Goodbye, Columbus Reading Order

Goodbye, Columbus (1959) by Philip Roth is the novella and stories that won Roth the National Book Award at twenty-six — a debut so assured and so controversial within the American Jewish community that it set the terms of his career for the next fifty years. The title novella follows Neil Klugman, a Newark public library employee, and Brenda Patimkin, a Radcliffe student from a newly wealthy Short Hills Jewish family, through a summer love affair that functions as a comic meditation on the contradictions of postwar American Jewish success. The Patimkins have escaped Newark for the suburbs; their house has an overflowing refrigerator, a basement full of athletic trophies, and a tennis court — and they are, in every way Roth can find, more interested in abundance than in Jewish identity. The Jewish community's outrage at the novella centered on its satirical portrait of middle-class American Jews — Roth was accused of self-hatred, of giving anti-Semites material. This accusation would follow him through Portnoy's Complaint (1969) and beyond, and his response (that the demand that a Jewish writer not satirize Jewish life is the same demand that Jewish life not be represented as fully human) was articulated again and again throughout his career. The five stories that accompany the novella are equally sharp: 'The Conversion of the Jews' and 'Defender of the Faith' announce the concerns — the pressure of Jewish community expectation on the individual, the comedy of religious piety encountered with secular eyes — that would organize Roth's entire output.