On the bookshelf above my desk in San Francisco, I have a pair of cufflinks that once belonged to Philip Roth which were given to me by a mutual friend after he died.  They serve as a reminder not just of Philip, who decades ago, opened my eyes to Eastern European writers, but also to both the Jewish-American writers who whetted my interest in moving west. 

As a teenager in Cardiff, the only Jewish author whose works I gobbled up were of the local poet, Dannie Abse. He was a generation older than me but had been born in Cardiff before moving to London where he practiced medicine and wrote poetry. Today, I wonder whether it was Abse who sent me scurrying off to buy the records of those North American poets and troubadours’ – Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon

After moving to the United States, I plunged into the works of the authors who formed part of the backbone of twentieth century American literature – Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Vidal and, later Tom Wolfe.  But it was the American Jewish authors who had a special appeal.

Their American upbringing offered a different perspective on being a Jew.  They had grown up surrounded by Jews, an ocean removed from the mid-century agonies that settled on the European continent, destroyed the lives of millions, and cast shadows over the subsequent generations.  Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead” made me wonder how a Jew wound up fighting in the jungles of southeast Asia.   The Chicago novels of Saul Bellow (though he was born in Canada) such as “The Adventures of Augie March” and “Herzog”.  Then of course there was Bernard Malamud, who gave me an introduction to baseball, courtesy of ‘The Natural’ and Joseph Heller who, like Mailer, plumbed his experiences of World War II to come up with the chaotic absurdity of “Catch 22”.  

But it was Philip Roth who exerted the greatest tug.  Like many of my generation I had read his early works such as Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint and then some years later, through one of those happy chances life creates, I became a member of a small literature seminar he taught at the University of Pennsylvania. I quickly became a card-carrying member of his admiration society with three of my favourite works of his being Sabbath’s Theater, The Plot Against America and Patrimony, an ode to his father. 

As fate would have it, a couple of decades after those seminars in Philadelphia, my family and I took to celebrating Thanksgiving with Philip and other friends in New York – which explains why his cufflinks are now perched above the computer on which I tap out these words.