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Summary
Summary
In the "stifling heat of equatorial Newark," a terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, lifelong disability, and even death. This is the startling theme of Philip Roth's wrenching new book: a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children.At the center of Nemesis is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director, Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower and weightlifter, who is devoted to his charges and disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. Focusing on Cantor's dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground--and on the everyday realities he faces--Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, theanger, the bewilderment, the suffering, and the pain.Moving between the smoldering, malodorous streets of besieged Newark and Indian Hill, a pristine children's summer camp high in the Poconos--whose "mountain air was purified of all contaminants"--Roth depicts a decent, energetic man with the best intentions struggling in his own private war against the epidemic. Roth is tenderly exact at every point about Cantor's passage into personal disaster, and no less exact about the condition of childhood.Through this story runs the dark questions that haunt all four of Roth's late short novels, Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and now Nemesis: What kind of accidental choices fatally shape a life? How does the individual withstand the onslaught of circumstance?
Author Notes
Philip Milton Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on March 19, 1933. He attended Rutgers University for one year before transferring to Bucknell University where he completed a B.A. in English with highest honors in 1954. He received an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1955.
His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, received the National Book Award in 1960. His other books include Letting Go, When She Was Good, Portnoy's Complaint, My Life as a Man, The Ghostwriter, Zuckerman Unbound, I Married a Communist, The Plot Against America, The Facts, The Anatomy Lesson, Exit Ghost, Deception, Nemesis, Everyman, Indignation, and The Humbling. He won the National Book Critic Circle Awards in 1987 for his novel The Counterlife and in 1992 for his memoir Patrimony: A True Story. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1993 for Operation Shylock: A Confession and in 2001 for The Human Stain, the National Book Award in 1995 for Sabbath's Theater, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for American Pastoral. He stopped writing in 2010. He died from congestive heart failure on May 22, 2018 at the age of 85.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Roth's compact latest novel rounds out his quartet-Everyman, Indignation, and The Humbling-addressing mortality. WWII-era Newark is in the grip of a rampant polio scare. Bucky Cantor, the fearless, 4F playground director valiantly holds the fort against the disease and protects his charges, until matters take a deadly turn. Dennis Boutsikaris, himself a Newark native, can sound a bit young in parts, sapping the listening of some of the book's dark majesty. But his reading conveys the book's aura, its nostalgia and horror. A Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hardcover. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The fourth in the great and undiminished Roth's recent cycle of short novels follows Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), and The Humbug (2009), and as exceptional as those novels are, this latest in the series far exceeds its predecessors in both emotion and intellect. In general terms, the novel is a staggering visit to a time and place when a monumental health crisis dominated the way people led their day-to-day lives. Newark, New Jersey, in the early 1940s (a common setting for this author) experienced, as the war in Europe was looking better for the Allies, a scare as deadly as warfare. The city has been hit by an epidemic of polio. Of course, at that time, how the disease spread and its cure were unknown. The city is in a panic, with residents so suspicious of other individuals and ethnic groups that emotions quickly escalate into hostility and even rage. Our hero, and he proves truly heroic, is Bucky Canter, playground director in the Jewish neighborhood of Newark. As the summer progresses, Bucky sees more and more of his teenage charges succumb to the disease. When an opportunity presents itself to leave the city for work in a Catskills summer camp, Bucky is torn between personal safety and personal duty. What happens is heartbreaking, but the joy of having met Bucky redeems any residual sadness.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
I wrote Roth off. Back in my early 20s, in a fit of literary conscientiousness, I undertook to sample his work. At the point when my nose could wrinkle no further in distaste, I was struck by a relieving epiphany - "Oh: these are for boys" - upon which I resumed my reading life unburdened by any expectation of venturing deeper into Rothiana. Until the Book Review offered me this assignment. So unlikely, so ill-conceived a pairing, I thought it must be an error. Yet no sooner had I restored my jaw to its rightful position than I found myself accepting, and an instant later my office was empty save for a few speed lines, as in a comic strip: I'd high-tailed it to the library in order to begin remediating my embarrassing literary gap, a cause to which I devoted - with a kind of mounting, marveling pleasure - much of this past summer. All of which is to say: Before you stands a convert. I come to swallow the leek. But first there is the matter of the cause of my early repulsion, relevant because surely not unique. The trouble for me with Philip Roth's fiction wasn't so much the sex thing, or even the sexism thing (although, perhaps especially in the case of a young female reader, one might reasonably expect a barrier to enjoyment to rise from the surfeit of all those women-as-orifices, women-as-booby-traps, women-as-willing-stand-ins for whatever his protagonists are so driven to shtup). The trouble was what seemed to be the curdling vein of hostility and nihilism in the prose. Why, I wondered, if the guy's so anti-everything, does he keep bothering to write? From the vantage point of two decades and thousands of pages of Roth later, I don't think it's a bad question. My mistake was asking it rhetorically. If treated as a point of real inquiry, the question affords an opening, a way of reading and being reached by the work. For a writer so generously endowed in the irony department, Roth turns out to be astonishingly earnest. We see this in his excesses - not merely the prolificacy of his output, but the outrageousness of his characters' offenses, their deeds, appetites, shames and confessions. Steaming along on the twin engines of intellect and humor (and what engines - horsepower through the roof), the novels transport us or run us over or both. His characters sometimes get caught up in a kind of Socratic Möbius strip, endlessly debating one another and themselves in a way that can verge on the tedious, but even then one cannot but marvel at his sheer energy, his unremitting investment in - what? Provocation. Interrogation. The feat of living. This is not a nihilist. This is a writer whose creative work lays bare the act of struggle. For all that, what heat his previous novels give off is the heat of friction, of conflagration. His newest, "Nemesis," stands out for its warmth. It is suffused with precise and painful tenderness. Set mostly in 1944 Newark, it tells the story of Bucky Cantor, at 23 a freshly minted phys ed teacher and summertime playground director. Life's dealt him some blows: his mother died in childbirth; his father, a thief, exited the picture long ago. Worse, to his anguish and disgrace, Bucky's poor vision keeps him from going to fight the Germans alongside his best buddies -alongside, for that matter, "all the ablebodied men his age." But life's dealt him blessings, too, prominent among these the grandparents who raised him: the immigrant grandfather who encouraged him "to stand up for himself as a man and to stand up for himself as a Jew," and his grandmother, a "tenderhearted little woman" with whom he is living in their tenement flat when the story begins. He has a girl he loves, prospective in-laws thrilled to welcome him into their family and solid aspirations of becoming a high school athletic coach. He's blessed, too, with an awareness of his blessings, a sense not only of gratitude for them but also of the obligation they confer, and it emerges that this sense of obligation is what allows him to withstand his disappointments; indeed, to flourish within his circumscribed world. He inhabits the role of playground director with a combination of enthusiasm and dignity that makes him, in the eyes of the children, "an outright hero," and Bucky's goals are no less exalted. "He wanted to teach them what his grandfather had taught him: toughness and determination, to be physically brave and physically fit and never to allow themselves to be pushed around or, just because they knew how to use their brains, to be defamed as Jewish weaklings and sissies." The school playground becomes Bucky's Fort Dix, his Normandy landing. And when a polio outbreak hits the city, his sense of duty swells: "This was real war too, a war of slaughter, ruin, waste and damnation, war with the ravages of war - war upon the children of Newark." Too decent to relish the chance to serve on the front lines of this battle, too honest not to acknowledge his own fear, Bucky rises to the occasion as best he can, which is to say with seriousness, compassion, bewilderment and anger. Not the sharpest of Roth's protagonists (he lacks introspection, possesses "barely a trace of wit"), he has an appealing capacity to apprehend happiness. Given its pall of war and disease, "Nemesis" is surprisingly dense with happiness - a happiness that's ever-tenuous, and the sweeter for it The word "happy" crops up immoderately throughout, and happiness is made manifest in stirringly specific moments (eating a peach on a hot night, observing a butterfly sip sweat from bare skin). The architecture of Roth's sentences is almost invisibly elegant; not only doesn't one notice the art, one barely notices the sentence, registering instead pure function: meaning, rhythm, intent. IS it impertinent to suggest Roth outdoes himself here by getting out of his own way? This short book has all his brilliance, minus the bluster. And it's a love story. I'm not thinking of Bucky and his girl, but of the narrator and Bucky. Roth achieves something strange and good here with point of view. From the outset, the narration is evocative of a Greek chorus, at once communal and all-knowing. More than a hundred pages go by before we discover who is telling the story. And even then, until very near the end, I persisted in believing that the narrator was somehow omniscient, speaking perhaps from beyond the grave, as in another of Roth's recent novels, "Indignation." There and here, one feels him exploring what role memory and narrative might play in salvaging meaning from a life. In the end, we learn that Bucky, who had so wished to serve and to save, has been crippled by his own sense of decency. His eventual determination to disallow himself happiness runs deep; he rebuffs the narrator's attempts to persuade him otherwise. Yet in the final shining pages, the narrator does restore Bucky to happiness, not by changing the man, but by doing what a storyteller can: conjure a moment from the past and fix it for all time. 'This was real war too, a war of slaughter, ruin, waste and damnation, . . . war upon the children of Newark.' Leah Hager Cohen, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, teaches writing at the College of the Holy Cross. Her new novel, "The Grief of Others," will be published next year.
Guardian Review
Carmen Callil withdrew from the judging panel of the Man Booker International prize when the other judges decided to give its award to Philip Roth. Roth, she said, "goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe." Which was a funny thing to say, not just for the obvious reasons, but because the subject of breathlessness comes up quite frequently in his latest novel - first published in this country some seven months before Callil made her intemperate remarks. The breathlessness in question comes as a result of polio, an epidemic of which strikes Newark, New Jersey, in the baking summer of 1944. This is surpassed only by death as the worst thing that can happen when polio strikes; that, and the fact that its victims are chiefly children. The novel's chief protagonist, 23-year-old Bucky Cantor, an athletic young man declared unfit for military service due to his poor eyesight, agonises about the appalling fates that await the victims: he's a playground director, God-like in the eyes of his young charges, a source of unimpeachable rectitude and kindness. But he can do nothing to prevent the spread of the disease. And as someone supremely active and fit, he can think of no worse existence than that of being trapped inside an iron lung. Now, as for going on and on about the same thing, you could argue that once again, Roth is going on about death, but that doesn't quite sound right here. What Roth is going on about in this book - and I would like to express this as tentatively as possible, because this is not an easy novel to second-guess, or, if you like, reverse-engineer - is the malicious capriciousness of fate, or the fallibility of God. This is, and is not, classic Roth. It is, in the sense that here he has returned to the scene of his childhood. Were the author's name not anywhere on or in the book, the setting - among the Jewish families of Newark in 1944 - would be pretty much a giveaway. It's Roth's turf, and he owns it almost aggressively. However, what he's getting up to is not as obvious as it has been hitherto. Lately in his career, it could be broadly summed up by the Rolling Stones' line: "what a drag it is getting old". But here we have something similar to the counter-factual approach in his magnificently terrifying The Plot Against America. Only the threat is more ambiguous, more existential. (It is not lazy association to compare this with Camus' La Peste.) In one early scene, Cantor stands up, one against ten, to a menacing group of Italians, who have come, they say, to give everyone polio; they spit all over the tarmac, and, once Cantor's seen them off, he scrubs the spots clean. But as another character says: "You washed the spit away but you didn't wash the polio away. You can't wash the polio away. You can't see it. It gets in the air and you open your mouth and you breathe it in and the next thing you got the polio." And the character - a hot-dog vendor who himself has been accused of spreading the disease - adds, almost bathetically: "It's got nothing to do with hot dogs." It is tempting, at this point, to think that there is something allegorical here: that polio is antisemitism, perhaps. But this is too reductive for such a superbly managed novel. It may not be long, but it's full, complete. For one thing, as the above quotation should show you, Roth's ear has never been better, and there is an almost unbelievable mastery of technique in the way that the prose slips between narrative and speech. This is unputdownable, and although it is one of my jobs to show you how authors do this kind of thing, I can't here, except by invoking some kind of magical talent on Roth's part. I won't tell you what happens, because that might dilute the full effect of the tragedy. (The better a man Cantor is portrayed as, the worse, you come to fear, his fate will be.) Suffice it to say that you know something awful is going to happen. The clue is in the title. To order Nemesis for pounds 6.39 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - Nicholas Lezard This is, and is not, classic [Philip Roth]. It is, in the sense that here he has returned to the scene of his childhood. Were the author's name not anywhere on or in the book, the setting - among the Jewish families of Newark in 1944 - would be pretty much a giveaway. It's Roth's turf, and he owns it almost aggressively. However, what he's getting up to is not as obvious as it has been hitherto. Lately in his career, it could be broadly summed up by the Rolling Stones' line: "what a drag it is getting old". But here we have something similar to the counter-factual approach in his magnificently terrifying The Plot Against America. Only the threat is more ambiguous, more existential. (It is not lazy association to compare this with Camus' La Peste.) In one early scene, [Bucky Cantor] stands up, one against ten, to a menacing group of Italians, who have come, they say, to give everyone polio; they spit all over the tarmac, and, once Cantor's seen them off, he scrubs the spots clean. But as another character says: "You washed the spit away but you didn't wash the polio away. You can't wash the polio away. You can't see it. - Nicholas Lezard.
Kirkus Review
For those who monitor the growing list of books by Philip Roth, his forthcoming, Nemesis, presents a revelation as startling as the discovery of a planet or the alignment of a new constellation.The top of the list remains reassuringly familiar: "Zuckerman Books" (those featuring Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's alter ego), "Roth Books" (another alter ego, "Philip Roth," in a category that includes fiction and nonfiction alike) and "Kepesh Books" (another serial protagonist who may or may not be an alter ego).But then there is an emergent category: "Nemeses: Short Fiction," which encompasses four recent novels, including the new one. What this means to the ardent Roth reader is that three works previously considered unrelatedEveryman (2006), Indignation (2008) and The Humbling (2009), formerly scattered at the list's bottom with some of his earliest efforts as "Other Books," are now connected. And Nemesis provides the key to that connection.A little longer than the other three, Nemesis could be the darkest novel Roth has written and ranks with the most provocative. It's a parable of innocence lost in the author's native Newark, where polio threatens a neighborhood that is already sacrificing young men to World War II. The protagonist is Bucky Cantor, a 23-year-old playground director, who has seen his best friends enlist in the war while he was rejected for poor eyesight.Instead, "Mr. Cantor" (as his charges call him) finds himself facing a more insidious enemy. "No medicine existed to treat the disease and no vaccine to produce immunity...(it) could befall anyone, for no apparent reason," writes Roth. It arrives without warning, and it changes everything. If anything, it was scarier than cancer or AIDS is now.Narrating the story is one of polio's victims, though he barely emerges as a character until the novel's epiphany. Until then, Roth lets the reader wonder how a narrator named only in passing could penetrate the protagonist's mind and relate a series of incidents that the narrator couldn't have witnessed.As Bucky's boys succumb to the disease, temptation lures him from the city to what appears to be a safe oasis, an idyllic summer camp where his girlfriend works. Yet his conscience (already plagued by his 4-F status) pays the price for his escape, an escape that might prove illusory.What is Bucky's nemesis? Maybe polio. Maybe God, "who made the virus," who kills children with "lunatic cruelty." Maybe mortalitydeath and the decay that precedes it, the ravages of time that distinguish man from God.But maybe Bucky's nemeses include Bucky himselfa layer of meaning that makes this novel something other than another retelling of Job and forces the reader to reconsider the previously published "Nemeses" in fresh light. For it is within these short novels that Roth tackles nothing less than the human condition, which finds its nemesis in the mirror.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
During the summer of 1944, young men like Bucky Cantor needed good reason not to be fighting overseas. Though he had bad eyesight, was the sole support of his grandmother, and was the best phys ed teacher Newark's Chancellor Avenue School ever saw, Bucky's guilt informed his life that long, hot summer and forever changed its trajectory. With an incredible eye for historical detail, Roth paints a vivid picture of the polio epidemic that hit the Jewish neighborhood of Weequahic on the Fourth of July weekend, pitting ignorance against science, neighbor against neighbor, and fear against common sense. Bucky excels at his job, keeping the kids active and naively believing that he can personally hold the disease at bay. But as one child after another falls ill, he loses faith in God even as he obsesses over the chance to join his girlfriend, Marcia, in the Poconos. Verdict Roth, one of our greatest American writers, is unrivaled in his mastery at evoking mid-20th-century New Jersey, but it's the thoughtful examination of the toll guilt takes on the psyche, the futility of raging against God or Fate, and the danger of turning blame inward that give this short novel its power. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/10.]-Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib., Ft. Myers, FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 Equatorial Newark The first case of polio that summer came early in June, right after Memorial Day, in a poor Italian neighborhood crosstown from where we lived. Over in the city's southwestern corner, in the Jewish Weequahic section, we heard nothing about it, nor did we hear anything about the next dozen cases scattered singly throughout Newark in nearly every neighborhood but ours. Only by the Fourth of July, when there were already forty cases reported in the city, did an article appear on the front page of the evening paper, titled "Health Chief Puts Parents on Polio Alert," in which Dr. William Kittell, superintendent of the Board of Health, was quoted as cautioning parents to monitor their children closely and to contact a physician if a child exhibited symptoms such as headache, sore throat, nausea, stiff neck, joint pain, or fever. Though Dr. Kittell acknowledged that forty polio cases was more than twice as many as normally reported this early in the polio season, he wanted it clearly understood that the city of 429,000 was by no means suffering from what could be characterized as an epidemic of poliomyelitis. This summer as every summer, there was reason for concern and for the proper hygienic precautions to be taken, but there was as yet no cause for the sort of alarm that had been displayed by parents, "justifiably enough," twenty-eight years earlier, during the largest outbreak of the disease ever reported-the 1916 polio epidemic in the northeastern United States, when there had been more than 27,000 cases, with 6,000 deaths. In Newark there had been 1,360 cases and 363 deaths. Now even in a year with an average number of cases, when the chances of contracting polio were much reduced from what they'd been back in 1916, a paralytic disease that left a youngster permanently disabled and deformed or unable to breathe outside a cylindrical metal respirator tank known as an iron lung-or that could lead from paralysis of the respiratory muscles to death-caused the parents in our neighborhood considerable apprehension and marred the peace of mind of children who were free of school for the summer months and able to play outdoors all day and into the long twilit evenings. Concern for the dire consequences of falling seriously ill from polio was compounded by the fact that no medicine existed to treat the disease and no vaccine to produce immunity. Polio-or infantile paralysis, as it was called when the disease was thought to infect mainly toddlers-could befall anyone, for no apparent reason. Though children up to sixteen were usually the sufferers, adults too could become severely infected, as had the current president of the United States. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, polio's most renowned victim, had contracted the disease as a vigorous man of thirty-nine and subsequently had to be supported when he walked and, even then, had to wear heavy steel-and-leather braces from his hips to his feet to enable him to stand. The charitable institution that FDR founded while he was in the White House, the March of Dimes, raised money for research and for financial assistance to the families of the stricken; though partial or even full recovery was possible, it was often only after months or years of expensive hospital therapy and rehabilitation. During the annual fund drive, America's young donated their dimes at school to help in the fight against the disease, they dropped their dimes into collection cans passed around by ushers in movie theaters, and posters announcing "You Can Help, Too!" and "Help Fight Polio!" appeared on the walls of stores and offices and in the corridors of schools across the country, posters of children in wheelchairs-a pretty little girl wearing leg braces shyly sucking her thumb, a clean-cut little boy with leg braces heroically smiling with hope-posters that made the possibility of getting the disease seem all the more frighteningly real to otherwise healthy children. Summers were steamy in low-lying Newark, and because the city was partially ringed by extensive wetlands-a major source of malaria back when that, too, was an unstoppable disease-there were swarms of mosquitoes to be swatted and slapped away whenever we sat on beach chairs in the alleys and driveways at night, seeking refuge out of doors from our sweltering flats, where there was nothing but a cold shower and ice water to mitigate the hellish heat. This was before the advent of home air conditioning, when a small black electric fan, set on a table to stir up a breeze indoors, offered little relief once the temperature reached the high nineties, as it did repeatedly that summer for stretches of a week or ten days. Outdoors, people lit citronella candles and sprayed with cans of the insecticide Flit to keep at bay the mosquitoes and flies that were known to have carried malaria, yellow fever, and typhoid fever and were believed by many, beginning with Newark's Mayor Drummond, who launched a citywide "Swat the Fly" campaign, to carry polio. When a fly or a mosquito managed to penetrate the screens of a family's flat or fly in through an open door, the insect would be doggedly hunted down with fly swatter and Flit out of fear that by alighting with its germ-laden legs on one of the household's sleeping children it would infect the youngster with polio. Since nobody then knew the source of the contagion, it was possible to grow suspicious of almost anything, including the bony alley cats that invaded our backyard garbage cans and the haggard stray dogs that slinked hungrily around the houses and defecated all over the sidewalk and street and the pigeons that cooed in the gables of the houses and dirtied front stoops with their chalky droppings. In the first month of the outbreak-before it was acknowledged as an epidemic by the Board of Health-the sanitation department set about systematically to exterminate the city's huge population of alley cats, even though no one knew whether they had any more to do with polio than domesticated house cats. What people did know was that the disease was highly contagious and might be passed to the healthy by mere physical proximity to those already infected. For this reason, as the number of cases steadily mounted in the city-and communal fear with it-many children in our neighborhood found themselves prohibited by their parents from using the big public pool at Olympic Park in nearby Irvington, forbidden to go to the local "air-cooled" movie theaters, and forbidden to take the bus downtown or to travel Down Neck to Wilson Avenue to see our minor league team, the Newark Bears, play baseball at Ruppert Stadium. We were warned not to use public toilets or public drinking fountains or to swig a drink out of someone else's soda-pop bottle or to get a chill or to play with strangers or to borrow books from the public library or to talk on a public pay phone or to buy food from a street vendor or to eat until we had cleaned our hands thoroughly with soap and water. We were to wash all fruit and vegetables before we ate them, and we were to keep our distance from anyone who looked sick or complained of any of polio's telltale symptoms. Escaping the city's heat entirely and being sent off to a summer camp in the mountains or the countryside was considered a child's best protection against catching polio. So too was spending the summer some sixty miles away at the Jersey Shore. A family who could afford it rented a bedroom with kitchen privileges in a rooming house in Bradley Beach, a strip of sand, boardwalk, and cottages a mile long that had already been popular for several decades among North Jersey Jews. There the mother and the children would go to the beach to breathe in the fresh, fortifying ocean air all week long and be joined on weekends and vacations by the father. Of course, cases of polio were known to crop up in summer camps as they did in the shore's seaside towns, but because they were nothing like as numerous as those reported back in Newark, it was widely believed that, whereas city surroundings, with their unclean pavements and stagnant air, facilitated contagion, settling within sight or sound of the sea or off in the country or up in the mountains afforded as good a guarantee as there was of evading the disease. So the privileged lucky ones disappeared from the city for the summer while the rest of us remained behind to do exactly what we shouldn't, given that "overexertion" was suspected of being yet another possible cause of polio: we played inning after inning and game after game of softball on the baking asphalt of the school playground, running around all day in the extreme heat, drinking thirstily from the forbidden water fountain, between innings seated on a bench crushed up against one another, clutching in our laps the well-worn, grimy mitts we used out in the field to mop the sweat off our foreheads and to keep it from running into our eyes-clowning and carrying on in our soaking polo shirts and our smelly sneakers, unmindful of how our imprudence might be dooming any one of us to lifelong incarceration in an iron lung and the realization of the body's most dreadful fears. Only a dozen or so girls ever appeared at the playground, mainly kids of eight or nine who could usually be seen jumping rope where far center field dropped off into a narrow school street closed to traffic. When the girls weren't jumping rope they used the street for hopscotch and running-bases and playing jacks or for happily bouncing a pink rubber ball at their feet all day long. Sometimes when the girls jumping rope played double dutch, twirling two ropes in opposite directions, one of the boys would rush up unbidden and, elbowing aside the girl who was about to jump, leap in and mockingly start bellowing the girls' favorite jumping song while deliberately entangling himself in their flying ropes. "H, my name is Hippopotamus--!" The girls would holler at him "Stop it! Stop it!" and call out for help from the playground director, who had only to shout from wherever he was on the playground to the troublemaker (most days it was the same boy), "Cut it out, Myron! Leave the girls alone or you're going home!" With that, the uproar subsided. Soon the jump ropes were once again snappily turning in the air and the chanting taken up anew by one jumper after another. Excerpted from Nemesis by Philip Roth All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
