demands of family solidarity and the bond of family history exceeded even his admonishing instincts. It was to be another forty-odd years, however, before the two brothers threw their arms around each other and hungrily embraced in an unmistakable act of unqualified reconciliation. This occurred a few weeks before Bernie’s death, in his late seventies, when his heart was failing rapidly and nobody, beginning with himself, expected him to last much longer.
I had driven my father over to see Bernie and his wife, Ruth, in their condominium in a retirement village in north-western Connecticut, twenty miles from my own home. It was Bernie’s turn now to wear the little face of his unillusioned, stoical old mother; when he came to the door to let us in, there in his features was that stark resemblance that seemed to emerge in all the Roth brothers when they were up against it.
Ordinarily the two men would have met with a handshake, but when my father stepped into the hallway, so much was clear both about the time that was left to Bernie and about all those decades, seemingly stretching back to the beginning of time, during which they had been alive as their parents’ offspring, that the handshake was swallowed up in a forceful hug that lasted minutes and left them in tears. They seemed to be saying goodbye to everyone already gone as well as to each other, the last two surviving children of the dour hat-blocker Sender and the imperturbable balabusta Bertha. Safely in his brother’s arms, Bernie seemed also to be saying goodbye to himself. There was nothing to guard against or defend against or resent anymore, nothing even to remember. In these brothers, men so deeply swayed, despite their dissimilarity, by identical strains of family emotion, everything remembered had been distilled into pure, barely bearable feeling.
In the car afterward my father said, “We haven’t held each other like that since we were small boys. My brother’s dying, Philip. I used to push him around in his carriage. There were nine of us, with my mother and father. I’ll be the last one left.”
While we drove back to my house (where he was staying in the upstairs back bedroom, a room in which he says he never fails to sleep like a baby) he recounted the struggles of each of his five brothers—with bankruptcies, illnesses, and in-laws, with marital dissension and bad loans, and with children, with their Gonerils, their Regans, and their Cordelias. He recalled for me the martyrdom of his only sister, what she and all the family had gone through when her husband the bookkeeper who liked the horses had served a little time for embezzlement.
It wasn’t exactly the first time I was hearing these stories. Narrative is the form that his knowledge takes, and his repertoire has never been large: family, family, family, Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew, Jew. Somewhat like mine.
I naïvely believed as a child that I would always have a father present, and the truth seems to be that I always will. However awkward the union may sometimes have been, vulnerable to differences of opinion, to false expectations, to radically divergent experiences of America, strained by the colliding of two impatient, equally willful temperaments and marred by masculine clumsiness, the link to him has been omnipresent. What’s more, now, when he no longer commands my attention by his bulging biceps and his moral strictures, now, when he is no longer the biggest man I have to contend with—and when I am not all that far from being an old man myself—I am able to laugh at his jokes and hold his hand and concern myself with his well-being, I’m able to love him the way I wanted to when I was sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen but when, what with dealing with him and feeling at odds with him, it was simply an impossibility. The impossibility, for all that I always respected him for his particular burden and his struggle within a system that he didn’t choose. The mythological role of a Jewish boy growing up in a family like mine—to become the hero one’s father failed to be—I may even have achieved by now, but not at all in the way that was preordained. After nearly forty years of living far from home, I’m equipped at last to be the most loving of sons—just, however, when he has another agenda. He is trying to die. He doesn’t say that, nor, probably, does he think of it in those words, but that’s his job now and, fight as he will to survive, he understands, as he always has, what the real work is.
Trying to die isn’t like trying to commit suicide—it may actually be harder, because what you are trying to do is what you least want to have happen; you dread it but there it is and it must be done, and by no one but you. Twice in the last few years he has taken a shot at it, on two different occasions suddenly became so ill that I, who was then living abroad half the year, flew back to America to find him with barely enough strength to walk from the sofa to the TV set without clutching at every chair in between. And though each time the doctor, after a painstaking examination, was unable to find anything wrong with him, he nonetheless went to bed every night expecting not to awaken in the morning and, when he did awaken in the morning, he was fifteen minutes just getting himself into a sitting position on the edge of the bed and another hour shaving and dressing. Then, for God knows how long, he slouched unmoving over a bowl of cereal for which he had absolutely no appetite.
I was as certain as he was that this was it, yet neither time could he pull it off and, over a period of weeks, he recovered his strength and became himself again, loathing Reagan, defending Israel, phoning relatives, attending funerals, writing to newspapers, castigating William Buckley, watching MacNeil–Lehrer, exhorting his grown grandchildren, remembering in detail our own dead, and relentlessly, exactingly—and without having been asked—monitoring the caloric intake of the nice woman he lives with. It would seem that to prevail here, to try dying and to do it, he will have to work even harder than he did in the insurance business, where he achieved a remarkable success for a man with his social and educational handicaps. Of course, here too he’ll eventually succeed—though clearly, despite his record of assiduous application to every job he has ever been assigned, things won’t be easy. But then they never have been.
Needless to say, the link to my father was never so voluptuously tangible as the colossal bond to my mother’s flesh, whose metamorphosed incarnation was a sleek black sealskin coat into which I, the younger, the privileged, the pampered papoose, blissfully wormed myself whenever my father chauffeured us home to New Jersey on a winter Sunday from our semiannual excursion to Radio City Music Hall and Manhattan’s Chinatown: the unnameable animal-me bearing her dead father’s name, the protoplasm-me, boy-baby, and body-burrower-in-training, joined by every nerve ending to her smile and her sealskin coat, while his resolute dutifulness, his relentless industriousness, his unreasoning obstinacy and harsh resentments, his illusions, his innocence, his allegiances, his fears were to constitute the original mold for the American, Jew, citizen, man, even for the writer, I would become. To be at all is to be her Philip, but in the embroilment with the buffeting world, my history still takes its spin from beginning as his Roth.
And as he spoke I was thinking, the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives that people turn stories into.
Nathan Zuckerman, in The Counterlife
Dear Zuckerman,
In the past, as you know, the facts have always been notebook jottings, my way of springing into fiction. For me, as for most novelists, every genuine imaginative event begins down there, with the facts, with the specific, and not with the philosophical, the ideological, or the abstract. Yet, to my surprise, I now appear to have gone about writing a book absolutely backward, taking what I have already imagined and, as it were, desiccating it, so as to restore my experience to the original, prefictionalized factuality. Why? To prove that there is a significant gap between the autobiographical writer that I am thought to be and the autobiographical writer that I am? To prove that the information that I drew from my life was, in the fiction, incomplete? If that was all, I don’t think I would have gone to the trouble, since thoughtful readers, if they were interested enough to care, could have figured as much for themselves. Nor was there any call for this book; no one ordered it, no one sent down for an autobiography from Roth. The order, if it was ever even placed, went out thirty years ago, when certain of my Jewish elders demanded to know just who this kid was who was writing this stuff.
No, the thing seems to have been born out of other necessities, and sending this manuscript to you—and asking you, as I do, to tell me whether you think I should publish it—prompts me to explain what may have led to my presenting myself in prose like this, undisguised. Until now I have always used the past as the basis for transformation, for, among other things, a kind of intricate explanation to myself of my world. Why appear untransformed in front of people when, by and large, in the unimagined world, I’ve refrained from nakedly divulging my personal life to (and pressing a TV personality on) a serious audience? On the pendulum of self-exposure that oscillates between aggressively exhibitionistic Mailerism and sequestered Salingerism, I’d say that I occupy a midway position, trying in the public arena to resist gratuitous prying or preening without making too holy a fetish of secrecy and seclusion. So why claim biographical visibility now, especially as I was educated to believe that the independent reality of the fiction is all there is of importance and that writers should remain in the shadows?
Well, to begin to answer—the person I’ve intended to make myself visible to here has been myself, primarily. Over fifty you need ways of making yourself visible to yourself. A moment comes, as it did for me some months back, when I was all at once in a state of helpless confusion and could not understand any longer what once was obvious to me: why I do what I do, why I live where I live, why I share my life with the one I do. My desk had become a frightening, foreign place and, unlike similar moments earlier in life when the old strategies didn’t work anymore—either for the pragmatic business of daily living, those problems that everybody faces, or for the specialized problems of writing—and I had energetically resolved on a course of renewal, I came to believe that I just could not make myself over yet again. Far from feeling capable of remaking myself, I felt myself coming undone.
I’m talking about a breakdown. Although there’s no need to delve into particulars here, I will tell you that in the spring of 1987, at the height of a ten-year period of creativity, what was to have been minor surgery turned into a prolonged physical ordeal that led to an extreme depression that carried me right to the edge of emotional and mental dissolution. It was in the period of post-crack-up meditation, with the clarity attending the remission of an illness, that I began, quite involuntarily, to focus virtually all my waking attention on worlds from which I had lived at a distance for decades—remembering where I had started out from and how it had all begun. If you lose something, you say, “Okay, let’s retrace the steps. I came in the house, took off my coat, went into the kitchen,” etc., etc. In order to recover what I had lost I had to go back to the moment of origin. I found no one moment of origin but a series of moments, a history of multiple origins, and that’s what I have written here in the effort to repossess life. I hadn’t ever mapped out my life like this but rather, as I’ve said, had looked only for what could be transformed. Here, so as to fall back into my former life, to retrieve my vitality, to transform myself into myself, I began rendering experience untransformed.
Perhaps it wasn’t even myself I wanted to be turned into but the boy I had been when I went off to college, the boy surrounded on the playground by his neighborhood compatriots—back down to ground zero. After the crack-up comes the grateful rush into ordinary life, and that was my life at its most ordinary. I suppose I wanted to return to the point when the launch was the launch of a more ordinary Roth and, at the same time, to reengage those formative encounters, to reclaim the earliest struggles, to get back to that high-spirited moment when the manic side of my imagination took off and I became my own writer; back to the original well, not for material but for the launch, the relaunch—out of fuel, back to tank up on the magic blood. Like you, Zuckerman, who are reborn in The Counterlife through your English wife, like your brother, Henry, who seeks rebirth in Israel with his West Bank fundamentalists, just as both of you in the same book miraculously manage to be revived from death, I too was ripe for another chance. If while writing I couldn’t see exactly what I was up to, I do now: this manuscript embodies my counterlife, the antidote and answer to all those fictions that culminated in the fiction of you. If in one way The Counterlife can be read as fiction about structure, then this is the bare bones, the structure of a life without the fiction.
As a matter of fact, the two longish works of fiction about you, written over a decade, were probably what made me sick of fictionalizing myself further, worn out with coaxing into existence a being whose experience was comparable to my own and yet registered a more powerful valence, a life more highly charged and energized, more entertaining than my own … which happens to have been largely spent, quite unentertainingly, alone in a room with a typewriter. I was depleted by the rules I’d set myself—by having to imagine things not quite as they had happened to me or things that never happened to me or things that couldn’t possibly have happened to me happening to an agent, a projection of mine, to a kind of me. If this manuscript conveys anything, it’s my exhaustion with masks, disguises, distortions, and lies.
Of course, even without the crack-up and the need for self-investigation it generated, I might have found myself, at this moment, unable to wield the whip over the facts sufficiently to make real life amazing. Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology—after thirty years at that, it could have seemed like I’d had enough even under the best of circumstances. To demythologize myself and play it straight, to pair the facts as lived with the facts as presented might well have seemed the next thing to do—if not the only thing I could do—so long as the capacity for self-transformation and, with it, the imagination were at the point of collapse. Insofar as the rest of me, which had collapsed as well, intuited that stripping the writing down to unvarnished specificity was a part of getting back what I’d lost, a means of recovery and a way to strength, there wasn’t even a choice. I needed clarification, as much of it as I could get—demythologizing to induce depathologizing.
This isn’t to say that I didn’t have to resist the impulse to dramatize untruthfully the insufficiently dramatic, to complicate the essentially simple, to charge with implication what implied very little—the temptation to abandon the facts when those facts were not so compelling as others I might imagine if I could somehow steel myself to overcome fiction-fatigue. But on the whole it was easier than I thought it would be to escape from what I’d felt constrained to do nearly every day of the pre-crack-up existence. Perhaps that’s because in its uncompelling, unferocious way, the nonfictional approach has brought me closer to how experience actually felt than has turning the flame up under my life and smelting stories out of all I’ve known. I’m not arguing that there’s a kind of existence that exists in fiction that doesn’t exist in life or vice versa but simply saying that a book that faithfully conforms to the facts, a distillation of the facts that leaves off with the imaginative fury, can unlock meanings that fictionalizing has obscured, distended, or even inverted and can drive home some sharp emotional nails.
I recognize that I’m using the word “facts” here, in this letter, in its idealized form and in a much more simpleminded way than it’s meant in the title. Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts. There is something naïve about a novelist like myself talking about presenting himself “undisguised” and depicting “a life without the fiction.” I also invite oversimplification of a kind I don’t at all like by announcing that searching out the facts may have been a kind of therapy for me. You search your past with certain questions on your mind—indeed, you search out your past to discover which events have led you to asking those specific questions. It isn’t that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history’s meaning. I suppose that calling this book The Facts begs so many questions that I could manage to be both less ironic and more ironic by calling it Begging the Question.
A final observation about the predicament that engendered The Facts, and then you may read on undisturbed. Though I can’t be entirely sure, I wonder if this book was written not only out of exhaustion with making fictional self-legends and not only as a spontaneous therapeutic response to my crack-up but also as a palliative for the loss of a mother who still, in my mind, seems to have died inexplicably—at seventy-seven in 1981—as well as to hearten me as I come closer and closer and closer to an eighty-six-year-old father viewing the end of life as a thing as near to his face as the mirror he shaves in (except that this mirror is there day and night, directly in front of him all the time). Even though it might not be apparent to others, I think that subterraneanly my mother’s death is very strong in all this, as is observing my provident father preparing for no future, a healthy but very old man dealing with the kind of feelings aroused by an incurable illness, because just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.
I wonder if a breakdown-induced eruption of parental longing in a fifty-five-year-old man isn’t, in fact, the Rosetta stone to this manuscript. I wonder if there hasn’t been some consolation, particularly while recovering my equilibrium, in remembering that when the events narrated here were happening we all were there, nobody having gone away or been on the brink of going away, never to be seen again for hundreds of thousands of billions of years. I wonder if I haven’t drawn considerable consolation from reassigning myself as myself to a point in life when the grief that may issue from the death of parents needn’t be contended with, when it is unperceivable and unsuspected, and one’s own departure is unconceivable because they are there like a blockade.
I think that’s everything that might lie behind this book. The question now is, why should anybody other than me be reading it, especially as I acknowledge that they’ve gotten a good bit of it elsewhere, under other auspices? Especially as I consider myself, partly through this effort, united again with my purposes and reengaged with life. Especially as this feels like the first thing that I have ever written unconsciously and sounds to me more like the voice of a twenty-five-year-old than that of the author of my books about you. Especially as publication would leave me feeling exposed in a way I don’t particularly wish to be exposed.
There’s also the problem of exposing others. While writing, when I began to feel increasingly squeamish about confessing intimate affairs of mine to everybody, I went back and changed the real names of some of those with whom I’d been involved, as well as a few identifying details. This was not because I believed that the rerendering would furnish complete anonymity (it couldn’t make those people anonymous to their friends and mine) but because it might afford at least a little protection from their being pawed over by perfect strangers.
Beyond these considerations that make publication problematic for me stands the question: Is the book any good? Because The Facts has meant more to me than may be obvious and because I’ve never worked before without my imagination having been fired by someone like you or Portnoy or Tarnopol or Kepesh, I’m in no real position to tell.
Be candid.
Sincerely,
Roth
THE GREATEST MENACE while I was growing up came from abroad, from the Germans and the Japanese, our enemies because we were American. I still remember my terror as a nine-year-old when, running in from playing on the street after school, I saw the banner headline CORREGIDOR FALLS on the evening paper in our doorway and understood that the United States actually could lose the war it had entered only months before. At home the biggest threat came from the Americans who opposed or resisted us—or condescended to us or rigorously excluded us—because we were Jews. Though I knew that we were tolerated and accepted as well—in publicized individual cases, even specially esteemed—and though I never doubted that this country was mine (and New Jersey and Newark as well), I was not unaware of the power to intimidate that emanated from the highest and lowest reaches of gentile America.
At the top were the gentile executives who ran my father’s company, the Metropolitan Life, from the home office at Number One Madison Avenue (the first Manhattan street address I ever knew). When I was a small boy, my father, then in his early thirties, was still a new Metropolitan agent, working a six-day week, including most evenings, and grateful for the steady, if modest, living this job provided, even during the Depression; a family shoe store he’d opened after marrying my mother had gone bankrupt some years before, and in between he’d had to take a variety of low-paying, unpromising jobs. He proudly explained to his sons that the Metropolitan was “the largest financial institution in the world” and that as an agent he provided Metropolitan Life policyholders with “an umbrella for a rainy day.” The company put out dozens of pamphlets to educate its policyholders about health and disease; I collected a new batch off the racks in the waiting room on Saturday mornings when he took me along with him to the narrow downtown street where the Essex district office of Newark occupied nearly a whole floor of a commercial office building. I read up on “Tuberculosis,” “Pregnancy,” and “Diabetes,” while he labored over his ledger entries and his paperwork. Sometimes at his desk, impressing myself by sitting in his swivel chair, I practiced my penmanship on Metropolitan stationery; in one corner of the paper was my father’s name and in the other a picture of the home-office tower, topped with the beacon that he described to me, in the Metropolitan’s own phrase, as the light that never failed.
In our apartment a framed replica of the Declaration of Independence hung above the telephone table on the hallway wall—it had been awarded by the Metropolitan to the men of my father’s district for a successful year in the field, and seeing it there daily during my first school years forged an association between the venerated champions of equality who signed that cherished document and our benefactors, the corporate fathers at Number One Madison Avenue, where the reigning president was, fortuitously, a Mr. Lincoln. If that wasn’t enough, the home-office executive whom my father would trek from New Jersey to see when his star began to rise slightly in the company was the superintendent of agencies, a Mr. Wright, whose good opinion my father valued inordinately all his life and whose height and imposing good looks he admired nearly as much as he did the man’s easygoing diplomacy. As my father’s son I felt no less respectful toward these awesomely named gentiles than he did, but I, like him, knew that they had to be the very officials who openly and guiltlessly conspired to prevent more than a few token Jews from assuming positions of anything approaching importance within the largest financial institution in the world.
One reason my father so admired the Jewish manager of his own district, Sam Peterfreund—aside, of course, from the devotion that Peterfreund inspired by recognizing my father’s drive early on and making him an assistant manager—was that Peterfreund had climbed to the leadership of such a large, productive office despite the company’s deep-rooted reluctance to allow a Jew to rise too high. When Mr. Peterfreund was to make one of his rare visits for dinner, the green felt protective pads came out of the hall closet and were laid by my brother and me on the dining room table, it was spread with a fresh linen cloth and linen napkins, water goblets appeared, and we ate off “the good dishes” in the dining room, where there hung a large oil painting of a floral arrangement, copied skillfully from the Louvre by my mother’s brother, Mickey; on the sideboard were framed photographic portraits of the two dead men for whom I’d been named, my mother’s father, Philip, and my father’s younger brother, Milton. We ate in the dining room only on religious holidays, on special and