![]() ![]() ![]() Surgery is ruled out for the octogenarian, and the author is a helpless, horrified witness to his father's humiliating demise, ``utterly isolated within a body that had become a terrifying escape-proof enclosure, the holding pen in a slaughterhouse.'' In a fast-paced, cogent memoir, Roth, whose filial devotion and awe are tempered with clear-eyed observational powers, ranges far afield and discusses the anti-Semitism of the insurance firm that employed Herman Roth for 40 years Herman's perfectionism and his latter-day disregard for his wife whom he nevertheless elevated to quasi-sainthood after death Herman's abandonment of his phylacteries in a locker at the local YMHA the author's quintuple bypass surgery weeks before his father's death and Herman's incontinence and the ample size of his genitals. In Patrimony: A True Story, published in 1991, Philip Roth made that journey with his 86-year-old father, who had been struck by a virulent brain tumor, leaving him utterly isolated within a body that had become a terrifying escape-proof enclosure, the holding pen in a slaughterhouse. A vigorous 86-year-old, Roth pere wakes up one morning and half his face is paralyzed soon he is deaf in one ear and the verdict is a benign brain tumor. ![]() Instead, here is Roth (NBCC Award-winning The Counterlife ) at his most humane as he pens a kaddish to his recently deceased father, Herman. Alter ego Nathan Zuckerman doesn't appear in these pages, and neither is there any sleight of hand blurring the line between literature and life. ![]()
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