Comparing Philip Roth and Amiri Baraka, Newark’s ‘near-exact contemporaries’

Newark Natives Philip Roth and Amiri Baraka, two of the city’s most acclaimed literary figures, were “near-exact contemporaries,” award-winning poet, author and educator John Keene said on Wednesday, delivering the annual Philip Roth Lecture at the Newark Public Library.

The two were born 19 months apart, Roth on March 19, 1933, and Baraka on Oct. 7, 1934. And while Roth went to Weequahic High School and Baraka to Barringer, they both enrolled at Rutgers-Newark. Both transferred out after their freshman year, Keene said, to escape the social and intellectual confines of their birthplace, only to return to Newark years later with fresh perspectives, either physically or in their writing. Both are gone: Baraka in 2014, at 79; Roth four years later, at 85.

“There are so many similarities,” Keene said in an interview before his talk. “They both went to Rutgers-Newark. They both served in the military, Baraka in the Air Force as a sergeant, Roth for a much briefer period of time. They both wrote extensively about their hometown. But they both had to leave their hometown. They couldn’t stay in Newark.”

The Roth lecture is a signature event of the library, where the author spent countless hours in his youth and later researched his famously autobiographical books. He donated his collection of 7,000 volumes, plus $2 million to maintain them, now housed in the library’s Philip Roth Room.

“The fact that we have Philip Roth’s personal library makes us unique,” the library’s director, Christian Zabriskie, told the Wednesday night crowd of about 100 local literati.

The lecture, which is in its 9th year, has been given by well-known authors, including biographer Robert Caro and novelist Salman Rushdie. Keene has been a literary light in his own right, with critically acclaimed works including his 1995 novel Annotations, the 2015 short story collection Counternarratives, and most recently, Punks: New and Selected Poems, a National Book Award winner in 2022.

Born in St. Louis in 1965, Keene went to Harvard as an undergrad, then Columbia for his master’s, and taught at Northwestern University. He’s now a distinguished professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, where he chairs the African American and African Studies Department.

Keene’s been called, “one of the most brilliant and imaginative fiction writers working in the U.S. today,” though as a working author, he sat at a folding table hawking copies of Punks during a reception in the library after the lecture.

Keene spent much of his hour-long talk reminding or informing listeners of his subjects’ lives and careers.

Roth is consistently ranked among a handful of America’s greatest novelists, placing third, for example, behind William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, and just ahead of John Updik in a 2012 survey by The Guardian.

Roth’s 31 books include his breakthrough 1959 novella and short story collection, Goodbye Columbus, which won him a National Book Award at age 27, his best-seller Portnoy’s Complaint, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, American Pastoral. His last book was the novel Nemesis in 2010.

Roth’s books were largely, sometimes overtly autobiographical — his narrator sometimes bore his own name — with themes that include the tension between retaining one’s Jewish identity and assimilating into mainstream American culture. For many of his books, Newark was the canvas for Roth’s unflinching portraits of himself and the Jews and Gentiles he grew up with, filled with real-life locations.

In February 2023, the Newark library and New Jersey Performing Arts Center held what they billed as the first major Roth literary festival, which included a bus tour past his house on Summit Avenue, Weequahic High School, and other locations familiar to his readers.

But Baraka may be the more familiar figure to today’s residents of Newark, a city whose population of 305,000 is about half African American, with virtually none of the Jewish families that dominated the Weequahic section when Roth grew up before and after WWII. Baraka’s name and political activism also live on in the person of his son, Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka, a spoken-word artist and outspoken arts advocate who is running for governor in 2025.

In April, Rutgers’ Express Newark space held a retrospective of Amiri Baraka’s landmark 1963 book, Blues People, which he wrote at 28, looking at the history of African Americans reflected in the evolution of music. The event included a discussion with the mayor and his half-sister, Kellie Jones, an art historian whom the elder Baraka fathered with his first wife, Hettie Cohen, during what Keene referred to as his “Bohemian (Greenwich) Village” days.

Baraka did write fiction, mainly short stories — his 2006 collection, Tales of the Out and Gone, for example, won a Pen Beyond Margins Award. But his writing took more varied forms than Roth’s, spread mainly among 30 books of poetry, a dozen plays, and another dozen works of non-fiction.

He was also an essayist and editor of works on Black culture, political power and civil rights, and was a central figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s. He left behind an extensive filmography, with over two dozen screen appearances, mainly as himself in documentaries.

“For decades, Baraka was one of the most prominent voices in the world of American literature,” states the Poetry Foundation.

The similarities between Baraka and Roth go beyond their births and occupations. Both were minorities against the backdrop of America’s white, Christian mainstream of their youth.

Both had first marriages to women outside their ethnic or religious groups: Baraka to Cohen, who was white and Jewish; Roth to an Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

Both were controversial: Roth for his sexual content and, despite being a Jew himself, charges of anti-Semitism for his unflattering portraits of Jewish characters; Baraka for what critics said was chauvinism, homophobia, and antisemitism, most notably his 9/11 poem, “Somebody Blew Up America?” which led to the elimination of his state poet laureate position when he refused to resign.

And both expressed their politics in their writing, Baraka in virtually all of his work, Roth, more overtly in some, The Plot Against America, for example, than others.

But it was the nature of their politics that was different, and eventually led to a public break between the two Newark natives, Keene said.

“I think the great divergence between the two of them was their politics,” Keene said. “Baraka was a radical from very early on, and radical in a good sense, in a sense that he was very unsatisfied with the state of things. He believed in liberation, Black liberation, in Black separatism. In his Marxist phase in the 70s. He really believed in a kind of global liberation of oppressed people.

“And even before his politics became so overtly radical, he was part of the (Greenwich) Village Bohemian scene,” Keene continued, referring to a period before he changed his name from Leroi Jones, which he had adopted from his birth name, Everett Leroy Jones. “So, he was always kind of pushing against the mainstream in some way, both in terms of his art and in terms of his life.”

Baraka also took a hands-on approach to politics, known nearly as much for his political activism as his writing. He and his wife, Amina Baraka, were closely involved in the effort to elect Kenneth Gibson as Newark’s first Black mayor in 1970.

“Philip Roth, I would say, was probably more of a mainstream liberal in terms of his attitudes,” Keene said. “So I feel like, you know, it was really where their politics diverged. And this led to some contention between the two of them over the years.”

The difference led to criticism, which led to hostility. For example, Keene cited an early public exchange following the debut of Baraka’s Obie Award-winning 1964 play “Dutchman,” about a white seductress’ killing of a younger Black man. Keene quotes Roth’s criticism of Baraka for having “let the white audience off much too easily” and Baraka’s retort that Roth is, among other things, “feebleminded.”

Decades later, the animus reached a pitch during the poet laureate saga. In his poem, Baraka suggested that Israel had advance knowledge of the attack, writing, “Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers/To stay home that day?”

He rejected accusations that the poem was antisemitic, noting his use of “Israeli” rather than “Jewish.” But Roth was among those who weren’t convinced and further belittled Baraka as “a ridiculously untalented poet to boot,” according to a 2021 Roth biography by Blake Bailey.

“The divergence of these two sons of Newark was growing wider by the book,” Keene told the library crowd, “and by the day.”

Comparing Philip Roth and Amiri Baraka, Newark’s ‘near-exact contemporaries’ – Mosaic