Roth: Tempting as it is, I will not bury you tonight beneath a ton of stories about my happy childhood and the Weequahic section of this city.
More about my emotional affinity to nearly every commonplace, unpoetic thing that was the Newark of my day.
There is no good reason for an 80-year-old man to regret that things were once different or to bore people with a pathetic fondness for carrying on about how everything back then was otherwise.
The Weequahic section is a 20 minute bus ride from this spot.
I know because we made school trips by bus to the museum to look at the famous jewelry collection, many of the pieces Newark made, when I was a pupil at Chancellor Avenue Elementary School from 1938 to 1946.
Schreiber: For a year prior to coming to Newark, when I had no idea that I'd be coming to Newark, I spent the year reading Philip Roth novels.
I don't know why.
And so, I got this job and I came to Newark, and bingo, you know, here I was in Philip Roth's hometown.
I arrived and I sort of felt as if I knew the city, but the city that I knew was the one he grew up in, which was the Newark of the 1930 and '40s and '50s.
So, it was quite a different Newark, and yet, I felt a sense of home.
Roth came to the Arts Center in 2013, when he was 80.
We premiered a film about him, a PBS "American Masters" film about him here.
I got to meet him.
It was thrilling.
Woman: He's so funny and so sharp and it's dazzling writing.
Announcer: Look for "Philip Roth: Unmasked"... Roth: Where should I lift the curtain?
Announcer: ...on "American Masters".
Schreiber: It always stayed with me that there was something to the idea of creating a series of events that examined his work, that allowed for theatrical readings and also allowed us to dig into the controversy around his work in a very intentional way, and so, we did.
We call it "Philip Roth Unbound".
It's a dozen events or so, and we found, as we started to work on it, that there was a great love of Roth's work.
Many of Roth's friends are still -- and colleagues are still here, and they wanted to talk about him.
So, that was our catalyst and our inspiration.
Wilentz: People think that he was a curmudgeon, that he was difficult.
No.
He stood up for standards and he wouldn't suffer fools, but if he got to know you and you liked you, then he was the most generous guy in the world.
He was interested in what I did because at that point, one of his later novels, "Plot Against America", is based on something that he read by the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was also a buddy of mine.
So, there was a sense, I think, that he was starting to think about history much more seriously.
And it's about Jews, it's about America, it's about what happened, and it kind of comes, you know, full circle right here in this book.
Prose: Rereading the plot, I was thinking that probably more than any other writer, reading it now, I was thinking about the way in which the nightmare -- he's been able to bring the nightmares of the 20th century into the 21st century, and then you realize it's not just the 20th or the 21st century.
It's the nightmares of every century in history.
So, in a way, what he was always looking for, I think, was these recurring patterns that happened in history and then the way they affected individual lives.
Gourevitch: It's exactly what you're saying, about how history slams into people.
It's about those moments when the unforeseen -- in other words, when what will later be looked at as history helps reshape a life, and in his own case, he said, you know, he was a happy child in his view, and an exuberant -- sort of happy to be in Newark boy, played baseball every day, et cetera, and then the war was there, and that became, for him, the first time that he saw how it affected the whole community, saw how it affected, and how the emotions of the war coincided with the emotions that you have, like, at the beginning, you have fear, then you have defiance, then you're proud of your country, then you have this, that -- all of these things that were out there that you think of as your own, and then you start to see later in life, as you look back, the larger shapes, that that kind of became the ambition of that later period.
Schreiber: When one reads his work, it is historically accurate even if he takes the true history and then fictionalizes it in ways that we could never imagine, like in "Plot Against America", where he imagines a U.S. that is led by a President Lindbergh, and "Plot" has been adapted for the stage.
Nine actors will each read a chapter.
Washington: "By 1940, Jewish parents and their children at the southwestern corner of New Jersey's largest city talk to one another in an American English that sounded more like the language spoken in Altoona or Binghamton than like the dialects famously spoken across the Hudson by our Jewish counterparts in the five boroughs.
I pledged allegiance to the flag of our homeland every morning at school.
I eagerly observed its national holidays.
Our homeland was America.
Then the Republicans nominated Lindbergh, and everything changed."
Bogosian: "The November election hadn't even been close.
Lindbergh got 57% of the popular vote, and in an electoral sweep, carried 46 states.
Though on the morning after the election, disbelief prevailed, especially amongst the pollsters.
By the day after that, everybody seemed to understand everything, and the radio commentators and the news columnists made it sound as if Roosevelt's defeat had been preordained.
It turned out, the experts concluded, that 20th century Americans, weary of confronting a new crisis in every decade, were starving for normalcy.
If Lindbergh promised no war, then there would be no war.
for the great majority, it was as simple as that."
Kaczmarek: "Hitler.
I heard him saying, 'Hitler is not business as usual, Rabbi.
This madman has conquered Europe!
He's at war with Russia.
Every night -- Every night he bombs London into rubble and he kills hundreds of innocent British civilians.
He is the worst anti-Semite in history.
And yet -- And yet his great friend, our president, takes him at his word when Hitler tells him that they have an understanding.'"
Schreiber: I think he felt very fondly towards Newark, the fact that he did donate 7,000 volumes of his own personal library to the Newark Public Library.
He appreciated all his life what that library meant to him, and the Philip Roth reading room that the library built is a wonderful space.
Giron: Everything had to be kept in order, so we had to obtain books from his apartment in New York and also from his home in Connecticut.
Visitors can see all of the books that influence Roth, and many contain markings.
So, you can look into the mind of a reader, what he was thinking when he was reading, and you can also see research materials, so which books he used in the creation of his novels.
Steinbaum: Well, the festival has brought foot traffic to the Philip Roth Personal Library.
We also, the library and NJPAC together, produced the audio guide to this space.
So, with the festival, the actor Morgan Spector recorded a narration walking through this space.
Spector: On the far left is a sketch of the apartment where Roth grew up in Newark.
As an adult, as he began writing his 2004 novel, :"The Plot Against America", he asked his brother Sandy to draw him a sketch of their childhood apartment on Summit Avenue.
Roth wrote the book with the sketch in hand, situating the novel's fictitious Roth family in his own childhood home.
Woman: And Roth lived on which floor?
Woman #2: Roth lived on the second floor.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Did you read "Plot Against America"?
Rigert: If you like to read, he will take you into a world that, when the book is over, you're just, like, so sad, not by the book, but that it's finished and you have to stop.
"Rich times.
Morty used to talk to the other men, the fishermen.
Did it so easily."
To me, it's exhilarating to read his books.
He just draws you in.
It's a full meal, Philip Roth, and if you like great literature, he will just -- he'll open your head.
Man: Thank you so much.
Woman: Ah, you're welcome.
Thanks for coming.
Woman #2: That was wonderful.
Woman: Great.
Thank you.
Thank you.