Free The Anatomy Lesson by Philip Roth

and his Finnley Wren. In the early fifties, during a two-year stint at Fort Dix, Zuckerman composed a fifteen-page “ Letter from the Army, ” describing the bristling class resentment between black cadre just back from Korea, white commanding officers recalled to active duty, and the young college-educated draftees like himself. Though rejected by Partisan, the manuscript was returned with a note which, when he read it, excited him nearly as much as if it had been a letter of acceptance: “ Study more Orwell and try us again. M.A. ”
    One of Appel ’ s own early Partisan essays, written when he was just back from World War II, had been cherished reading among Zuckerman ’ s friends at the University of Chicago circa 1950. No one, as far as they k new, had ever written so unapol ogetically about the gulf between the coarse-grained Jewish fathers whose values had developed in an embattled American immigrant milieu and their bookish, nervous American sons. Appel pushed his subject beyond moralizing into deterministic drama. It could not be otherwise on either side—a conflict of integrities. Each time Zuckerman returned to school from a bruising vacation in New Jersey, he took his copy of the essay out of its file folder ( “ Appel, Milton, 1918- “ ) and. to regain some perspective on his falling out with his family, read it through again. He wasn ’ t alone … He was a social type … His fight with his father was a tragic necessity…
    In truth, the type of intellectual Jewish boy whom Appel had portrayed, and whose struggles he illustrated with painful incidents from his own early life, had sounded to Zuckerman far worse off than himself. Maybe because these were boys more deeply and exclusively intellectual, maybe because their fathers were more benighted. Either way, Appel didn ’ t minimize the suffering. Alienated, rootless, anguished, bewildered, brooding, tortured, powerless —he could have been describing the inner life of a convict on a Mississippi chain gang instead of the predicament of a son who worshipped books that his unschooled father was too ignorant to care about or understand. Certainly Zuckerman at twenty didn ’ t feel tortured plus powerless plus anguished—he really just wanted his father to lay off. Despite all the solace that essay had given him, Zuckerman wondered if there might not be more comedy in the conflict than Appel was willing to grant.
    Then again, Appel ’ s might well have been a more dispiriting upbringing than his own. and the young Appel what he himself would later have labeled a “ case. ” According to Appel, it was a source of the deepest shame to him during his adolescence that his father, whose livelihood was earned from the seat of a horse-drawn wagon, could speak to him easily only in Yiddish. When, in his twenties, the time came for the son to break away from the impoverished immigrant household and take a room of his own for himself and his books, the father couldn ’ t begin to understand where he was going or why. They shouted, they screamed, they wept, the table was struck, the door was slammed, and only then did young Mi l ton leave home. Zuckerman, on the other hand, had a father who spoke in English and practiced chiropody in a downtown Newark office building that overlooked the plane trees in Washington Park; a father who ’ d read William Shirer ’ s Berlin Diary and Wendell Willkie ’ s One World and took pride in keeping up; civic-minded, well-informed, a member admittedly of one of the lesser medical orders, but a professional, and in that family the first. Four older brothers were shopkeepers and salesmen; Dr. Zuckerman was the first of the line even to have gone beyond an American grade school. Zuckerman ’ s problem was that his father half understood. They shouted and screamed, but in addition they sat down to reason together, and to tha t there is no end. Talk about torture. For the son to butcher the father with a carving knife, then