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Strange Presences on the Family Tree: The Unacknowledged Literary Father in Philip Roth’s The Prague Orgy

1991; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1991.0030

1913-4835

Norman Ravvin,

Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies

STRANGE PRESENCES ON THE FAMILY TREE: THE UNACKNOWLEDGED LITERARY FATHER IN PHILIP ROTH’S THE PRAGUE ORGY N O R M A N RAV V IN University of Toronto Jr'hiiip Roth’s fascination with Franz Kafka is well-known, and throughout Roth’s career the diffident son of an overbearing Prague businessman has served as his paradigm for the contradictions of filial love and resentment. This makes it all the more noteworthy that in The Prague Orgy, the novella Roth appended as an epilogue to his Zuckerman Trilogy, he makes use of the life and work of a lesser known Jewish Polish writer in his depiction of Nathan Zuckerman’s struggles with cultural inheritance and literary influ­ ence in Prague. In a subtly worked scenario that turns the reader into a kind of literary sleuth, Roth adds Bruno Schulz to his carnival of literary and not-so-literary father figures. Schulz is never mentioned by name — the biographical details of his life and work are manipulated and purposely disguised, turned into what Roth has called “useful fiction” (Reading 106) — but through plot turns and oblique references Schulz becomes a ghostly presence in the narrative of The Prague Orgy.1 After his death at the hand of a Gestapo officer in 1942, Bruno Schulz’s reputation as a writer of eccentric, magical fictions was buried, like much of the fragile culture of Middle and Eastern Europe, beneath the rubble of a ghetto. Schulz’s final manuscript, The Messiah, as well as much of his correspondence, was lost, and his two published collections of fiction, en­ titled Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, remained virtually unknown in the West until Philip Roth included them in his “Writers from the Other Europe” series. Published by Penguin alongside Milan Kundera, Danilo Kis, and Tadeusz Borowski, Schulz gained an inter­ national readership. Cynthia Ozick contributed to North American readers’ familiarity with Bruno Schulz by placing him at the centre of her novel, The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), which Ozick dedicated to Roth, perhaps in gratitude for his efforts at gaining Schulz a readership in America. And Isaac Bashevis Singer spoke warmly of his lantsman, albeit apologetically, telling Roth that he favoured Schulz’s writing above Kafka’s (Roth, “Roth and Singer” 5). As an editor for Penguin, Roth was responsible for the recovery of a valu­ able literary patrimony, but in his fictional mining of Schulz’s life and work, English Stu d ie s in Ca n a d a , x v ii, 2, June 19 9 1 Roth betrays a rather complicated and ambiguous attitude toward this re­ surrected literary hero. The Prague Orgy is introduced as an extract “from Zuckerman’s notebooks,” beginning with an entry dated January 11, 1976 (423). Roth began working with Penguin in 1974 on the “Writers from the Other Europe” series, and Schulz’s Cinnamon Shops appeared under the title The Street of Crocodiles in 19772 (Rodgers 22, 374). During the period he was working with Penguin on Cinnamon Shops, the details of Schulz’s life and work made such a strong impact on Roth that they reappeared as the­ matic concerns in his fiction. Interestingly enough, Schulz does not appear in Roth’s novella as the recipient of a literary heir’s unquestioning worship. He is portrayed in The Prague Orgy as another of Roth’s elusive fathers, as a link with a lost heritage, but also sis a questionable figure of authority, one who is at once inspiring and loved but forever out of reach. Nathan Zuckerman’s search for an appropriate literary father figure be­ gins in The Ghost Writer, the first volume of the Zuckerman Trilogy. The “amiable” relationship Nathan enjoys with his own father has been upset by his first published work, and Nathan’s arrival on the doorstep of “the most famous literary ascetic in America” is guided by the desire to be accepted as E.I. Lonoff’s “spiritual son” (7). In The Prague Orgy, an admirer brings a plan for the recovery of a literary patrimony to the door of Nathan Zucker­ man’s Manhattan apartment. Now a mature and successful writer himself, it...