Goodbye, Columbus

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Goodbye, Columbus is a short novel by the Jewish-American writer Philip Roth , which was first published in 1958 in The Paris Review, along with five other short stories, in the collection Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories published by Houghton Mifflin Verlag in Boston in 1959.

The German first edition was published in 1962 in a translation by Herta Haas under the title Goodbye, Columbus. A short novel and five stories in the Rowohlt publishing house , Reinbek.

Table of contents

In Goodbye, Columbus , first-person narrator and protagonist Neil Klugman tells of the love of a summer. Like Roth himself from a middle-class Jewish family in Newark , he falls in love with Brenda, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from the mansion suburb of Short Hills. He visits Brenda's parents' house and is invited by them to spend his vacation there. The initial flirtation between Neil and Brenda turns into real love on both sides.

At the end of the summer vacation, Brenda's brother Ron is married; Brenda and Neil are already considered the next couple. However, Neil cannot bring himself to ask Brenda if she would like to become his wife. Instead, he urges her to buy a pessary .

After the end of the vacation, Neil returns to work at the Newark City Library, Brenda to her college in Boston . While Brenda's visit to Boston on Rosh Hashanah , Jewish New Year's Day, Neil learns that Mrs. Patimkin, Brenda's mother, has discovered her daughter's pessary and is shocked about it. Brenda believes she has to choose between Neil and her family and decides to end her relationship with Neil.

When Neil sees his reflection in a window after the breakup, he asks himself: “What had transformed my instinct for conquest into love and then turned this feeling into another? What had profit converted into loss and loss - who knows - into profit? ”However, he cannot give himself an answer to this question; however, he is certain that he loved Brenda but can no longer love her.

Interpretative approach

In Goodbye, Columbus deals with American Judaism and the question of the relationship to Jewish tradition as well as processing his own autobiographical feelings and "saying goodbye to the utopia of the" American Dream "".

The first-person narrator and protagonist Neil Klugman sees his retreat into an authentic, perhaps perspective-free life, which ultimately means his separation from the self-confident, well-to-do student Brenda Patimkin, as an expression of his strong striving for freedom. In addition to the personification of the idea of individualism firmly rooted in the American worldview , which is expressed in the tradition of the independent, completely self-reliant hero, for example in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau , Neil's increasingly satirical view reflects on this Philistinism in the nouveau riche world of the Patimkins is also Roth's uncompromising criticism of American consumer society.

For Brenda's father, a determined, uneducated Jewish businessman who made his fortune making sinks during the war, the dream of exodus from Newark to the upscale suburban world of country clubs has come true; As a sign of successful Americanization , he finances his children's surgical straightening of their noses. Saul Bellow , who met Roth in 1957 during a writing seminar at the University of Chicago , sees Roth's real theme here: the "comfortable, paradoxical life of Jews in prosperous post-war America".

As a descendant of Jewish immigrants whose Newark family is still arrested in the Old World , Neil embodies "an expectant soldier of fortune who seeks a respected place in American society for himself," similar to the position the Patimkins already have take in. With Neil's departure into the new world and his eventual reversal, Roth tries at the same time to unmask or demythologize the supposed paradise of Short Hills and the superficial materialism of the Patimkins as a hapless self-alienation .

In Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint , Roth repeatedly raises the problem of correct or incorrect action at a central point. The question is whether what is to be regarded as good or right is what is conveyed by the parental home in terms of religion or customs, or what the individual understands as his own identity in the process of self-discovery. In Goodbye, Columbus, for example, the question of the legitimacy of premarital intercourse is only superficial; it is really about the question of the validity of traditional norms and values. As in other works by Roth, there is no unequivocal answer; Brenda and Neil have different views. While Brenda initially submits to parental law, Neil, similar to Alexander Portnoy, is unwilling to do so.

Winning Brenda as his wife would mean for Neil to share in the material wealth of the Patimkins. For example, Mr. Patimkin suggests several times that there is still a job for his son-in-law in his company. However, Neil would not be able to live in the world of the Patimkins as he came to know in the family of his parents and Rons.

Their lives are shaped solely by the acquisition and enjoyment of prosperity and wealth, as is clearly expressed in the description of the family's eating habits: “Not much was spoken at table; one ate with devotion, seriousness, and methodology, and I think it would be better to repeat everything the Patimkins said without taking into account the fact that sentences were lost as the food was passed around, that words were half swallowed while chewing, the syntax as they were filled up , Spilling and snare was mutilated or completely forgotten. "

In such an atmosphere, an intelligent conversation - unless it is about business - does not take place.

The love of the parents is also largely exhausted in material gifts; For example, right at the beginning of a letter from Mr. Patimkin to his daughter, it says: “I love you, honey, if you want a coat, I'll buy you a coat. You could always have everything you wanted. [sic] "

Brenda's mother expresses herself in a similar way in a letter to her daughter: “You have estranged yourself from your family, although we sent you to the best schools and otherwise gave you the best that money can buy. [sic] "

Neil loathes the Patimkins' way of life, but succumbs to the temptation of their wealth thinking.

While waiting for Brenda in New York, he prays in the cool atmosphere of St. Patrick : “God, I said, I'm twenty-three years old. I want to do everything as well as possible. Right now the doctor is marrying Brenda to me [d. that is, the doctor is adjusting the pessary for her right now] , and I am not entirely sure that it is for her or my good. What do I actually love, sir? [...] If we meet you at all, God, it is because we are carnal and possessive and therefore part of yourself. [...] I am possessive. Where does my greed take me now? [...] At what price do I know you? It was a witty meditation and suddenly I was ashamed ”.

Neil, however, knows the answer he can expect to such a prayer: “What do you think, at what price, Schmock ? Golden dinnerware, sporting goods trees, nectarines, rubbish chutes, bumpless noses, Patimkin sinks, Bonwit plates ... [...] And God just laughed, the clown . "

The god that Neil worships here is, as Link explains in his interpretation, "a god of carnal lust and that of the golden calf "; not God, but Neil himself makes himself a clown.

Even if Neil misses intangible , spiritual values ​​in the world of the Patimkins, he has hardly found his own. Although he tries to withstand what is traditional, he does not know where his path will lead him. This becomes clear, for example, when Neil first heard the farewell greeting of the students at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio on a Ron record. Ron plays the record to Neil again the day before his wedding; for Ron this symbolizes the farewell to his youth; his path is mapped out: marriage and business.

While Neil is listening to the record, he dreams that he is standing on a ship on the coast of a Pacific island with a little negro boy . While the native girls sing "Goodbye, Columbus" the ship drifts off the island. Neil had met the Negro boy in the library in Newark, where he was admiring Gauguin's South Seas paintings . For Neil, it's about saying goodbye to a dream world. As Link writes in his interpretation, Neil does not lead his journey as Columbus into Brenda's arms. This is too much part of a world that is internally alien to him.

However, his self-discovery is still ahead of him; However, he does not succeed in this simply by rejecting given values, but solely by dealing with them. Neil is still too attached to the youthful imagination embodied by the South Seas world to be able to cope with such an argument. However, dealing with the experiences gained in Brenda's family becomes part of his pending self-discovery.

The values ​​with which Neil must grapple encounter him in the form of Jewish tradition and tradition ; Goodbye, Columbus becomes a " Jewish story " in this way . The acceptance or rejection of these traditional Jewish norms and values ​​is part of the process of assimilation of Neil or of finding his new identity .

The turning away from the Orthodox Jewish religion, which is also discussed in Goodbye, Columbus , is already extended by Roth to American society as a whole with the title. The question raised by Roth of the morally responsible behavior or wrong behavior of the individual in Goodbye, Columbus concerns the American reality as a whole, in which the values ​​associated with Columbus' discovery have lost their meaning. The partly satirical - comical perspective of Roth in Goodbye, Columbus also reflects his hopeful conviction that individual, ethnic , religious or national misconduct can be corrected.

reception

In the literary critical reception, Goodbye, Columbus was initially dismissed as too realistic or too profane and criticized the distant and ironic tone of the first-person narrator, which ultimately left the reader uninvolved.

In 1960, Goodbye, Columbus won the National Book Award and made Roth known as a young, aspiring writer in wider circles.

In subsequent literary analyzes, at the latest since the beginning of the 1970s, it has increasingly been pointed out that with Goodbye, Columbus , Roth began to develop his own style, which was unprecedented in American literature and in no way inferior to the prose Bellows or Salinger .

In addition to Saul Bellow himself, respected literary scholars and critics such as Irving Howe or Alfred Kazin acknowledged Roth's precise description of the living conditions of the Jewish-American upper class in Newark and the surrounding area; and Leslie Fiedler , herself grew up in Newark, stressed Roth brought back to him with his work the memory of his own childhood. These critics, all Jews themselves, saw Roth not only as an individually outstanding literary talent, but also regarded him and his work as an important voice in the Jewish-American literature of modern times.

The renowned German literary scholar Hubert Zapf saw Goodbye, Columbus in his standard work on American literary history as Roth's “grandiose first work”, which found its subsequent climax in Portnoy's Complaint . In Goodbye, Columbus, Roth exposed Jewish religious practices to ridicule, which had earned him “the vehement criticism of the Jewish community”, but also “the praise of literary studies”.

Goodbye, Columbus provided the basis for a film adaptation of Larry Peerce under the title of the same name in 1969 with Richard Benjamin as Neil Klugman and Ali MacGraw as Brenda Patimkin in the lead roles; the German version appeared in the same year under the title Zum Teufel mit der Innschuld .

Latest issue

  • Goodbye, Columbus . A short novel and five stories. German by Herta Haas. Hanser, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-446-23065-1 .

Secondary literature

  • Heiner Bus: Philip Roth · Jewish tradition as irritation and a way out of the crisis . In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history. 2nd act. Edition, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , pp. 448-451.
  • Thomas David: "Goodbye, Columbus ... goodbye" . In: Thomas David: Philip Roth . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , pp. 38–45.
  • Eric Koch: Roth's Goodbye, Columbus . In: Tamarack Review , 13, 1959, pp. 129-132.
  • Gottfried Krieger: Philip Roth . In: Martin Christadler (Ed.): American literature of the present in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 412). Kröner, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , pp. 129–154, here mainly pp. 129–132 and p. 136.
  • Franz Link: “Goodbye, Columbus”, 1959 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 136-138.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See the information from Thomas David: "Goodbye, Columbus ... goodbye" . In: Thomas David: Philip Roth . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , p. 44. For the first publication of the original text in the Paris Review, see also Roth's own statements in The New York Times 1989 (see web links). The Goodbye, Columbus collection has since been reprinted several times in various editions and publishers.
  2. ↑ The German edition was reprinted in 2004 and 2012 by Rowohlt Verlag and also published in 2010 by Hanser Verlag . See the information in the catalog of the German National Library under [1] .
  3. ↑ Philip Roth: Goodbye, Columbus. A short novel and five stories . Translated from the English by Herta Haas . Rowohlt Verlag , Reinbek near Hamburg, ISBN 978-3-499-25804-6 , p. 168.
  4. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , p. 42f.
  5. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , p. 42f.
  6. ↑ Quoted from Thomas David: Philip Roth . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , p. 42f.
  7. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , p. 43.
  8. ↑ See in detail Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 136ff.
  9. ↑ Philip Roth: Goodbye, Columbus. A short novel and five stories . Translated from the English by Herta Haas . Rowohlt Verlag , Reinbek near Hamburg, ISBN 978-3-499-25804-6 , p. 34.
  10. ↑ Franz Link: “Goodbye, Columbus”, 1959 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 137.
  11. ↑ Philip Roth: Goodbye, Columbus. A short novel and five stories . Translated from the English by Herta Haas . Rowohlt Verlag , Reinbek bei Hamburg, ISBN 978-3-499-25804-6 , p. 158 and p. 160. Cf. also Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 137. Similar is the interpretation by Gottfried Krieger: Philip Roth . In: Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , p. 131f. and Thomas David: "Goodbye, Columbus ... goodbye" . In: Thomas David: Philip Roth . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , p. 43f.
  12. ↑ Philip Roth: Goodbye, Columbus. A short novel and five stories . Translated from the English by Herta Haas . Rowohlt Verlag , Reinbek bei Hamburg, ISBN 978-3-499-25804-6 , p. 126. For the interpretation of this passage, cf. Franz Link: American narrators since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 137f.
  13. ^ Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 137f.
  14. ↑ See Philip Roth: Goodbye, Columbus. A short novel and five stories . Translated from the English by Herta Haas . Rowohlt Verlag , Reinbek bei Hamburg, ISBN 978-3-499-25804-6 , pp. 94f., 130-132, 150. See also the interpretation by Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 137f. See also Gottfried Krieger: Philip Roth . In: Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , p. 132.
  15. ↑ Cf. Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 138. See also Hubert Zapf: Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte . Metzler Verlag, 2nd act. Edition, Stuttgart a. Weimar, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , p. 322f.
  16. ↑ On this interpretation, see the remarks by Hubert Zapf: American Literature History . Metzler Verlag, 2nd act. Edition, Stuttgart a. Weimar, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , p. 322f.
  17. ^ National Book Awards - 1960 . National Book Foundation online listing. Retrieved February 19, 2014. (Website also contains a link to Roth's speech at the award ceremony.)
  18. ↑ See more detailed Thomas David: Philip Roth . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , p. 44.
  19. ↑ See the information from William H. Pritchard: Roth, Philip in the Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Literature , published online in July 2017. Accessed March 7, 2018.
  20. ^ Hubert Zapf: American literary history . Metzler Verlag, 2nd act. Edition, Stuttgart a. Weimar, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , p. 322.
  21. ↑ To the devil with innocence (1969) . On: IMDb . Retrieved February 7, 2014.