“Every Man’s Tragedy”: Historical Context and Personal Hardships in Phillip Roth’s American Pastoral Jillian Cancela 11th Grade

As World War II struck and anti-Semitism rattled Europe, Jewish immigrants migrated into the United States. The Jewish population continued to rise well after World War II, and with a decrease of anti-Semitism throughout the nation, the Jewish population were not discriminated against and were able to find economic and social wealth. One author who described the Jewish life in America was Phillip Roth, who emphasized upwardly-mobile Jewish communities in New York and New Jersey in his acclaimed novel American Pastoral. Having a change of events, the novel refutes all American immigrant dream and depicts colossal events that doom the protagonist’s life due to a choice his daughter made. In American Pastoral, Phillip Roth explains how the past hardships and sins that alter one’s life will eventually cause one to change one's own perspective on life.

Throughout American Pastoral, Roth shows how one downfall leads to the continuation of more hardships in life. Merry Levov detonates a bomb at the post office to protest the Vietnam War. This event is the first of the downfalls to occur: “The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for-American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the...