I've recently been reading reviews that place Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus in the top ranks of fiction in the 20th
Century. It gets this high rating for dealing honestly with Jewish and
Black issues of the time (1959). I think that is Lefty bullshit. The
book is a series of short stories with Jewish characters who are
pathetic schlemiels. A "schlemiel" is Woody Allen, a gutless, cowardly
overgrown four year old. The blacks in the book in no way resemble the
blacks I knew well at the time.
The lead story is about Marxist social class differences, written just at the end of class differences in America, although class lingered much longer in New England. The story takes place in New Jersey, the title refers to the college in Columbus attended by the brother of the central female figure.
I
have a connection to the lead story. I was at the U. of Chicago in 1957
living in apartment off campus with two roommates (roughly 53rd and Kimbark).
My girl friend was a Roman Catholic from a very strict family. We were
having sex regularly as we had been for more than a year. She was 18
and living at home. Her mother found a diaphragm in my girl friend's
dresser drawer and when she got home she was kicked out of the house.
I had to go pick her up and, without going in the house, help her move
out. The fact that she was having unmarried sex was bad enough, but
having it with a Jew was grounds for expulsion from the family.
The mother and the diaphragm became a part of the story Goodbye Columbus. It got there because the roommate who replaced me was Philip Roth, a graduate student at the U. of Chicago who wrote his short story about that subject in 1958.