— Book review by Jens Kruse —
Philip Roth published Nemesis in the fall of 2010. In 2012 he announced that he would stop writing novels. In 2018 he died. So this is Roth’s last novel, and we are fortunate to have it, especially in our current
situation, because it tells the story of a polio epidemic in Newark, and especially in the Jewish Weequahic neighborhood in which the
protagonist Bucky Cantor grew up (as did Philip Roth).
The novel has three sections: “Equatorial Newark, “ “Indian Hill,” and “Reunion.” In the first section the narrator tells us the story of how, beginning in early June of 1944, first a few cases of poliomyelitis occur in the poorer Italian section of the city, but none in Weequahic; of how the superintendent of the Board of Health assures Newark’s citizens that “the city of 429,000 was by no means suffering from what could be characterized as an epidemic of poliomyelitis” (2); of how, nonetheless, cases begin to multiply and spread, including to Weequahic, which soon enough becomes the most affected section of the city; of how those with the means decamp to the Jersey Shore or to the Poconos.
These developments are experienced by our protagonist, the 23 year
old Bucky Cantor: gym teacher, swimmer and diver, weightlifter, athlete,
and at the beginning of this summer the playground director adored and
respected by a group of boys. Bucky feels guilty that very bad eyes kept
him out of the war while many of his contemporaries are at this very
moment fighting in France. To compensate he tries to entertain, keep
fear-free and safe his group of boys.
But, inevitably, several of them get polio, some die. Mr. Cantor attends
funerals, makes condolence calls, gets yelled at by distraught mothers
because he did not close the playground, a decision that was not his to
make and that the mayor, tragically, postponed until it was too late.
Rumors circulate, ethnic tensions rise: Italians are accused of bringing
polio to Jewish Weequahic; Jews are accused of being the carriers of the
disease. And above all fear spreads, the “germ of fear.” Dr. Steinberg, the
father of Marcia, Bucky’s soon to be fiancée, says to Bucky:
I am against the frightening of Jewish kids. I am against the frightening of Jews, period. That was Europe, that’s why Jews fled. This is America. The less fear the better. Fear unmans us. Fear degrades us. Fostering less fear – that’s your job and mine. (106)
It is shortly after this moment that we find out who our narrator is. We
read: “Three more boys had come down with polio – Leo Feinswog, Paul
Lippman, and me, Arnie Mesnikoff (108).” Soon after this Bucky Cantor
makes a decision he will regret for the rest of his life: he gives in to
Marcia, who is at this time a camp counselor at Indian Hills camp in the Poconos. She has been pleading with him to quit his job as playground
director and take a job as water front director in the safe environment
of the Poconos.
This phase of Bucky Cantor’s story is narrated in the second section of
the novel, “Indian Hill.” I will refrain from being too detailed about the
events that unfold at this camp, because I want you to be able to
experience first hand the powerful ways in which Roth develops the
story. Suffice it to say that Bucky experiences life at the camp as a sort of
paradise where children do not live in fear and where he can be with his
fiancée. But he vacillates between his enjoyment of this new existence
and his guilt feelings for having left his playground boys and his
grandmother, who raised him, behind. And he is of course aware that
things have gotten even worse in Newark, and especially in Weequahic,
that polio is raging and that anti-Semitism is now rampant. And then
comes the moment where “everything in camp had suddenly changed –
that everything in life had changed – (232).”
The third section of the novel describes the time when, much later, in
1971, Arnie Mesnikoff, one of the playground boys and our narrator,
and Mr. Cantor – both crippled survivors of polio now — meet by chance
and begin to see each other once a week for lunch. There they take stock
of the similar and yet very different ways in which the disease has
changed their lives, how their reactions to their ordeal have been
different and have left them in very different places.
Philip Roth’s Nemesis is in the collection at the Orcas Library and could be checked out there when the library goes to curbside pickup. It is obtainable through Darvill’s Bookstore.
