Shifting Landscape: A Composite, 1925-1987

by Henry Roth

Gathers memoirs, articles, a poem, speech, and excerpt from an unfinished novel, writings from each period in Roth's career

Genres: Short Stories, Memoir

301 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Billy · Rating 4 out of 5]

With a career bookended by literary triumphs, Shifting Landscapes explores the messy, painful, endless middle period of this great genius of American literature. It is beyond my ability to understand the massive block that stopped Roth in his tracks but at some level it resonates. And he has illuminated a loss of my own, which heretofore I had not understood. This took place at the end of winter in 1959.

I admire Roth's honesty and his humility. While the journey from communist to Zionist is not altogether clear, nor dealt with head on (especially the turn to and away from communism), it begins to make sense: " No, my fate was more like Pound's; to live long enough so that the warp of time became manifest, so inexorably contrary to one's views one had to repudiate them--even repudiate the self, though grown old, I am only furious at myself for having taken so long, so ponderously long to have effected the change--to the degree that I have, however inept, inadequate." April 1939, Saturday night (from Weekends in New York, written in 1984)

"And now I felt even better. Who were they to make me run? I could outlast a million such Domunds, visit a million churches, see a million crucifixes, hear million Hail Marys. I was still myself and lived in the twentieth century, not in the dark ages of their obscurantism. By evening I had completely recovered my cheerful self, my equilibrium, such as it is. Evidently I was still a Marrano, a latter day one without the shema." Letter to Iven, Winter, 1965