I Might Give Them Some Books To Read

Following a reading from his memoir, Patrimony, at Trinity College in 1992, Philip Roth read aloud the questions, followed by his answers to the audience. Among the many topics was the following as recorded that evening:

With all the Neo-Nazis denying the existence of the Holocaust, what argument would you use to convince them otherwise? Well, I don't know that I would argue with the Neo-Nazis. I think I would be concerned. And I am concerned that young people who didn't live through the period 1939-45 and even though I was a child, I lived through it and it had a strong impact on my family and therefore on me. People who didn't live through that might be influenced by this vicious idiocy of the Neo-Nazis.

And so, I think I might give them books to read. And in fact, in the course I teach at Hunter College, I do indeed have my students read three books of Primo Levi's. A book called Survival at Auschwitz, a book called The Reawakening, and his brilliant, brilliant, grave masterpiece, The Drowned and the Saved…And I also have them read a book by Borowski, a Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski called This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. And I have them read a book by Gitta Sereny, a brilliant journalist, about Treblinka, called Into That Darkness. So that's my argument, my argument against them is not so much an argument against them, but an exposure of the material about the Holocaust to a new generation.

Twelve years after that evening, in 2004, Roth published The Plot Against America, the imagined story of real life aviator hero and isolationist Charles A Lindbergh winning the 1940 American presidential election, bringing the terror of fascism and antisemitism to Roth’s stand-in Newark childhood.

The books Roth cited that night are part of his personal library left to the Newark Public Library.

As of this past year, the majority of U.S. states did not yet require the teaching of the Holocaust in public school education, but 23 did. According to Wikipedia, those states are: California, Illinois, New Jersey, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Kentucky, Texas, Oregon, Colorado, Delaware, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Arizona, Maine, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Missouri.