Philip Roth
Nemesi

Nέμεσις (Nemesis) from Greek to distribute, was the name of the goddess "Distributor of Justice" while in this latest work by Philip Roth ehm, is distributed polio, with an epidemic in 1944 in a Jewish community in a neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey (the hometown of PR where he has set several of his novels, including “American Pastoral” in 1997, “The Human Stain” in 2000, “The Plot Against America” in 2004, and the very first “Goodbye, Columbus” in 1959…) here especially children are threatened with mutilation, paralysis, permanent disability, and death, panic spreads in the small community and to face it is Bucky Cantor (who looks after the playground and its young students even during the extra-school summer period), a twenty-three-year-old physical education teacher, vigorous and respectful, a javelin thrower and weightlifter, who feels guilty because his weak eyesight excluded him from serving in the war alongside his peers and close friends.

The beloved fiancée of Cantor (a fellow teacher working as a counselor at a Jewish summer camp) Marcia Steinberg, fearing that Cantor might catch polio if he stays in the city during the summer, implores him to leave his job in Newark and join her in her summer camp free from the highly dangerous disease.

Cantor wants to be with his fiancée, and leaving the boys of Newark adds to his other feelings of guilt.

With the inevitability of a Greek drama, polio also reaches the summer camp.

A camper dies, many fall ill, and Cantor himself is affected.

Ça va sans dire that Cantor blames himself for bringing polio into the camp.

Roth examines some of the central themes of contagion: fear, panic, anger, guilt, bewilderment, suffering, and pain.

The novel ends in 1971, when Cantor meets at a gas station where he works, one of the children from the Newark playground who had contracted polio and has survived since then, Arnie Mesnikoff.

Recalling the events of their lives since 1944, Cantor reveals to him that, after being paralyzed by polio, he insisted that his fiancée Marcia Steinberg (despite her insistent pleas to stay together and get married) leave him and find a husband who was not disabled.

Cantor will never marry, he firmly broke the engagement with Marcia Steinberg despite her (his) resistance, and then he drifted with odd jobs through a solitary and isolated life.

Cantor remained angry with God and himself, while Arnie Mesnikoff built a successful business that converts homes and buildings to meet the needs of the disabled and is an atheist who simply sees his disability as one of the coincidences to be dealt with in human life.

The novel is written in the narrative voice of that playground child (Arnie Mesnikoff) now grown-up, based on what Cantor had told him in 1971, who tries to rescue him morally by advising him to “Don't be against yourself. There is enough cruelty in the world. Don't make things worse by making yourself the scapegoat”.

Three curiosities, no more:

Nemesis was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2011, honoring "the best of medicine in literature".

In 2012, Philip Roth told an interviewer that Nemesis would be his last novel (the thirty-first), and it was.

The idea for this novel came to PR thinking of his ex-girlfriend Mia Farrow, who suffered from polio during her childhood.

p.s. having read the ebook more than a year ago, I had many mental gaps and without the help of wikipedia it would have been difficult for me to now have the desire to write about it, as I would have had to read it again, and nothing, I can't manage…