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By Bill Altreuter

Recommended: The Paris Review Podcast. Beautifully produced, with material that inspires thought. A highlight for me is Jason Alexander reading Philip Roth's "Conversion of the Jews". I haven't read the story in years and years, and thought I remembered it. There is, it turns out, a lot more there than I'd thought I remembered- it is clever, but also contains beautiful, unpretentious writing. Also, Mr. Alexander does a fine job of playing the humor against the commentary on the nature of our common humanity.

I may have mentioned here that lately I have come to think that American culture might be best understood through the lens of the African experience in the New World. (New to Europeans and Africans, I mean. The story of the native peoples of the Americas is another matter altogether.) While I hold to that it is certainly also true that the American experience also has to be described through the eyes of the people who have come here and made lives for themselves, assimilated and, maybe, not quite assimilated. The post WWII American novel was profoundly affected by the emergence of writers documenting the Jewish-American experience. Roth's work is about a lot of things, but certainly it is about the pain and alienation that accompanies assimilation. As jazz is to the African American experience, maybe, one can say that there is a streak of dark humor running from the Jewish theatrical tradition through vaudeville and film and Roth and Saul Bellow.   

Full post as published by Outside Counsel on March 19, 2020 (boomark / email).