When working-class Newarkian Neil Klugman in Goodbye, Columbus phones affluent Jewish American princess Brenda Patimkin and launches into his “you-don't-know-my-name-but-I-held-your-glasses-for-you-at-the-club” “speech,” she answers him, quite naturally enough, by asking him what he looks like. “I'm … dark,” he answers; “Are you a Negro?” she responds. “No,” he replies. Pages later the conversation repeats, in painfully truncated form. Asked what his cousin looks like, he responds: “She's dark-” “Is she-” “No.”

How are we to understand the placement of this conversation in a novel essentially concerned not with blacks but with Jewish Americans? And what, further, are we to do with that “no,” Neil's refusal of likeness between himself and the “Negro”? The answers to both questions might seem obvious enough, and wholly objectionable, on both Neil's part and on Roth's as well, were it not for an even more dominant and pervasive pattern through the novel. This is the book's affirmation of a genuine similarity, verging on consanguinity, between blacks and Jews, as much on Neil's part as on Roth's.