“She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.”

― Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint

Philip Roth wrote several books before publishing his novel, “Portnoy’s Complaint,” which hit the book stores in 1969. The book became a fast best-seller and a source of controversy that haunted Roth throughout his career and life as a novelist.

A polarizing and confrontational book, “Portnoy’s Complaint” brought to the forefront the inner machinations of the mind of a character portraying the direct opposite of the idealized Jew in America. Roth wrote the novel voiced as a stream of consciousness that many considered obscene to the point of being worthy of censorship. Indeed, for many years, “Portnoy’s Complaint” was banned in many public libraries due to the use of unpolished language and an explicit description of masturbation.

The convention of framing the story as a psychoanalytical session, the sexually explicit nature of the book, along with the main character’s, Alexander Portnoy, neurosis seemed to feed the worst stereotypes held of Jews after the Second World War, a representation that caused an outcry in American and Israeli public discourse.

The great Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah researcher, Gershom Scholem, was so incensed by the book that he wrote a scathing and contemptuous review and sent it out across the world.

[Content Warning: The text below contains language that may be inappropriate for young audiences]

“Let the pollyannas not tell us that here we have satire, although it may that into the hearts of those who say this some doubts about the work may already have crept. The hero of a best-seller, which is being grabbed avidly by the public, proclaims as the basic motto of his whole life (and lives his proclamation) that his behavior is shaped by but one lust: to get ‘shikse c**t.’

…And all of this in order to square accounts with that demonic figure, the Yiddishe Mame, who had not been told all that she deserved until this author came along and ‘artistic’ release to his secret drives. This hero is no longer some miserable individual writing in his lust; he is the Jew taking vengeance of his upbringing in the Jewish home, which has become detestable to him, and going forth to lay shikses, thereby freeing himself from his nightmare of mame.

This is the book for which all anti-Semites have been praying. I daresay that with the next turn of history, which surely will not be long delayed, this book will make all of us defendants at court.”

Scholem was part of a vocal contingent of Jewish readers and critics who would continue to call Philip Roth “self-hating” and an “anti-Semite” for the ways in which he portrayed Jews in his fiction. Philip Roth actively engaged with the storm of criticism more than once and was very self-aware of his position as an American Jew and as an author of Jewish characters in America.

In “Reading Myself and Others,” Roth responded directly to the sort of criticism that Scholem pitched at him in the interview, “On Portnoy’s Complaint (1974),” where he was asked by George Plimpton about the accusations of anti-Semitism:

“… I have always been far more pleased by my good fortune in being born a Jew than my critics may begin to imagine. It’s a complicated, interesting, morally demanding, and very singular experience and I like that. I find myself in the historic predicament of being Jewish, with all its implications. Who could ask for more? But as for those charges you mention- yes they probably will be leveled at me. Because of the U.N. condemnation of Israeli ‘aggression,’ and the anti-Semitic rage flaring up in the black community, many American Jews must surely be feeling more alienated than they have in a lone time; consequently, I don’t think it’s a moment when I can expect a book as unrestrained as this one to indulged or even tolerated, especially in those quarters where I was not exactly hailed as the Messiah to begin with.”

Though it was “Portnoy’s Complaint” that skyrocketed Roth into literary stardom, his other books and stories like “Goodbye, Columbus,” only gave fodder to the rabbis who charged him with the aforementioned “self-hatred.” In his essay, “On Writing Jews,” published in 1963, Roth explained:

“Among the letters I receive from readers. There have been a number written by Jews accusing me of being anti-Semitic and “self-hating,” or at least tasteless…

Furthermore, it is charged that such criticism as I make of Jews- or apparent criticism- is taken by anti-Semites as justification of their attitudes, as ‘fuel’ for their fires, particularly as it is a Jew himself who seemingly admits to habits and behavior that not exemplary, or even normal and acceptable. When I speak before Jewish audiences, invariably there have been people who have come up to me afterward to ask, “Why don’t you leave us alone? Why don’t you write about the Gentiles? – ‘Why must you be so critical?’ – ‘Why do you disapprove of us so? …’

It is difficult, if not impossible, to explain to some of the people claiming to have felt my teeth sinking in that in many instance they haven’t been bitten at all. Not always, but frequently, what readers have taken to be my disapproval of their lives lived by Jews seems to have to do more with their own moral perspective than with the one they would ascribe to me: at times they see wickedness where I myself had seen energy or courage or spontaneity; they are ashamed of what I see no reason to be ashamed of, and defensive where there is no cause for defense.”

It is not with a little irony that Roth’s own mother questioned his position:

“My mother did say to me at one point, ‘Philip, are you anti-Semitic?’ And so I said, ‘Ma, what do you think? You’ve known me since kindergarten and before.’ But they were getting that from the Rabbi, you know?”

Philip Roth, through his fictional works, never stopped exploring his complicated existence as an American Jew in an America in which he happened to be Jewish. His characters beyond Alexander Portnoy, including Nathan Zukerman and his own fictional alter-ego, Philip Roth, made up a collection of unforgettable stories that influenced the literary world far beyond the scope of Jewish-American writing.

Philip Roth died on May 22, 2018 at the age of 85.

I came to the National Library in December, 2017 in search of Sella’s books. Sella Podbielski née Weiss was born in Gostyn in Poland in 1888 and was most likely murdered in Auschwitz. Her books – if they still exist – would be the only surviving items from her possessions.

One of her two sons, the writer Gerhard René Podbielski, left Poland in January 1939 and I have been working for his son since 2015, exploring the family’s tabooed fate.

Sella’s books first came to my attention during an online search in a tangle of digitized microfilms from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington. They were recorded in the Offenbach Archival Depot (OAD), established in early 1946 by the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the American military government to collect books, manuscripts and archival materials that had been looted, confiscated or taken by the German army under the Nazi government.

In 1947, the organization, Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Inc. (JCR), was founded to deal with the restitution procedure of Jewish property and heirlooms following the Holocaust. Its executive secretary from 1949 to 1952 was the political theorist Hannah Arendt. When the Offenbach Depot was cleared in June 1949, the remaining items from the more than three million volumes which had been handled there, most of which had already been restituted, were transferred to the Central Collecting Point (CCP) Wiesbaden. In Oct 1949 a list of books received from Offenbach was compiled, containing about 45000 books previously owned by private Jewish owners identifiable by signatures, stamps or ex-libris. According to this list, three of the books contained Sella’s signature.

I realized that I was searching for a needle in a haystack as the lists from Offenbach and Wiesbaden named the previous owners of the books but listed no book titles. But it was too early for me to give up. I found out in the NARA microfilms that about 12,000 books from this list were packed in cases and mostly sent to New York and Jerusalem in 1950. I realized that JCR provenances have not been recorded in the library catalogs, even more so the names of the previous owners. My correspondences with library staff showed that not much institutional knowledge of the processes of book distributions in the 1950s has remained.

I was fortunate that Daniel Lipson of Israel National Library was also interested in the books from the JCR and in their stories. He put much effort into responding to my request and he created an excel list with thousands of books, which the National Library had received from the JCR in the 1950s.

It is a reconstruction and – as Lipson puts it – definitely not complete and far from being accurate. But it was something to work with and I decided to work by taking random samples. I chose 40 books written by authors read and appreciated by Sella’s son – this was the only possible lead I had – and requested them into the reading room for an autopsy.

Some of them still had the JCR label from Wiesbaden, but in other cases it has fallen off or has been lost during re-binding.

I found stamps, from institutions like the Jewish communities of Dresden and Frankfurt upon Main or the Königsberg Zionist Association, but also of Nazi institutions which had formed libraries mainly from looted books. I also found signatures, and some of such private owner marks can be directly connected to the 1949 list.

Just to give one example: The library’s third copy of Arnold Zweig’s Novellen um Claudia contains the following handwritten entry: Else Ehrlich, Hildesheim, Juli 1921 v. L. Meyerhof (Else Ehrlich, a resident of the city of Hildesheim, has received this book from L. Meyerhof in July 1921).

The Wiesbaden source does not contain the name Else Ehrlich, but lists one book from the possession of a Hildesheim Ehrlich. Evidently the person in charge could not decipher Else or simply forgot to include the given name in the list and put Hildesheim into the column for the given name instead of the place column.

As much research is being done on the victims of the Nazi terror, it took me only five minutes and a few clicks to find out about the deportation of Else Ehrlich from Hildesheim in April 1942 into Warsaw Ghetto. Her date and place of death are unknown, but this one book – and maybe more – has survived and we can hold it physically in our hands.

Book provenance research is – in the shadow of art provenance research – still quite a young discipline, but many public libraries in Germany have started to check their stocks for looted items and to document their previous owners, for example in the cooperative looted cultural assets database, with six – so far – participating institutions such as the Free University Berlin Library.

I did not find Sella’s books. But I found books from the possession of people who shared her fate. And with the help of Daniel Lipson I found a way to regain knowledge which had been lost over the decades in the shut library stacks. Ten matches out of the 40 books I have checked and compared with the 1949 list is a promising quota, but it is only just the start.