The two women, suffocating from the strictures of Orthodox Judaism and their own sexual needs, turn to each other for fresh air. Their love scenes, all hands and mouths and bare skin, are pretty hot stuff. Last month, you could hear the entire Charles Theatre audience breathing heavily.
Naturally, I immediately thought about Philip Roth.
The movie is called “Disobedience.” I’ve read most of the reviews, and I’ve seen no one calling this solemn, sober, textured film an act of anti-Semitism, or a libel on the Jews, or a gift to the ghost of Hitler.
And so the ghost of Philip Roth, who died about a month ago, may rest in peace. Maybe we’ve grown up, and maybe even grown less self-conscious about our religion, and probably it was Roth who helped get us here. Maybe now we can read a book about Jews, or see a movie that shows us with human desires and flaws the same as any gentile’s, without imagining this will set off a new round of pogroms.
It was different when Roth was starting out. When he died, at 85, at the end of May, he was revered as one of the great figures of modern American literature. But it was a long way from his early years, when such works as “Goodbye, Columbus,” and “Portnoy’s Complaint” were called a comfort to anti-Semites.
When he wrote “Goodbye, Columbus,” there were rabbis who labeled Roth “an enemy of the Jews.” They called his characters “depraved and lecherous.” And at that point, they hadn’t even gotten a hint of Alexander Portnoy, whom The New York Times, in its worshipful front-page Roth obituary, comically described as “a teenager so libidinous he has sex with both his baseball mitt and the family dinner.”
Yet, when “Portnoy’s Complaint” first appeared, “This is just the book the anti-Semites have been waiting for,” declared the philosopher Gershom Scholem.
It wasn’t just the sex that disturbed Roth’s critics, it was the post-war issue of assimilation. We were hungry to feel part of the American family, and not commit some public act that hinted at ethnic stereotype.
But who’d want to live next door to the Patimkins of “Goodbye, Columbus,” the nouveau riche Jews who seemed to personify Oscar Wilde’s line about people who “know the price of everything and the value of nothing”? For that matter, as the joke went, who’d want to shake hands with young Alexander Portnoy?
The criticism pained Roth, but he turned it into art. Deep into his career, in “The Ghost Writer,” Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, receives a letter criticizing him for the way he’s written about Jews.
“If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the ‘30s, would you have written such a story?” he’s asked.
But for Roth, that was the whole point. This isn’t Nazi Germany, he was saying. It’s America, and it’s our home, and we don’t have to hide our truest humanity anymore, however it may express itself.
“My [teenage] experience,” Roth told The New Yorker, “has been about our … going out into Newark, three or four of us, wandering the streets at night, shooting crap in the back of the high school with flashlights. … It was that verbal robustness, people talking, being terrifically funny, playing ball, competing, energy flowing out.”
It sounds like Newark’s version of Barry Levinson’s “Diner.” The diner guys are Jewish, but their concerns are strictly secular. They’re all about adolescent sexual hunger, about make-out sessions, about a wise-ass spirit that Roth himself might have inspired.
Nobody watched this and imagined it was peculiarly Jewish. It was American, it was any human being at all.
And now we have “Disobedience,” with two women reaching for each other in their desperation, and casting off all religious strictures. And we can get past the Jewish self-consciousness and realize they could be anybody.
Maybe we’re finally comfortable including ourselves in such conversation because, as Roth insisted, our hungers are no different than anybody else’s.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, is now in paperback.
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