Our Man in Vienna

Philip Roth and Jewish Mothers

Jewish mothers may have their failings,
but as far as I am concerned, the good sides
outweigh the bad sides.
One of our prominent American writers is down on them.
Book after book appears with the Jewish mother as a monster.
For God’s sake, there can’t be a Jewish mother who’s all-bad!
It’s not in the nature of things.
A man who condemns Jewish mothers is up to no good.
Roth writes with facility like many American literary entertainers,
but whenever I get to the end of one of his novels or stories,
I ask myself why I had started in on it.
He, like many of our prose writers,
is situated somewhere in No-Man’s-Land
between Literature and Pulp Fiction.

– Herbert Kuhner