The narrator of the novel, Nathan Zuckerman (the author's alter ego), reunites with his youthful professor and mentor, Murray Ringold, now decrepit and in his nineties. Meanwhile, Nathan is already a renowned sixty-year-old writer who lives secluded in a mountain like a hermit, disenchanted with the world and society (a not-so-disguised Roth). The reunion with his old literature teacher allows Nathan to reconstruct, over six nights, his past as a young idealist and enthusiast of literature and radio programs, as well as closely examine one of the darkest and most ignominious episodes in American history: the McCarthyism of the 1950s and the communist paranoia that took hold of the country, ruining the lives of thousands of artists, celebrities, and workers in the name of national security and Republican values. All of this centers around the story of Murray Ringold's brother and Nathan's youthful idol: Ira Ringold.

Nathan will uncover the truth and piece together the disconnected parts of the puzzle of his memory into a panoramic whole through the impetuous narrative torrent of his old professor, who, aware that his days are numbered, holds nothing back; neither the unconfessable nor the secrets one would prefer to take to the grave. The author's alter ego, in addition to being the trigger for these stories, acts as the passive listener of the confession of an old man who wants to make peace with the ghosts of his past and purge the weight of what he has guarded and accumulated in his long life. And the hero (or anti-hero) of his cathartic narrative is his brother Ira Ringold, called the Man of Iron for his choleric and incorruptible character; a fierce defender of workers and the needy and a radio star, sadly famous for having been falsely accused of being a Soviet spy by his own wife during the "witch hunt" era.
The novel is told as a tale that encompasses Ira's childhood, described as a child who at an early age was already manifesting his dissatisfaction and his rebellious nature, his youth as a ditch digger and miner, his sudden rise to fame as a radio announcer, his stormy marriage to a silent film star actress, the publication of a defamatory book that made him the perfect target that McCarthyism needed to exacerbate anti-communist sentiments, and his final days as a nobody condemned to oblivion and ostracism. In Murray's meticulous narration, Nathan's memories intervene, in a kind of dialectic between the idealized image he had of his hero and the realistic demystification of his brother, whom he describes as a contradictory, unpredictable, and conflictive character, whose uncontrollable anger could arouse homicidal instincts; but with a moral sense and a sensitivity that made him intolerant of injustices and earned him no small number of enemies on the conservative right.
Philip Roth once again demonstrates his narrative genius for creating memorable characters and directing his sharp and critical gaze at American history, without hesitation or concessions, incisively denouncing not only McCarthyism but also the political practice of silencing voices that are not on the same frequency as the official voice and official ideology, the hypocritical attitude of committing the worst acts of disloyalty in the name of loyalty to the country, and the moral bankruptcy of a nation that has invented its own enemies.

In the second part of the trilogy, the reader grasps even more the horror of this writer.

Roth is a master in sketching heroes. The sincerity, the brutality, and the irony of his writing are overwhelming. He realistically presents every fact without considering if you will be shocked while reading it.

With a strong political and caustic stigma in the second book, the American dream is shattered.

Loss, betrayal, and lies are concepts pervasive in every chapter and level the protagonists both mentally and physically.

The only thing that remains for them is to get lost in their thoughts and memories, seeking peace, a comfort that will never betray them.

Forta narativa a lui Philip Roth este, ca de obicei, remarcabila.

His storytelling ability is truly remarkable, as it always manages to captivate the reader from the very beginning.

Roth has a unique way of creating complex and engaging characters that come to life on the page.

Their thoughts, emotions, and actions are so vividly described that one can't help but feel a deep connection to them.

Moreover, his plots are filled with twists and turns that keep the reader on the edge of their seat.

Whether it's a story about love, family, or society, Roth always manages to explore these themes in a profound and thought-provoking way.

In conclusion, Philip Roth is a master storyteller, and his works are definitely worth reading.

5 stele.

Of course it should not be too surprising to find out that your life story has included an event, something important, that you have known nothing about. After all, your life story is in and of itself something that you know very little about. –Nathan Zuckerman

If it weren’t for mistakes, I would still be home sitting on the front stoop. –Nathan Zuckerman

“I Married a Communist” is the follow-up to “American Pastoral”, in the middle of a trilogy. It is set partly in Newark and partly in Chicago. I read it mainly because I had read “American Pastoral” in the last year, but also because it is timely now. The McCarthy connections, the rising fascism of the fifties understood in the context of present events, the clown cars of revenge and betrayal and the irrelevance of facts all make it relevant. But there is also the wonderful muscular masculine passionate Roth language and the intense and carefully drawn characters. It may not be as good as “American Pastoral”, but it has flashes of that brilliance.

This is a sort of read-aloud book as it is a story largely told in soliloquy fashion by 90-year-old Murray about his blacklisted brother Ira to Nathan Zuckerman, a novelist who is a stand-in for Roth himself. Murray is one of Nathan’s former English teachers and helped shape him as a writer. As Nathan (Roth) reflects on his career as a writer, he says, “Occasionally now, looking back, I think of my life as one long speech I've been listening to. The book of my life is a book of voices. When I ask myself how I arrived at where I am, the answer surprises me: 'Listening.' Was I, from the beginning, just an ear in search of a word?” –Nathan Zuckerman

This is a complex book dealing with a particular period of history, post WWII. It explores issues of betrayal and revenge on at least three basic levels. Firstly, nationally, as McCarthy and others in the early fifties in the USA blacklisted “Communists”. Some were actual Communist party members, but many of those accused were Jews, blacks, gays, and liberals whom they didn’t like personally or politically. It was an ugly American moment when the country could turn in their neighbors to the House Un-American Committee for being “unpatriotically” critical of American policies and values. Secondly, the central character Ira’s wife Eve turns him in to that committee after learning Ira has hit on his step-daughter Sylphid’s friend Penelope. She does this in a published piece called “I Married a Communist”. Thirdly, Roth himself seems vindictive about his ex-wife Claire Bloom’s memoir, “Leaving the Doll’s House”, where she tells about her affairs with men and especially skewers Roth for being abusive and angry after decades of marriage to him. There are many servings of revenge and betrayal, going round and round. At one point Roth likens these tales to Elizabethan tragedies, which I think is stretching it, especially when it comes to him and Bloom.

I didn’t want to read this book when it came out as I felt it sounded too acidic and vicious. I knew it was in part a response to Bloom’s book, which I read a lot about but didn’t read. I didn’t find it focused too much on the personal issues until much later in the novel, after much brilliant talk from Murray about Ira and the country during this time. When it gets to the last ¼, it seems a little out of control, angry, and crazy. But before that, much of it is as good as “American Pastoral”. We learn a lot about what might have attracted many people to Communism, such as anti-racism, economic inequities, and anger at the American government. Sound familiar? Thousands of good people, many of them artists, had their lives destroyed in those years. The (lefty) arts were a target, especially Hollywood and Broadway.

The book is also in part about teaching, learning, and mentoring. Nathan is mentored by his father, Ira, Murray, Leo Glucksman from The University of Chicago (on writing), Johnny O’Day, and many others, including novelists such as Mailer and Dostoevsky. All his reading of Marx and political theory of the day are teaching texts. The radical theory of Thomas Paine set him on his way and drove a wedge between the radical Nathan, who admired Ira, and Nathan’s liberal father. This is a book about a boy and his male teachers. Most of Roth’s books are about boys, talk, and sex. This one has less about sex, but it is here and figures centrally but not so specifically. There is a lot of big talk, really, and most of it is pretty impressive. Murray and Ira are great talkers.
It is a great portrait of Ira, this crazy Commie who married Eve and ruined his life, compromising his socialist ideals for what? Love? Conventional life? But it’s a novel, not a tract. Finally, it’s art, and he doesn’t pick sides that much. I mean, he hates McCarthyism of course, but he looks at the whole range of perspectives on the mid-century American communist movement. As Mikhail Bakhtin says, a novel at its best can be a cultural forum. This is one of those novels.
There are great lines and references. For example, the idea of “boxing with books”, learning to argue through books as critical thinking. It is a portrait of the male aggressive roots of the University of Chicago and Jewish intellectual and literary life, and argumentation culture. Words are seen as weapons. It can be a little overwhelming at times how great every character is at talking and opining. There is also a great diatribe by a (capitalist) manufacturer, Goldstine, making fun of communism to Ira in a delightful way. A gun is even pulled in the process! “Make money, kid. Money’s not a lie. Money’s the democratic way to keep score.” There is great stuff on the Truman-Dewey-Wallace election and Ira’s rants about how the working class always votes against its own self-interests. Ira argues pretty persuasively for third part Commie Wallace. There is also great and amazing stuff on the apolitical nature of the novel, not about making points, political or otherwise, but to ask questions, explore, and create complicated characters, all of which Roth does. He maybe crosses the line by making it too personal with his revenge skewering of Bloom, though, in the end. “Not to erase the contradictions but to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being.” –Glucksman, to Nathan
So it’s well worth reading. Roth may be a little bit of an asshole. He doesn’t create sympathetic portraits of women, maybe bordering on misogynist. Eve, get it? And Eve’s witchily cast daughter, Sylphid? Ouch. But Eve is actually not so bad here until the end. And well, the language, the talk, the characters, and the wide sweep of American history made personal tip the balance here to Roth “winning the day.”
As Murray says to Nathan about Ira, it is as true of Roth’s books: “That a man has a lot of sides that are unbelievable, is, I thought, the subject of your books. As a man, as your fiction tells it, everything is believable. Christ, yes, women, Ira’s women. A big social conscience and the wide sexual appetite to go with it. A Communist with a conscience and a Communist with a c____.” Roth, angrily unapologetic to the very last.

I gave myself an hour after finishing the reading before writing this review, but my judgment has not changed at all in these sixty minutes.

Philip Roth is one of those authors who, in my opinion, one must absolutely read something. His ability to build "palaces" of literature is unrivaled.

The approach to the stories he tells is always immediate and total: we find ourselves catapulted into the middle of the written words from which it is then difficult to get out.

"I Married a Communist" reminded me a lot of "American Pastoral" - the first of the trilogy on American history - and I loved both in the same way. In this novel, Roth uses communism - and not only - to tell about human fragility. It is a great novel that talks about the contradictions of the human soul and manages to plumb it in the same way and with the same precision as Dostoevsky does - in fact, there are several references to "Crime and Punishment".

What I love about Philip Roth is the fact that he "forces" the reader to think with his own head. He does not express only one thesis and only one, but arranges every smallest element that can be useful to form a real idea of what he is writing about, both good and bad. I consider it a challenge, in a sense, and this I like.

Philip Roth passed away in May of last year (I am writing this in 2018), and he was widely eulogized as one of the true giants of American literature.

Surprisingly, I had never delved into any of his works before. However, I did have one of his books sitting among my numerous stacks of books-to-be-read.

On a sweltering summer afternoon, with a refreshing cold drink (lemonade) by my side, I finally picked up and read this particular work by Roth, which was published in 1998. It tells the story of a physically imposing man (he stands at 6 feet 6 inches), a tough individual from New Jersey named Ira Ringold. Ira becomes a devout believer in the Communist Party during World War II and later goes on to become a popular radio broadcaster in the late 1940s. He even marries a beloved movie star, Eva Frame.

But the late 1940s is a time of McCarthyism and witch hunts. When Eva betrays Ira by writing an expose titled "I Married A Communist," it ultimately brings the giant crashing down. I must admit that I found the writing to be truly excellent, just as I had anticipated. What I liked most about it was Roth's ability to vividly evoke a period of history that was rife with treachery and fear.

I would like to naively believe that we will never experience a time like this again in American history, but unfortunately, history has a way of repeating itself.

Raccontare attraverso una singola e particolare vita la storia dell'America durante la guerra fredda. It is a way to show the true story in a subliminal manner, piece by piece, until finally composing a dense, complex overall picture, stripped of syrup and myth. Confuse the idea with ideology and this with a political system that is threatening because it is "other" than one's own. Create the enemy, make it monstrous, and unify a people to expel it, wherever it nests, in other hemispheres or in individual Americans who, far from being spies of an adversarial dictatorship, cultivate liberal ideas but are not in line with the perfect and democratic American capitalism.

The magnificent pen sketches the delirium of an entire system that ostracizes by elevating suspicion to condemnation and does so without getting its hands dirty through the means of a "devoted" individual, deluded into avenging a family betrayal, who becomes an armed arm called upon to uproot the "red evil" from the bucolic, peaceful, and perfect American system.

Ancora un romanzo emozionante! It's not like "Pastorale" because this one unfolds and twists upon itself over many pages. It indulges in the pleasure of fantastic and perfect writing. However, it is still a powerful and unyielding novel. The ending under the stars is truly memorable.

This novel takes the reader on a thrilling journey, filled with unexpected turns and captivating descriptions. The author's skill in creating a vivid and immersive world is evident on every page. As the story progresses, the characters come to life, and the reader becomes deeply invested in their fates.

The final scene, set under the stars, provides a beautiful and poignant conclusion. It leaves the reader with a sense of wonder and a longing for more. This is a novel that will stay with you long after you've turned the last page.

Every day you ask yourself why you don't leave him?

But you didn't do this, because people who are together don't do this. Everyone is dissatisfied, but not leaving when being together is something that people do.

It seems that there are many reasons and emotions involved in this situation. Maybe there is still a glimmer of hope, or there are too many memories and ties.

However, constantly asking this question but not taking action may lead to more confusion and unhappiness.

Perhaps it is time to seriously consider whether this relationship is still worth maintaining and make a decision that is truly beneficial to oneself.

Tragic, but brilliant and captivating about forgotten era.

Philip Roth's exploration of the American communists in the 1940s and 1950s,看似边缘，实则意义重大。小说的主人公是演员兼鼓动家艾拉·林戈尔德，也被称为铁林。通过他的兄弟默里和作者的化身内森·祖克曼的视角，展现了他动荡的一生。这是一个巧妙的手法，就像挪威作家卡尔·弗罗德·蒂勒在他的小说中所做的那样，能够创造出书中人物多面的形象。

书中的核心事件是艾拉与好莱坞明星伊芙·弗雷姆的婚姻。当20世纪50年代的反共运动达到高潮时，这对矛盾的关系爆发了。当时，伊芙被她的一些朋友引诱出版了《我嫁给了一个共产党员》，这也结束了他们的婚姻。然而，罗斯最终用心理特征而不是意识形态来解释他的人物和他们的问题。

这部小说不仅是对一个被遗忘时代的生动描绘，也是对人性复杂性的深刻洞察。它让读者思考历史、政治和个人选择之间的相互作用，以及这些因素如何塑造我们的生活。

Hunting for Witches
This book truly moved me. Do you remember when you listen to a story that gets inside you, and you feel a kind of emotion, a sense of participation, and a growing compassion that builds up layer by layer, getting stronger with each different level of reading the story you approach, with each level of understanding the story that the author leads you to? Well, this book had this effect on me. Because this is the magic of Philip Roth: he explains everything to you, he explains the political situation of the moment, he illustrates the psychological and social motivations that drive the protagonists, he lays out all the parts of the problem and presents them to you not only from his own eyes but from the eyes of all those who people his story. And when he has explained to you the fabric in which the events unfold and made you look at them through the eyes of all, then he goes beyond and tries to understand, both we and he together, the emotions that make people what they are, the paths that lead them to take (inevitably?) the actions they take. So in the end we feel sorry and pity for them, whether they are "good" or "bad", because we come to feel sorry and pity.

There is a quote in this book that contrasts politics, described as "the great generalizer," with literature, labeled as "the particularizer."

Although this book contains a great number of memorable characters, the overall impression is that these particular fabrications come perilously close to being mere pawns in a generalized, polemical debate.

Roth presents Ira Ringold firmly set in the McCarthy era, using a deeply flawed character to explore a great deal. However, much of it is related secondhand, with other characters extensively summarizing, engaging in armchair psychoanalysis, and explaining Ira to the reader.

Roth does an excellent job of capturing and grounding a specific time and place in American history. And a three-star Roth is essentially a four-star for anyone else. But given my affection for the other two books in this trilogy, this one felt a bit overly pedantic.

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WORDS I LOOKED UP BUT PROBABLY WON'T USE DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

chiropodist | schmattas | picayune | deprofanation | minatory | rostrum