Philip Roth, Czechoslovakia, Prague, traveling, immigrants, totalitarian regime

This article, introduced by my personal interview with the Jewish American writer Philip Roth, examines the roots of Roth?s interest in Czechoslovakia and the ways in which the country - and Czech characters - are reflected in his fiction. It focuses on three works in which Roth depicted Czechoslovakia or Czech immigrants - The Prague Orgy, The Professor of Desire and Deception. Roth?s interest in the Czech nation, and in Eastern and Central Europe generally, had both personal and political dimensions, which are voiced to the greatest extent in the novella The Prague Orgy; this work compares uprooted Czech immigrants in New York with the persecuted dissident artists and intellectuals of Prague in the 1970s.

This article, introduced by my personal interview with the Jewish American writer Philip Roth, examines the roots of Roth?s interest in Czechoslovakia and the ways in which the country - and Czech characters - are reflected in his fiction. It focuses on three works in which Roth depicted Czechoslovakia or Czech immigrants - The Prague Orgy, The Professor of Desire and Deception. Roth?s interest in the Czech nation, and in Eastern and Central Europe generally, had both personal and political dimensions, which are voiced to the greatest extent in the novella The Prague Orgy; this work compares uprooted Czech immigrants in New York with the persecuted dissident artists and intellectuals of Prague in the 1970s. On the one hand, the despair and escapism of those Czechs who decided to remain in an internal opposition to the communist regime is determined by their deprivation of freedom, while on the other hand Roth?s account of the life of Czech émigrés in the United States is also painted in dark colors due to the novelist?s accentuation of their displacement and sense of loss. While the novella The Prague Orgy is entirely devoted to Czechs, in The Professor of Desire and Deception the portrayal of Czech characters has only an episodic character. However, even in these two works, Roth managed to present the characters? dramatic personal life stories in a close connection with the political situation in their motherland.