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One of the dominant voices of American-Jewish literature during the past two decades, Philip Roth has had an ambivalent, even troubled, response to the Jewishness of his congenial material. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, and shares that birthplace with such luminaries of contemporary letters as Allen Ginsberg, Leslie Fiedler, and Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). At best, only traces of Newark still cling to the others: Allen Ginsberg bangs his prayer wheel, squeezes his harmonium, and gives every impression of being a bodhisattva; LeRoi Jones has metamorphosed into a true son of Africa; and Leslie Fiedler headed west, literally to Montana and figuratively to that place in his imagination where black men and American Indians are really "Jewish" under the skin. Only Philip Roth has remained faithful, in his fashion, to what it meant to grow up Jewish in lower-middle-class Newark, the son of Beth Finkel and Herman Roth, a salesman for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.
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