The title story of this collection is the one which established the reputation of a young writing talent who would go on to become of America’s 20th century literary lions. That title story would be made into a movie starring Richard Benjamin in 1969 and by then Roth would be at the vanguard of American Jewish fiction. And it precisely that generic tag which dogs this collection of the novella and the five additional stories.
In fact, it is one of the Gilligan’s Island-style “and the rest” that turned out to be of even greater impact on Roth’s reputation than the star of the show. Like the title tale and the other four short stories surrounding it, “Defender of the Faith” is part of a thematic chain linking all the various assorted stories together into a collective. Many scholars have identified post-war Jewish assimilation into the larger social fabric of American society as the overarching them which justifies these six stories being collected together. “Defender of the Faith” is a story about a Jewish sergeant in the American military who must resist attempts by a fellow Jewish soldier to curry special treatment on account of their religious brotherhood.
To an outsider, the story hardly seems worthy of outrage, but of all the individual texts in the collection it is the one which has had the deepest impact on Roth’s reputation. It was “Defender of the Faith” in particular which was singled out for outrage by attendees at an infamous writing convention panel in 1962. Roth would later write about that experience in detail in a 1988 memoir. While conventions panels where novelists are assembled on the stage rarely have the ability to even make news, much less become an item of irritation worthy of extensive recollection in a memoir a quarter century later, this panel clearly stands out. Why?
The topic of the panel was minority representation in American fiction. Sharing the stage with Roth was one of the certified kings of minority representation in American fiction, Ralph Ellison. Knowing all these facts, one might well suspect it was the African-American author Ellison appearing on stage just as the Civil Rights Movement was really beginning to catch fire across the country who would be the one facing an onslaught of not mere criticism, but outright denunciation. Instead, Ellison could only sit by and watch and several in the attendance turned against Roth’s portrayal of American Jews as anti-Semitic and culminating in the attachment of a term which would haunt the author for much of the rest of his career: that he was an example of the “self-hating Jew.”
There can be no question that Roth’s analysis of Jewish assimilation into American society is severely critical at times. Mr. Patimkin in Goodbye, Columbus, for example, goes so far as to attach the pejorative Jewish term “goyim” (non-Jewish) to his own children because they do not speak any Yiddish. “Eli the Fanatic” introduces Orthodox Jews as a potentially sinister threat to the peaceful assimilation already enjoyed by the non-Orthodox Jewish minority within a small community. Assimilation is forwarded by many characters in the novel as being a particularly bad thing for Jewish-Americans with the striking potential of having the long-term possibility of being destructive to the religion itself, much less the personal identity that goes with religious practice. The reality, as is almost always the case, is that the portrait presented by Roth throughout the six tales he told is much more complicated than that that for which he was attacked.
In 1962, however, Roth had only published one other book and his reputation rested primarily on a string of short stories. He was for most of American an almost unknown commodity was still another three decades away from hitting a peak to worthy of envy by any living writer at the time: a second National Book awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and three PEN/Faulkner Awards within a thirteen year stretch. The attacks against his first book not just by those attending that writers’ conference, but many within the American Jewish community had a lasting impact on Roth’s career that he spent decades trying to shake off. Eventually, the stains faded and Roth emerged in the mid-1980’s as one of the unquestioned titans of his generation.
