Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore, a new book by Laurence Roth, is a hybrid text: part memoir, part history, part theoretical meditation about a Jewish bookstore in Los Angeles and the family that ran it. It’s a beautiful book about a slice of everyday experience that often gets lost. We interviewed Roth, who is a professor of English at Susquehanna University, about his work, the story behind this book, and archives.
Berman Archive: Tell us a bit about your work and research interests?
Laurence Roth: I’m grateful that at the small undergraduate liberal arts college where I teach, I get to share with students my obsession with books and analyzing culture industry goods and services. Susquehanna University has a large business school and the department I’m in is oriented around a strong and successful creative writing program, so that spurred me to develop a publishing and editing program that used publishing studies to bridge our creative writing major with our literature major and our department with the business school. These days my work is focused primarily on expanding that program as well as project-based learning at Susquehanna. Next semester, a colleague in the business school will co-teach a class with me on bookstore retailing and the final project will have the students running a pop-up bookshop in our college town.
My research interests were, as I say in the book, formed in and through my experiences at my father’s bookstore. I was always less interested in the religion sections of the store and far more fascinated with the mass market and pop culture titles. That’s how I discovered Jewish detective stories, the subject of my first book, and Jewish comic books, cookbooks, zines, and spy stories whose surprising cultural mash-ups inspired various articles and papers. But my father’s store is also where I discovered Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Cecil Roth, Irving Howe, Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and Raphael Patai. I guess I’ve always been a “theory head,” though in many ways I’m still that curious kid in the store trying to understand what such critics and philosophers were talking about and what it might mean to think along with them.
What was the impetus to write your new book, Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore?
I always knew that at some point I would write about the store. Growing up inside it and working there shaped my character and education. The problem was that I didn’t know how to write that story, and memoir, at least when I began my academic career, wasn’t likely to get me tenure.
But of course, I continued to talk about the store and family issues with my father, and as he began sending me more and more memorabilia and papers, I started to feel like Gene Wilder in that nightmare scene from Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein: “Destiny, destiny, no escaping, that’s for me!” Finally, when I was a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where my father visited me to see what I was up to and talk books with Arthur Kiron, the librarian there, I began to intuit how I might combine theory and memoir. My first stab at writing about the store appeared in that year’s fellowship volume. After that, I spent the next twelve years slowly teaching myself about narrative voice, autotheory, and mixed genre writing (by reading Laura Levitt and others who were already doing that), thinking about the book’s structure, and experimenting with one chapter at a time.
Is it a memoir, a history, or something else? How did generic conventions/expectations inform the writing of this book?
I’ve always been attracted to generic remixes—Al Wiesner’s Shaloman superhero comic? Yeah, I’ll read that!—so I was already primed to try it myself. The book is my take on the academic remix. In it I sample memoir, history, and the critical/theoretical meditation, their generic conventions lending me narrative structures on which to hang my story. My training in literary scholarship and post-structural theory had already prepared me to recount the store’s history and to critically analyze that history and the store’s space. I understood what was expected of such scholarship and how digging into online and brick and mortar archives inform its writing.
But there was no point in claiming to be objective about it. That was a lesson I learned from the New Journalism of Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson. I was inevitably writing about myself on one level or another, and trying to pretend otherwise would have been disingenuous. Thinking about my narrative voice as not just that of a scholar or observer, but as a character in the story allowed me to embody and to wrestle with the ideas, arguments, contradictions, and confusions that flowed through the bookstore. And to write for both my professional colleagues and a general audience interested in that kind of story.
What was the significance of your father’s bookstore to the Los Angeles and National Jewish communities during its heyday?
J. Roth Bookseller, as I say in the book, was a microcosm of the L.A. Jewish community from 1966 to 1994 and it reflected the acculturation of my father’s generation of American Jews to the United States. What made the store unique was my father’s dedication to carrying the widest possible array of Jewish books and literature because his own mid-twentieth century Jewish education, which made him cognizant of the many streams that fed the wide river of modern Jewish life and culture, instilled in him an equally wide understanding of Jewishness and books. And also because he discovered that there were more Jewish, Jewishly-informed, and Jewishly-adjacent books being published in the U.S. than people realized, books that followed, and followed from, the arc of the American Jewish post-immigrant experience.
More specifically, the store reflected and helped assemble a mid-century détente in Los Angeles between the various streams of Jewish identity and practice—from Orthodox to Reform and neo-traditionalist to secular humanist—in defense of building up and sustaining a diverse Jewish community in a not yet dependably hospitable postwar sunbelt city. The bookstore, by supporting and seeding Jewish learning, solidarity, and self-definition, helped grow that community into the second largest Jewish community in America.
While your father’s bookstore was, indeed, impactful, you tell an intimate, personal story of a family and a small business. Why is it important to tell the stories of the everyday past, Jewish or otherwise?
The sheer multiplicity of human life makes it impossible to ever fully know the past, much less the present in which we produce the past to be. For me, the most precious part of our stories about what was, the part that stokes empathy and emotional intelligence, lies in the intimate moments that ache with what it felt like living in a particular time and place. Raymond Williams, the famous socialist novelist and cultural critic, called the everyday living-out of an era’s culture its “structure of feeling,” and I think it no accident that a novelist gave us that insight. Yes, the intimate stories of our everyday lives are often the raw material of fiction and storytelling. But in reading them we gauge their reliability, their truthfulness, by assessing our own personal feelings and beliefs and then comparing or interpreting, and in that way, we educate ourselves to feel for and with others.
J. Roth Bookseller, as I say in the book, was a microcosm of the L.A. Jewish community from 1966 to 1994 and it reflected the acculturation of my father’s generation of American Jews to the United States.
I hope the story of our family business and what it felt like to live inside it reminds readers why it’s so important to preserve the stories of those local independent bookstores that sustain our everyday lives. They do so much for their communities, but their important social and cultural work too often vanishes from history.
What was your favorite discovery in the process of writing this book?
I actually have two favorite discoveries. The first arose out of my reconstruction of the burgeoning Jewish bookstore scene at the turn of the twentieth century on the Lower East Side. I knew the names of a number of those booksellers—Joseph Werbelowsky, Asher Germansky, Meyer Chinsky, Judah Meir Katzenelenbogen—because of histories I had read. Yet it wasn’t until I walked the streets where their bookstores were located that I really understood how close their stores all were to each other, and how each was a wheelhouse for their owners’ stratagems in dealing with the gentile authorities and with the other booksellers as both potential partners and stiff competitors.
The second was uncovering the heartbreaking biography of Michael Harelick, the Yiddishist whose bookstore in Los Angeles my father bought. All I knew, all my father told me, was that Harelick was a lifelong bachelor and that he opened his bookstore sometime in the late 1940s, but why, my father couldn’t say. It took a lot of digging in the archives to discover that Harelick had been married, and that the first act of his life was an object lesson in the exhaustingly hard work and traumas that the immigrant generation endured. And that his bookstore, the second act in his life, was not only a wheelhouse but also a safehouse for him and for his brand of Jewish literary realism and culture.
What’s a single book or object from your father’s store that recalls its spirit?
I have one of the chocolate brown gusseted bags with twisted paper handles and the store’s logo and address printed on them in gold, standing open and as if ready to receive books, perched on top of the file cabinet in my office at the university. My father was inordinately proud of them. They signaled, he thought, a certain kind of literary and commercial sophistication, that his was a quality bookstore. The combination of the bag’s style with the logo—a reproduction of the half-moon store sign whose border was the name of his store in Hebrew, Yud Yud Roht Moycher Sforim—nicely encapsulates the aspirational, mid-century American Jewish ethos of my father’s business.
We’re an archive so we always have to ask—what is a favorite item of yours found in any archive?
Photographs. I’ve always found them fascinating portals into another world or a different reality. Portraits or candid shots or a still life—I can stare at them for what seems like hours and still find myself wondering: What did the texture of those clothes or that object feel like? What was it like to experience that moment’s quality of light or darkness? That face, those trees, what kind of life did it witness? Photographs make tangible for me a certain kind of wonder about the solidity of existence, even as they document the fleeting nature of the brief moments they capture.
Laurence Roth is the Charles B. Degenstein Professor of English and Director of the Jewish & Israel Studies Program and The Build Collaborative (a project-based center for liberal arts, business, and creativity) at Susquehanna University. He is the author of Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories; co-editor, with Nadia Valman, of The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures; and editor of Modern Language Studies, the scholarly journal of the Northeast Modern Language Association.
