Hello, Unorthodoxine. I'm Noah Levinson, editor of the podcast and we're coming to you early this week with a little bonus episode

to talk about some very sad news of a very important Jew, Philip Roth, who died last week of heart failure at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 85.

Considered until last Tuesday to be one of America's greatest living authors, if not its greatest.

Roth was born and raised in the Wiquaic neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey,

which served as the nostalgic playground for many of his novels, most of which were written well after Roth and most of the city's Jews, had left Newark during the white flight of the 1960s.

Roth's fiction initially shocked and alienated much of the Jewish community

that he wrote so much about and probably never more than in his 1969 bestseller

Port Noise complaint the book that sealed his fame and for which my ninth grade English teacher sought special

permission from my parents to lend to me as an introduction to Roth. In it, Alexander Portnoy delivers

a 300-page monologue from his therapist's office, confessing his most grotesque masturbation stories, a host of sexual fetishes played out with Gentile women,

neuroses about his Jewishness and his inability to work up a

tear for the six million, and the depravity that he feared sat at his very core, all setting

up one of the great punchlines in literary history the doctor's response and only line in the book

So now we may perhaps to begin yes all I remember is the outcry with Portnoy's complaint.

People were furious.

They felt that he betrayed us.

Even though I don't see betrayal, I see love for the community.

That's Leslie Goldman-Pumfry, one of several Jewish

requaic natives I met at the Newark Public Library's

Philip Roth historical tour this past Sunday.

Like many other attendees, she came not only

to pay her respects to the literary giant, but also to reminisce about a Jewish. came not community I would say that the large majority were not orthodox many belong to

...