Goodbye, Columbus

Five Short Stories

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY/BOSTON

Copyright © 1959 by Philip Roth
Copyright renewed © 1987 by Philip Roth
Preface copyright © 1989 by Philip Roth
All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
2 Park Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02108.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-85214
ISBN:
0-395-51850-4

Printed in the United States of America

BTA
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

“Goodbye, Columbus,” “The Conversion of the Jews,” and
“Epstein” appeared in
The Paris Review.
“Defender of the
Faith” appeared originally in
The New Yorker
—copyright ©
1959 by the New Yorker Magazine, Inc. “You Can’t Tell a
Man by the Song He Sings” and “Eli, the Fanatic” have appeared
in
Commentary
—copyright 1957, 1958 by Philip Roth.

To my mother and father

“The heart is half a prophet.”

Y
IDDISH PROVERB

Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition
xi

Goodbye, Columbus
1

The Conversion of the Jews
137

Defender of the Faith
159

Epstein
201

You Can’t Tell a Man by
the Song He Sings
231

Eli, the Fanatic
247

With clarity and with crudeness, and a great deal of exuberance, the embryonic writer who was me wrote these stories in his early twenties, while he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, a soldier stationed in New Jersey and Washington, D.C., and a novice English instructor back at Chicago following his army discharge. Eisenhower, who was president, the embryonic writer despised, though not nearly as much as he was to despise Eisenhower’s Republican successors. His cultural ambitions were formulated in direct opposition to the triumphant, suffocating American philistinism of that time: he despised
Time, Life,
Hollywood, television, the best-seller list, advertising copy, McCarthyism, Rotary Clubs, racial prejudice, and the American booster mentality. Among the writers he was reading when he wrote these stories in the 1950s—and he was reading all the time, all kinds of books, dozens and dozens of them—were David Riesman, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, John Cheever, James Baldwin, Randall Jarrell, Sigmund Freud, Paul Goodman, William Styron, C. Wright Mills, Martin Buber, George Orwell, Suzanne Langer, F. R. Leavis, David Daiches, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Ralph Ellison, Erich Fromm, Joseph Conrad, Dylan Thomas, Sean O’Casey, e. e. cummings—who collectively represented a republic of discourse in which he aspired to be naturalized.

The magazine to whose strategies of cultural attack and techniques of literary assault he felt an immediate affinity was Philip Rahv’s intellectually combative
Partisan Review;
he bought back issues of the quarterly in the used bookstores around Hyde Park and read each new issue in its entirety the day it appeared in the U. of C. library. The magazine that educated him to be both unapologetic and critically freewheeling about the class of Jews whose customs and beliefs had shaped his boyhood society, the magazine whose example encouraged him to recognize as the seeds of stories the mundane household dramas of his Jewish New Jersey, was the
Commentary
of the late forties and fifties. Back then
Commentary,
a monthly supported by the American Jewish Committee, was still a publication in which it was considered not a manifestation of unearned assimilationist superiority or of sick Jewish self-hatred but an expression of ineluctably Jewish self-scrutiny to propose a psychosexual critique of the kosher laws, as Isaac Rosenfield managed to do marvelously in his essay “Adam and Eve on Delancey Street,” or to reveal, with mournful joy, the raw, hysterical, primitive energies propelling family life in a Brooklyn Jewish neighborhood, as Wallace Markfield did so masterfully in the story “The Country of the Crazy Horse.”

Of the stories brought together in his own first book, two had previously appeared in
Commentary
and another in
The New Yorker,
while the rest (including the longest) had been published in the fledgling quarterly
The Paris Review.
The sympathetic young editors at
The Paris Review
were, by and large, from privileged Gentile backgrounds conspicuously unlike those of the Jewish editors encouraging him at
Commentary
(not to mention his own). The fact that magazines embodying such divergent cultural perspectives could sanction his subject matter had an exhilarating effect on the young writer’s sense of freedom. In the beginning it simply amazed him that
any
truly literate audience could seriously be interested in his store of tribal secrets, in what he knew, as a child of his neighborhood, about the rites and taboos of his clan—about their aversions, their aspirations, their fears of deviance and defection, their underlying embarrassments and their ideas of success.

He certainly hadn’t imagined, while reading the best of English prose and poetry at college only a few years earlier, that literature of the kind T. S. Eliot praised could be rooted in anything close to him. What did the tiresome tension between parents and children in lower-middle-class Jewish Newark—arguments about
shiksas
and shrimp cocktail, about going to synagogue and being good—have to do with Shakespeare and the stoicism of Seneca, or, for that matter, with all the abundance of the unimaginable life to come? Who among the mothers and fathers on his street could speak as fluently as the high school principal, Mr. Herzberg, let alone like Alexander Pope? He saw himself entering into a world of intellectual consequence precisely by moving beyond the unsubtle locutions and coarse simplifications of the families still living where he’d grown up, a tiny provincial enclosure where there was no longer room for the likes of him.

And perhaps if he’d become something other than a writer, that kind of predictable leave-taking would have been a natural-enough route to maturity. His particular skills, however, inclined him to reimagine as a species of folk fiction—as unguarded short stories, spontaneously told, that somehow stretched over the bones of the folktale a skin of satiric social comedy—what not that long before has been the undifferentiated everydayness of Jewish life along the route of Newark’s Number 14 Clinton Place bus. In this way, without knowing it, he proceeded to make identical the acts of departure and return and to perpetuate those contradictory yearnings that can perplex the emotions of an ambitious embryo—the desire to repudiate and the desire to cling, a sense of allegiance and the need to rebel, the alluring dream of escaping into the challenging unknown and the counterdream of holding fast to the familiar. Altogether unwittingly, he had activated the ambivalence that was to stimulate his imagination for years to come and establish the grounds for that necessary struggle from which his—no, my—fiction would spring.

PHILIP ROTH
June 1989

T
HE FIRST TIME
I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses. Then she stepped out to the edge of the diving board and looked foggily into the pool; it could have been drained, myopic Brenda would never have known it. She dove beautifully, and a moment later she was swimming back to the side of the pool, her head of short-clipped auburn hair held up, straight ahead of her, as though it were a rose on a long stem. She glided to the edge and then was beside me. “Thank you,” she said, her eyes watery though not from the water. She extended a hand for her glasses but did not put them on until she turned and headed away. I watched her move off. Her hands suddenly appeared behind her. She caught the bottom of her suit between thumb and index finger and flicked what flesh had been showing back where it belonged. My blood jumped.

That night, before dinner, I called her.

“Who are you calling?” my Aunt Gladys asked.

“Some girl I met today.”

“Doris introduced you?”

“Doris wouldn’t introduce me to the guy who drains the pool, Aunt Gladys.”

“Don’t criticize all the time. A cousin’s a cousin. How did you meet her?”

“I didn’t really meet her. I saw her.”

“Who is she?”

“Her last name is Patimkin.”

“Patimkin I don’t know,” Aunt Gladys said, as if she knew anybody who belonged to the Green Lane Country Club. “You’re going to call her you don’t know her?”

“Yes,” I explained. “I’ll introduce myself.”

“Casanova,” she said, and went back to preparing my uncle’s dinner. None of us ate together: my Aunt Gladys ate at five o’clock, my cousin Susan at five-thirty, me at six, and my uncle at six-thirty. There is nothing to explain this beyond the fact that my aunt is crazy.

“Where’s the suburban phone book?” I asked after pulling out all the books tucked under the telephone table.

“What?”

“The suburban phone book. I want to call Short Hills.”

“That skinny book? What, I gotta clutter my house with that, I never use it?”

“Where is it?”

“Under the dresser where the leg came off.”

“For God’s sake,” I said.

“Call information better. You’ll go yanking around there, you’ll mess up my drawers. Don’t bother me, you see your uncle’ll be home soon. I haven’t even fed
you
yet.”

“Aunt Gladys, suppose tonight we all eat together. It’s hot, it’ll be easier for you.”

“Sure, I should serve four different meals at once. You eat pot roast, Susan with the cottage cheese, Max has steak. Friday night is his steak night, I wouldn’t deny him. And I’m having a little cold chicken. I should jump up and down twenty different times? What am I, a workhorse?”

“Why don’t we all have steak, or cold chicken—”

“Twenty years I’m running a house. Go call your girl friend.”

But when I called, Brenda Patimkin wasn’t home. She’s having dinner at the club, a woman’s voice told me. Will she be home after (my voice was two octaves higher than a choirboy’s)? I don’t know, the voice said, she may go driving golf balls. Who is this? I mumbled some words—nobody she wouldn’t know I’ll call back no message thank you sorry to bother … I hung up somewhere along in there. Then my aunt called me and I steeled myself for dinner.

She pushed the black whirring fan up to
High
and that way it managed to stir the cord that hung from the kitchen light.

“What kind of soda you want? I got ginger ale, plain seltzer, black raspberry, and a bottle cream soda I could open up.”

“None, thank you.”

“You want water?”

“I don’t drink with my meals. Aunt Gladys, I’ve told you that every day for a year already—”

“Max could drink a whole case with his chopped liver only. He works hard all day. If you worked hard you’d drink more.”

At the stove she heaped up a plate with pot roast, gravy, boiled potatoes, and peas and carrots. She put it in front of me and I could feel the heat of the food in my face. Then she cut two pieces of rye bread and put that next to me, on the table.

I forked a potato in half and ate it, while Aunt Gladys, who had seated herself across from me, watched. “You don’t want bread,” she said, “I wouldn’t cut it it should go stale.”

“I
want
bread,” I said.

“You don’t like with seeds, do you?”

I tore a piece of bread in half and ate it.

“How’s the meat?” she said.

“Okay. Good.”

“You’ll fill yourself with potatoes and bread, the meat you’ll leave over I’ll have to throw it out.”

Suddenly she leaped up from the chair. “Salt!” When she returned to the table she plunked a salt shaker down in front of me—pepper wasn’t served in her home: she’d heard on Galen Drake that it was not absorbed by the body, and it was disturbing to Aunt Gladys to think that anything she served might pass through a gullet, stomach, and bowel just for the pleasure of the trip.

“You’re going to pick the peas out is all? You tell me that, I wouldn’t buy with the carrots.”