Uchicago — English Department

JHS
Thu, 24 May 2018 15:24:58 +0000

You’re right on both counts, @marlowe1 . Sinaiko really belongs in the category of legendary teacher (but he was a legendary teacher). I wasn’t familiar with Murrin, but his work looks interesting, and he seems to have been very successful in making the fashionable pivot from literary theory early in his career to literary history in his (and its) prime.

Separately, Roth has been a really important figure for me, and not for purely literary reasons. He and my father grew up in the same community – for a while even on the same block – at the same time. They went to the same schools. He was a few years younger than my father, and my father never knew him, but Roth’s father was my grandfather’s insurance broker and friend. My father did remember him. Roth’s mother, at least as portrayed in his fiction, was nearly interchangeable with my grandmother.

The rabbis, community figures, and temptresses that appeared in Roth’s stories about his youth were also the dramatis personae of my father’s psyche. When Portnoy’s Complaint came out, and most of the world was tut-tutting and gnashing its teeth, my Dad brought a copy home and started reading it to us at the dinner table. (Not those parts, though.) I remember his gleefully performing his high-school football cheer, which I’m sure many people thought was a product of Roth’s imagination:

Ikey, Mikey, Jake, and Sam
We’re the boys who eat no ham
We play football, we play soccer
We keep matzahs in our locker
Ay, ay, ay, Weequaic High