In Philip Roth's novella The Ghost Writer (1979), American novelist Nathan Zuckerman tells us a story that took place on December 9 and 10, 1956, when he was 23 years old. Four of his short stories had recently been published in literary magazines, and he has been invited to the home of E. I. Lonoff (then in his 50s and just five years before his death), the author who Zuckerman most reveres. Zuckerman has brought some baggage to Lonoff's quiet house in the Berkshire's. He has recently drawn on some unsavory aspects of his own family history to write his most ambitious story yet. But it's a story his father believes should not be published, for it will simply reinforce all the anti-Semitic stereotypes held by the Gentiles. His father even brings to the story to Judge Leopold Wapter (who functions as a kind of secular Rabbi to the Zuckermans) who asks Nathan in a letter "Can you honestly say that there is anything in your short story that would not warm the heart of a Julius Streicher or Read More...