What Philip Roth taught me about my life as a Jewish man, despite his own imperfections

Sometime in 2011 or 2012, racing in a cab to pick up my kids from school, I passed Philip Roth on the corner of West 79th Street and Central Park West. At the edge of the urban paradise where I ran each morning to keep my sanity — just as I had heard daily swims kept Roth sane at his Connecticut house — there stood my favorite novelist in a long overcoat, his left hand in one pocket, his right hand extended, palm up, leaning forward as he negotiated a lost cause with a beautiful woman.

“Negotiations and love songs are often the same thing,” another almost-Upper West Side neighbor, Paul Simon, once sang. The same could be said of Roth’s 27 novels — all negotiations of life, love, lust and self. He taught me more about all of these things than any writer I’ve ever read.

The only other time