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elleng

(130,126 posts)
Sun Apr 21, 2013, 01:24 PM Apr 2013

In Memory of a Friend, Teacher and Mentor

by Phillip Roth

'This book about a boy and his men opens with a brief portrait of Murray Ringold, the Ringold brother who is not violent and whose rage is tempered and reserved for unwarrantable injustice. Murray Ringold, by the way, undergoes an education of his own. So too did Bob, of course, when, impaled suddenly on his moment in time, caught in the trap set to ruin so many promising careers of that American era — a casualty like thousands of others of the first shameful decade in his country’s postwar history — he was forced for six years out of the Newark school system and his chosen profession, expelled as a political deviant and a dangerous man to let loose on the young.

I refer now not to a boy’s but to an adult’s education: in loss, grief and, that inescapable component of living, betrayal. Bob had iron in him and he resisted the outrage of the injustice with extraordinary courage and bravery, but he was a man, and he felt it as a man, and so he suffered too.

I hope that in my novel I have given ample recognition to the qualities of our late, legendary and noble friend, who understood, as did the poet Charles Péguy, that “tyranny is always better organized than freedom.” I don’t know how Péguy found this out, but Bob learned it the hard way.'

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/in-memory-of-a-friend-teacher-and-mentor.html?hp&_r=0

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In Memory of a Friend, Teacher and Mentor (Original Post) elleng Apr 2013 OP
K & R mgc1961 Apr 2013 #1
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