American Jewry in Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus

The integration of Jews within the American society started centuries back, but with the ending of World War II and the explosion of postwar prosperity the temptation of migrating to America grew bigger among Jews. The struggle of new-American Jews as immigrants is even more stressed by their Jewishness. Generation after generation, American Jews are challenged to adapt to the changes of modern society and its consequences on their identity as Jews. This is the context picked up by Philip Roth in his first work, the collection of short stories entitled Goodbye, Columbus (1959). This study wants to analyze Roth’s piece of work by firstly giving the elements useful to understand the Jewish and American condition during this time, secondly focusing on the implicit themes behind its plot and the conflicts surrounding its characters. In order to do so, I will reference multiple literary essays of authors before me centered around each topic with greater attention to Alan Cooper’s Philip Roth and the Jews (1996) and David Castronovo’s Beyond the Grey Flannel Suit (2005) which I have used as a guide. The first chapter of this thesis begins with an introduction to the concept of American dream from the point of view of immigrants Jews and it continues by summarizing the key events in American Jewish history through to the 1950s. I will then address the social transformation experienced by the Jewish community in the postwar years and their rise to American white middle-class. The chapter ends by describing the effect of conformism and the quest for consensus on the newly arrived Jews in Gentile America. The second chapter of this thesis studies Goodbye, Columbus’s short stories by theme. I start by returning to the topic of Jewish assimilation through commodity culture by taking Roth’s characters as examples. Secondly, I will review the subject of Jewish identity through the novellas and the conflicts within the nuclear family as depicted by the author. The chapter continues by discussing the roles of religion and the sense of solidarity within the community. To conclude my discussion, I will finally concentrate on the pursuit of authenticity and the feeling of disillusionment common to this collection’s protagonists.