Speaker unverified: uncertainty

Transcript context

…You knew Roth, right? What was he like? I was very lucky when I went to university in America, I went to the University of Pennsylvania, and here he was, one of the heroes of modern literature. He was teaching a small seminar class at the University of Pennsylvania and I enrolled in it. And as a teacher, he had edited a Penguin series on Eastern European authors, so he taught from that canon. And one of his abiding virtues as a teacher or as a professor, was he prescribed short books to read, so he didn’t ask his students to read 600-page tomes. Most of the books that I remember him asking us to read were fairly short, so you could really read them without feeling out of breath and then have time to ingest them. And he listened very carefully and was very polite and courteous toward all of his students. Then he very, very kindly wrote me a reference when I applied for a job at Time Magazine. I’m not sure that many people who applied at Time had a reference from Philip Roth. Then later in life, way later in life, our paths crossed again through a mutual friend and for several years, when our family was in the habit of going to New York to celebrate Thanksgiving with friends, Philip was a mutual friend of the hostess and so for, I don’t know, half a dozen years, we always had Thanksgiving dinner and among the guests was Philip Roth. And unless he was in a deep funk, he was always wry and amusing and sardonic. How would you describe your current relationship to the Hebrew Bible?…

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