Strangers in a Strange Land: The Homelessness of Roth’s Protagonists

Gershom Scholem quotes Charles Peguy as having said about the Jew that ‘Being elsewhere, the great vice of this race’ was also ‘the great secret virtue, the great vocation of this people’. Scholem interprets this statement as having in it the contrary element of ‘the desperate wish to “be at home” in a manner at once intense, fruitful and destructive’.1 Certainly Philip Roth’s characters suffer from both the vice and the virtue Peguy mentions, and Roth continually tells us that his characters bring with them that ‘desperate wish to be at home’ which both defines their neurosis and their essential being. Any discussion of this could easily turn into a discussion of alienation. But, in fact, a distinction has to be made between what we ordinarily call alienation and marginality and what is the condition of the Jewish character in Roth. The more assimilated the Roth character becomes, the more intense his desire to be at home in his environment, the more homeless he feels. It is his sense of himself as separate that is a continual reminder of his spiritual homelessness. This, and not any external force, creates his peculiar estrangement.