Goodbye, Columbus (1959). Content and Description

Published when he was just 28, Goodbye, Columbus marked the beginning of Roth’s literary career. Composed of a similarly titled novella and five thematically linked short stories, the collection touched a nerve in postwar America, particularly among Jewish Americans who were facing many of the difficulties experienced by the characters in Roth’s work. The novella itself was a sensation, sparking a series of imitators and a cinematic adaptation starring the Jewish heartthrob Richard Benjamin (1969).

As does Marjorie Morningstar, Herman Wouk’s 1955 best-selling look at the life of the Jewish every-woman Marjorie Morgenstern, Goodbye, Columbus contains the first of many hyperarticulate male protagonists/narrators. Although Neil Klugman is a college graduate, he remains a lower-middle-class Jewish boy, toiling in the Newark library and staying with his aunt Gladys and uncle Max in a working- class neighborhood. When Klugman meets the Jewish beauty Brenda Potimkin, he is carried into a world of wealth and privilege far from his accustomed landscape. The Potimkin clan lives of leisure and conspicuous consumption in Short Hills, a wealthy area far removed from the Newark Neil calls home. The Potimkins tan by the pool and engage in multihour tennis matches. Brenda’s brother, instead of attending a local college, travels to Ohio for university, successfully mixing with the goyim in a way Neil could never imagine.

Brenda’s family challenges Neil’s class expectations and sets the scene for a typically acerbic Roth satire on the excesses of the nouveau riche. While Brenda’s father, Ben, has the same working-class background as Neil, he takes great pains to separate his children from the world of their immigrant forebears—an increasingly common scenario in middle-class Jewish-American life, according to Roth. While Neil experiences alienation due to the Potimkins’ wealth, their lifestyle also collides with his notions of Jewishness: The upwardly mobile Potimkin tribe is engaged in sloughing off not only their lower-class past but their ethnic and racial identities.

If Roth’s honest depiction of the complexities of assimilation for American Jews drew readers to Goodbye, Columbus, it was his unusually frank discussion of Brenda and Neil’s lustful sexuality that kept them reading. Prefiguring his more ribald literary creations, particularly Portnoy’s Complaint, My Life as a Man, and The Professor of Desire, Goodbye, Columbus witnessed the beginnings of Roth’s interest in exposing the subterranean excesses of sexuality in postwar America.

Goodbye, Columbus, which won the coveted National Book Award in 1960, introduced many of the themes that were to preoccupy both Roth and his audience throughout his career. It also heralded the entrance of a new voice on the literary scene— one that would produce an unprecedented number of books chronicling both the American and the Jewish-American experience.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Goodbye, Columbus is filled with issues surrounding class in postwar America. How does Roth use his unique descriptive gifts to render class? In what way do objects and consumption play a role in the way class is depicted in Goodbye, Columbus? How does Roth’s novella respond to its particular cultural moment—an era of unrivaled economic success and rising birth rate?

2. Marjorie Morningstar, a mass-market best seller published in 1955, had distinctly fewer literary ambitions than did Roth’s 1959 collection. Nonetheless, there are striking similarities between Herman Wouk’s narrative about upper-middle-class American Jewry and Roth’s biting Goodbye, Columbus. How do these works contribute to our understanding of assimilation in the American Jewish community after World War II? How do Marjorie Morningstar and Goodbye, Columbus portray Jewish femininity, and how do they inscribe their critiques of Jewish upward mobility and economic consumption onto Jewish women?

3. Goodbye, Columbus was Roth’s first published book. Although it is less formally innovative than some of his later works, it shares a number of themes with them. Most notably, in Goodbye, Columbus, Roth is concerned with what we might call the rhetoric of Jewish “chosenness.” Roth came under fire for the way in which he portrayed both the cronyism of the Potimkins and that of the Jewish soldier Grossbart in “Defender of the Faith,” one of the other pieces in the collection. How does Roth begin a critique of what he will later call (in his novel The Human Stain) the “coercive ‘we’” of ethnic identity in his first published book?

4. At work in the library, the protagonist, Neil Klugman, meets a young African-American child who wants help finding reproductions of the artist Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian landscapes. When Neil meets this youth, he is mired in worries about his Jewishness and his relationship to his working-class roots. Why does this child appear when he does? How do the Tahitian landscapes the child is seeking function as a portal to an authentic racial identity for him, and how does this pursuit of authentic identity relate to Klugman’s own search for meaning in Goodbye, Columbus?