May 24, 2018 By: rolen
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In 1962, while appearing on a panel at Yeshiva University, Mr. Roth was so denounced, for that story [“Defender of the Faith”] especially, that he resolved never to write about Jews again. He quickly changed his mind. “My humiliation before the Yeshiva belligerents — indeed, the angry Jewish resistance that I aroused virtually from the start — was the luckiest break I could have had,” he later wrote. “I was branded.”Indeed, the canonical edition of Roth’s works, The Library of America, divides his early writings into: “Novels & Stories 1959-1962” (volume 1), and “Novels 1967-1972” (volume 2), perhaps indicative of the influence of the discussions at Yeshiva in 1962 in Roth’s literary career.
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