Patrimony by Phillip Roth

Phillip Roth has four main topics to deal with in Patrimony and they are all about being Jewish, except, ironically, there is very little religion (as being Jewish is a religious connection to Abraham) in the book, and most of the characters seem disinterested in religion. The four topics Roth covers are the dying of his father, the Jewish-ness of his father, the holocaust, and discrimination of the Jews in the US.

What this book is primarily about is the chronicling of the last months of the life of Herman Roth, Phillip’s father. For this, Roth gives insight into a man who has stubbornly gone after a full life throughout his 87 years of existence, and even in the bleakest diagnosis of a deadly brain tumor, he still asks for “a couple of more years.” It includes the doctors visits, the rapid physical deterioration of Herman’s body, and the anguish of a son watching a loved parent go down hill.

Although these insights are interesting and thought-provoking, there are just not enough of them. It is said that writers work because they can tell the story better than the rest of us. So the question becomes, do I need Roth to tell this story? The answer here is no. It is a fact of life that most people deal with the death of a loved one; as people get older the chances are greater they will watch their parents die and probably suffer too. So most of what Roth told us we already know about the dying elderly: the irritability with life, the denial of mortality, and the loss of bodily functions such as when Herman ‘beshat himself.”

His attempts to give an honest portrayal, letting the reader know Herman was not kind to his wives was not effective; for most people this verbal abuse trumps even the finest of other character traits. I checked out myself about then.

As for the Jewish-ness, that was dealt with mostly with depictions of Jews who were hard scrabble businessmen who made good, and one of the themes of the book, remembering, was illustrated as Herman remarkably recanted the locations and names of long-ago businesses and businessmen.

Roth seemed to throw in the topic of discrimination of insurance employees by Metropolitan Life, as he admits it is a retelling from another book he wrote. It seemed he was trying to make a page-count.

Lastly, his dealing with the holocaust and concentration camp survivor Walter Herrmann seemed to be a tag-on in order to get in two signature elements Roth is known for, humor and pornography, and also to add to the page-count. It seemed strange that this German Ron Jeremy, someone having difficulty with English, could translate with perfect grammatical clarity.

In this book, Roth manages to accomplish much though. He has paid tribute to his father; brought attention to holocaust survivors and discriminated Jews in the US; and probably most of all showed the savvy of Jews in business, for after realizing that he got fourteen bucks off me for this book I almost beshat myself.