Philip Roth: “What I’m saying, Doctor, is that I don’t seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds – as though through fucking I will discover America.”
In other words, shiksas are for practice.
* “The radio was playing ‘Easter Parade’ and I thought, But this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’ The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ — the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity — and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow. He turns their religion into schlock. But nicely! So nicely the goyim don’t even know what hit them.”
— Philip Roth, Operation Shylock
* From Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books by Claudia Roth Pierpoint (no relation):
* Roth may have had an all-American childhood, but he had come to suspect that he had never known any real Americans in Newark. The stories he wrote at Bucknell were about real Americans, and so he saw no place in them for Jews at all.
* …Roth now suspects it was the aspect of the [Portnoy] book that Jews found most upsetting, in its revelation of “Jewish rage, and in particular Jewish rage against the Gentiles.”
* But his biggest problem in writing about England was that “I don’t hate anything here.”
