“Stairwell by Stairwell”

Photo: Herman Roth in the 1970s

A year after Philip Roth published his 1991 memoir Patrimony: A True Story about the last years of his father’s life, the New Jersey Historical Society --for the first time --gave its annual award for “significant contributions to New Jersey history” to a novelist.

Roth, who was 59 that year, gave all credit to his father, Herman Roth, born in Newark’s Central Ward in 1901, the son of Sender and Bertha Roth who were part of the immigration movement between 1879 and 1910 that drew a quarter of a million foreign immigrants to Newark’s 100,000 primarily English-speaking population.

Herman Roth was able to go to school through the eighth grade before starting his life of work, and it is that career as a life insurance salesman for Metropolitan Life in North and South Jersey, that saw him “talking for nearly forty years to thousands of families here about life-and-death matters in the toughest human terms ,” Philip Roth said in his speech, adding: “They can’t win,” my father told me, “unless they die.”

“It’s the insurance man and not the novelist,” Roth says, “who came to know, from a vast personal experience, with his own brand of awareness and practical intelligence, the social history of Newark, New Jersey’s largest and, during the decades my father was employed there, its liveliest and most productive city, to know it not just neighborhood by neighborhood, not even just block by block and house by house and flat by flat but door by door, hallway by hallway, stairwell by stairwell, furnace room by furnace room, kitchen by kitchen.”

“…It was he and not I, who, by virtue of an occupation that took him daily among the people and into their homes however lowly, became something of an amateur urbanologist in the city of Newark, an anthropologist-without-portfolio from one end of the state to the other, and it is for the prodigious substantiality of this achievement, his far-from-ordinary entanglement with the breadth and depth of the everyday existence of a hard-bitten city’s seemingly insignificant lives, that I’d like to accept this award in his name.”

Roth included his acceptance speech in his Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013.