Word: jewes
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...Jew boy with that yamaka on your head...
...pale faced Jew boy I wish you were dead...
...Jew boy you took my religion and adopted...
...center. Roth's humor--which pervaded his early short stories only to be swamped and reduced to little islands of comic vignettes in the two novels that followed--is back on center stage where it belongs. Roth uses it to light up his portrait of the archtypal American male Jew. It's as if Roth is sending up a nine-foot menorah in the middle of Fourth of July fireworks, a dazzling display of verbal pyrotechnics and ethnic humor...
...ONLY serious problem with the book is that much of the more controlled, more pointed social satire one associates with Roth has had to be forfeited. To be sure, there is still an overwhelming section on the WASP as seen by a young Jew. ("These are the children from the coloring books come to life, the children they mean on the signs we pass in Union, New Jersey, that say CHILDREN AT PLAY and DRIVE CAREFULLY, WE LOVE OUR CHILDREN.") It is more damning than anything in Roth's last novel, a story of an unwed mother in the great...