My husband, the communist

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Cover of the American first edition

My husband, the communist (English: I Married a Communist ) is a novel by the American writer Philip Roth , which was published in 1998 by Houghton Mifflin . This is the second part of "American Trilogy", the Philip Roth in 1997 with American Pastoral ( American Pastoral opened) and in 2000 with The Human Stain ( The Human Stain ended). The German translation by Werner Schmitz was also published by Carl Hanser Verlag in 1998.

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The novel tells the story of a great betrayal: Ira Ringold, worker, upright communist and then media star is almost dared by his wife Eve through the book in the book My Man, the Communist , in the paranoia of the McCarthy era of the 1950s no one solidarity or support.

The rise and fall of the angry Ira Ringold (Latin: ira means anger) is told by his older brother, the teacher Murray Ringold, to his former student Nathan Zuckerman , who, as Philip Roth's alter ego, in turn tells the story to the readership.

Ira Ringold made it from the Jewish outsider child and violent perpetrator in the Italian-dominated Newark through unskilled labor and the military in World War II to a miner and finally to a radio star. During his military service he becomes a staunch communist, he becomes a spokesman against injustice and exploitation, his radio show is called The Free and the Brave , the free and the brave. He marries Eve Frame, a Hollywood diva who has a daughter, the talented harpist Sylphid, into the marriage. The girl begins a hateful, destructive work and the couple move faster and faster into a self-destructive catastrophe: In the course of the marital conflict, Eve hands over material to Republican politician Bryden Grant and his wife, journalist Katrina van Tassel Grant. The journalist uses it to write the revelatory book My Man, the Communist , in which Ira is accused of communist infiltration of America by means of unfounded allegations and the protagonist of the witch hunt is handed over to Joseph McCarthy . Political and personal friends drop Ira Ringold. Eve believes that she and her daughter can gain social benefits through contact with the grants. But Ira's revenge follows immediately: he reveals her Jewish ancestry, whereupon she becomes a non-person in the anti-Semitic climate of the USA in the 1950s and ends up as a lonely alcoholic. Ira no longer recovers from the catastrophe and dies a short time later without having been rehabilitated. His brother, the narrating Murray, on the other hand, is being rehabilitated: He had been dismissed from school because he had not testified on the committee for un-American activities at the time. After a few years he becomes a teacher again and years later he can tell the story to Nathan Zuckerman.

background

Claire Bloom (2011)

Although Roth won the National Book Award (for Sabbath's Theater ) in 1995 and the Pulitzer Prize (for American Pastoral ) in 1998, his name was primarily present in the American public through another book during those years: the 1996 memoir Leaving a Doll's House of his ex-wife Claire Bloom , in which she bitterly settled down with Roth and their marriage, which had been divorced two years earlier. Roth saw his reputation as badly damaged by the book and the accompanying reviews in the American feature pages as it was more than a quarter of a century earlier by the Portnoy's Complaint scandal . As in the past, he withdrew from the big city of New York in order to gain distance in the loneliness of Connecticut . There, however, the writer prevailed in him, who, as so often, made his own biography the starting point for a fictional story.

As a historical analogy for his ex-wife's "betrayal", he fell back on the McCarthy era , when unsubstantiated allegations could ruin a person's life and, according to Roth, more acts of personal treason than any other period in American history. McCarthy's witch hunt for communist machinations had marked the first deep turning point in his adult life by then in college, the end of the golden age of heroism and the beginning of a dark period of irrationality, demagogy, and lies. So the second theme of the novel - besides public and private betrayal - is the growing up of the narrator Nathan Zuckerman. Roth's long-standing alter ego betrayed his father when he chose various male characters to replace his father: first his teacher Murray Ringold, who was a role model in Roth's first English teacher, then his brother Ira, who was modeled after his cousin's husband, an ex-GI and youth hero of Roth, and finally the college professor Leo Glucksman, who freed literature from the shackles of political agitation and awakened in the young writer the literary ambitions that the background of the Zuckerman trilogy ( The Ghost Writer , Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson ). A third theme of the novel is finally the silence of the aging, in several ways impotent Zuckerman, who no longer writes his own story, but only takes up the stories of third parties.

The title of the novel I Married a Communist , which is also the title of Eve Frame's unveiling book, comes from the alarmist alternative title of the anti-communist propaganda film The Woman on Pier 13 by Robert Stevenson from 1949. Roth himself described the novel as one of his favorite books, what he mainly attached to the character of Ira Ringold, an unabashed, explosive hothead, and the freedom that gave him to write about such a character. In the reviews of the book, however, Roth often missed the variety of motifs and literary seriousness he intended. Rather, it was read as a novel of the keys and barely veiled literary revenge. Linda Grant compared : “Frame is a Jewish actress, as is Bloom. Frame's second husband is a banker, so is Blooms. Eve Frame has a daughter who plays the harp and Bloom's daughter is an opera singer. Ira wants to throw the daughter out, so did Roth. Ira has an affair with the daughter's best friend; Bloom claims turning on Roth to her daughter's best friend. "

reception

In connection with My Man, the Communist , literary criticism primarily discussed Philip Roth's path to becoming a political author. The reviewers were preoccupied with the McCarthy-era hysteria, American anti-Semitism, and the conjuring up of a powerful labor movement in the United States.

A controversy arose on the subject of the book in the book: While part of the criticism classified My Man, the Communist as a revenge novel, other reviews were interested in the literary technique of mirroring, the book in the book as Mise en abyme and the related Philip Roth's reflection on his own writing.

According to Mark Shechner, Mein Mann der Kommunist may not be Roth's most read book, but it is full of quotable epigrams about lies, deceit, revenge, blame, power, deception, everyday theater, language and speech.

expenditure

  • Philip Roth: I Married a Communist . Houghton Mifflin, New York 1998, ISBN 0-375-70721-2 .
  • Philip Roth: My husband, the communist . Hanser, Munich 1999, ISBN 978-3-446-19785-5 .
  • Philip Roth: My Man, the Communist (The American Trilogy, Volume 2) . Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2001, ISBN 978-3-499-22824-7 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Claudia Roth Pierpont : Roth Unbound. A Writer and His Books. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-374-28051-2 , pp. 226-242.
  2. ^ Sorin Radu Cucu: The Underside of Politics. Global Fictions in the Fog of the Cold War . Fordham University Press, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-8232-5434-7 , p. 113.
  3. ^ Claudia Roth Pierpont : Roth Unbound. A Writer and His Books. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-374-28051-2 , pp. 234-235.
  4. ^ "Frame is a Jewish actress, so is Bloom. Frame's second husband is a financier, so what Bloom's. Eve Frame has a daughter who is a harpist, Bloom's girl is an opera singer. Ira tells the daughter to move out, Roth did the same. Ira has an affair with the daughter's best friend; Roth, Bloom alleged, came on to her own daughter's best friend. ”Quoted from: Linda Grant: The wrath of Roth . In: The Guardian, October 3, 1998.
  5. ↑ Ulrich Raulff: The iron and his property. In: FAZ. Retrieved August 18, 2018 .
  6. ^ Robert Stone: Waiting for Lefty. In: NYRB New York Review of Books. November 5, 1998, accessed August 18, 2018 .
  7. ↑ Linda Grant : The Wrath of Roth. In: The Guardian. October 3, 1998, accessed August 18, 2018 .
  8. ↑ Hündür Erikson: Philip Roth - My man, the communist (1998). In: discourse.at. August 16, 2018. Retrieved August 18, 2018 .
  9. ↑ Mark Shechner: Roth's American Trilogy . In: Timothy Parrish (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2007, ISBN 978-0-521-68293-0 , p. 151.