Volume 21, Number 15 · October 3, 1974
Imagining Jews
By Philip Roth
Alas, it wasn't exactly what I'd had in mind. Particularly as I was one of those students of the Fifties who came to books by way of a fairly good but rather priestly literary education, in which writing poems and novels was assumed to eclipse all else in what we called 'moral seriousness.' As it happened our use of that word 'moral'—in private conversations about our daily affairs as easily as in papers and classroom discussions—tended often to camouflage and dignify vast reaches of naïveté, and served frequently only to restore at a more prestigious cultural level the same respectability that one had imagined oneself in flight from in (of all places) the English department.
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