That would elevate the future author far beyond his parents - socially, intellectually and professionally. His hard work paid for the elixir, higher education, Two generations removed from Galicia (now in Ukraine), with only an eighth-grade education, Roth’s father was a salesman for Metropolitan Life in Newark, New Jersey. We see “the poignant abyss” between the pair. Philip Roth’s mother had been “a good-natured, even-tempered, untroublesome partner whose faults and failings could correct unceasingly.” Through the son, we come to know the father as a “pitiless realist” who tossed out his wife’s clothes hours after she died. In the end, they decide against all surgeries and try to deal with the effects of the growing tumor, which leaves Herman Roth disfigured with facial paralysis, deaf in one ear and blind in one eye. The questionable results and protracted recovery left father and son bewildered and frustrated as they tried to make wracking decisions about prolonging life and postponing death. With unsparing prose, Roth chronicles the last two years of his father’s life, which became a horrifying excursion into modern medicine - different doctors with various diagnoses and misdiagnoses, some of which required crippling surgeries by men the author “wouldn’t trust to carve my Thanksgiving turkey.” In “Patrimony: A True Story,” published in 1991, Philip Roth made that journey with his 86-year-old father, who had been struck by a virulent brain tumor, leaving him “utterly isolated within a body that had become a terrifying escape-proof enclosure, the holding pen in a slaughterhouse.” It is a trip that will inevitably lead to the grave, and that final farewell can bring crushing grief One of life’s toughest journeys is accompanying a loved one into old age or disability. WORTH A REVISIT: PHILIP ROTH’S PLAINSPOKEN, POIGNANT MEMOIR

Patrimony a true story