Philip Roth’s Disappearing Yiddish-Speaking Grandmother

Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick are both members of a generation of Jewish writers who displayed remarkable literary ability and did much to shape the American cultural scene. Thus one can’t but be fascinated by Ozick’s assessment of Roth, which appears just a few weeks before the sixth anniversary of his death. Although both Ozick and Roth filled their novels with unmistakably Jewish characters, Ozick openly advocated an embrace of Jewish particularism—what she described as blowing through the “narrow end of the shofar”—while Roth always chafed at being labeled a Jewish writer.