Free The Anatomy Lesson by Philip Roth Page A

step across his guts and out the door, may be a more merciful solution all around than to sit down religiously to reason together when there is nothing to reason about.
    Appel ’ s anthology of Yiddish fiction, in his own translations, appeared when Zuckerman was at Fort Dix. It was the last thing Zucke rm an expected after the pained, dramatic diction of that essay proclaiming the depths of alienation from a Jewish past. There were also the critical essays that had, since then, made Appel ’ s reputation in the quarterlies and earned him, without benefit of an advanced degree, first a lectureship at the New School and then a teaching job up the Hudson at Bard. He wrote about Camus and Koestler and Verga and Gorky, about Melville and Whitman and Dreiser, about the soul revealed in the Eisenhower press conference and the mind of Alger Hiss—about practically everything except the language in which his father had hollered for old junk from his wagon. But this was hardly because the Jew was in hiding. The disputatious stance, the aggressively marginal sensibility, the disavowal of community ties, the taste for scrutinizing a social event as though it were a dream or a work of art—to Zuckerman this was the very mark of the intellectual Jews in their thirties and forties on whom he was modeling his own style of thought. Reading the quarterlies for the essays and fiction of Appel and his generation—Jewish sons born into immigrant fami lies a decade or more after his own father—only corroborated what he ’ d first sensed as a teenage undergraduate at Chicago: to be raised as a post-immigrant Jew in America was to be given a ticket out of the ghetto into a wholly unconstrained world of thought. Without an Old Country link and a strangling church like the Italians, or the Irish, or the Poles, without generations of American forebears to bind you to American life, or blind you by your loyalty to its deformities, you could read whatever you wanted and write however and whatever you pleased. Alienated? Just another way to say “ Set free! ” A Jew set free even from Jews—yet only by steadily maintaining self-consciousness as a Jew. That was the thrillingly paradoxical kicker.
    Though Appel ’ s initial motive for compiling his Yiddish anthology was, more than likely, the sheer excitement of discovering a language whose range he could never have guessed from the coarseness of his father ’ s speech, there seemed a deliberately provocative intention too. Far from signaling anything so comforting and inauthentic as a prodigal son ’ s return to the fold, it seemed, in fact, a stand against: to Zuckerman, if to no one else, a stand against the secret shame of the assimilationists, against the distortions of the Jewish nostalgists, against the boring, bloodless faith of the prospering new suburbs—best of all, an exhilarating stand against the snobbish condescension of those famous departments of English literature from whose impeccable Christian ranks the literary Jew, with his mongrelized speech and caterwauling inflections, had until just yesterday been pointedly excluded. To Appel ’ s restless, half-formed young admirer, there was the dynamic feet of a rebellious act in the resurrection of those Yiddish writers, a rebellion ail the more savory for undercutting the anthologist ’ s own early rebellion. The Jew set free, an animal so ravished and agitated by his inexhaustible new hunger that he rears up suddenly and bi t es his tail, relishing the intriguing taste of himself even while screaming anguished sentences about the agonies inflicted by his teeth.
    After reading Appel ’ s Yiddish anthology, Zuckerman went up to New York on his next overnight pass, and on lower Fourth Avenue, on booksellers ’ row, where he normally loaded up with used Modern Library books for a quarter apiece, searched the stores until he found secondhand copies of a Yiddish grammar and an English-Yiddish dictionary. He bought them, took them