Philip Roth’s 1959 New Yorker short story, “Defender of the Faith,” curiously anticipates the controversy that would whirl around the writer’s later work. From Letting Go and Portnoy’s Complaint through his later Sabbath, Zuckerman and “Roth” persona novels, Roth was frequently criticized by the Jewish community for satirizing the Jews — as if antisemites need his help. Canadian Mordecai Richler was similarly criticized for fiction that putatively aired his people’s soiled laundry in public. As early as this story Roth anticipates and confronts that criticism. He weaves ambivalences into irony, especially when we consider the story’s various defenders of various faiths.
The eponymous character would appear to be Sheldon Grossbart, a slimy self-server who purports to defend his fellow Jews’ rights at an American army training base. But Roth is careful to undermine this character, indeed making him as repulsive to those of his faith as he is to their enemies.
Though the plot unwinds in an American army camp, the narrative frame sets the drama in the context of WW II in Europe. At the outset, First Sergeant Nathan Marx has to his surprise been rotated away from the last days of the war in Europe to train new recruits at Camp Crowder, Missouri. Away from the war, there is still a crowd, still a mass of humanity with which to contend. His war experience has moved him from horror to numbness. At the end, Marx and his men are despatched to meet their fate in the Pacific arena.
Between those wars the story takes place in ostensibly peaceful America. But even here conflict remains, specifically between the aggressive Grossbart and his Sergeant Marx. True to his surname, Sheldon grossly trades on his Jewish identity. At their first meeting he sits on the sergeant’s desk and tries to go by their first names. He assumes the Jewish sergeant will excuse the Jewish soldiers from the Friday evening cleaning of the barracks — and prevent the other soldiers’ resentment.
In identifying Marx with his Karl and Harpo namesakes Grossbart assumes they share a historic kinship. He implicitly evokes the class politics of the former and the comic pathos of the latter, the quality that distinguishes the silent, magical Harpo from the slick, urban Groucho.
That sabbath intervention leaves Sergeant Marx feeling “tender about myself…. I felt as though a hand were reaching down inside me. It had to reach so very far to touch me! It had to reach past those days in the forests of Belgium, and past the dying I’d refused to weep over; past the nights in German farmhouses whose books we’d burned to warm us; past endless stretches when I had shut off all softness I might feel for my fellows, and had managed even to deny myself the posture of a conqueror—the swagger that I, as a Jew, might well have worn as my boots whacked against the rubble of Wesel, Münster, and Braunschweig.” Marx recovers in his revived Jewish identity the connection lost in the war. His sabbath observance revives his feeling of Jewish humanitarianism. This reminder of his sensitivity and moral compass begins the positive representation of Jewishness that will balance out Grossbart’s debasement.
That ancient kinship dwindles as Grossbart exploits it. Even at that first service “I thought I heard Grossbart cackle, ‘Let the goyim clean the floors!’” He later purports to advocate for lantzmen Larry Fishbein and Mickey Halpern, but that only hides his self-service. In their supposed interest he writes a formal complaint — fraudulently, in his father’s name — against the non-kosher food. In a phone call from a superior, Captain Barrett deflects the political complaint: “‘Sir?’ he said. ‘Sir—Marx, here, tells me Jews have a tendency to be pushy. He says he thinks we can settle it right here in the company.’” Roth puts the generalized charge of Jewish pushiness into the mouth of a lying, unsympathetic Gentile officer.
To excuse his belligerence Grossbart has the chutzpah to cite the war he resists: “‘That’s what happened in Germany,’ Grossbart was saying, loud enough for me to hear. ‘They didn’t stick together. They let themselves get pushed around.’” But Captain Barrett trumps that: “‘Look, Grossbart…. Who does more for the Jews—you, by throwing up over a lousy piece of sausage, a piece of first-cut meat, or Marx, by killing those Nazi bastards? If I was a Jew, Grossbart, I’d kiss this man’s feet. He’s a goddam hero, and he eats what we give him.’” Yet Grossbart keeps playing the victim card: “I don’t want to start trouble. That’s the first thing they toss up to us.” Another Grossbart letter putatively from his father strategically exalts Sergeant Marx for his efforts.
After a brief pause in his campaign Grossbart maneuvers a weekend pass supposedly to attend an aunt’s seder in St Louis. Reminded that Passover has passed, he avows she plans a special ceremonial meal for him. He expands the request to include his two compatriots. In another defence of Jewish values Marx questions his reluctance to submit to Grossbart’s demands: “But my grandmother knew—mercy overrides justice. I should have known it, too. Who was Nathan Marx to be such a penny pincher with kindness? Surely, I thought, the Messiah himself—if He should ever come—won’t niggle over nickels and dimes. God willing, he’ll hug and kiss.”
Having granted the three their weekend pass, Marx learns the entire request was a lie. The promised gefilte fish turns into a Chinese egg roll. Marx throws out Grossbart’s gift, which delights one happy soldier the next morn: ”’Egg roll!’ he shouted. ‘Holy Christ, Chinese goddam egg roll!’” The oath makes the revelation comically religious.
In Grossbart’s climactic fraud he evades the draft to the Pacific theatre. He gets only himself exempted, not his two coreligionists. Marx counters with his own deception. With a Grossbartian ploy he has Grossbart reinstated supposedly at his own request. At this Grossbart drops all pretence of kinship. In fake concern for his father, Grossbart attacks his erstwhile comrade Marx: “He hasn’t had enough troubles in a lifetime, you’ve got to add to them. I curse the day I ever met you, Marx! Shulman told me what happened over there. There’s no limit to your anti-Semitism, is there? The damage you’ve done here isn’t enough. You have to make a special phone call! You really want me dead!”
As the soldiers prepare for their possibly one-way trip to war, Marx resists “with all my will an impulse to turn and seek pardon for my vindictiveness.” Unlike Grossbart Marx has a conscience — and the ethical grounds here to suppress it. With his interference and false phone claim the sergeant has truly defended his faith as an American, a Jew, a soldier. To counter Grossbart’s selfish wiles he practices one.
Roth clearly subordinates defending the faith to defending the values. That is the true difference between “a company of soldiers here, and … a company of boys,” as Captain Barrett remarked at the outset. The faith does not protect its abusers and malpractitioners. Roth uses Grossbart to remind us we can judge a Jew without judging the Jews. In Marx's subversion of his coreligionist Roth rebuts the traditional calumny that Jews place their own people against their state of citizenship and therefore cannot be trusted.
The WW II setting provides a macro version of the title. America and its Allies defend their national values, their “faith.” The characterization of the officers may undercut that assumption, expanding Roth’s target from the Jews to include the gentiles too, indeed Western Civilization. Captain Barrett — whose name implies self-exposure — reveals his own instinctive bigotry: “‘Marx, I’d fight side by side with a nigger if the fella proved to me he was a man. I pride myself,’ he said, looking out the window, ‘that I’ve got an open mind. … Consequently, Sergeant, nobody gets special treatment here, for the good or the bad.’ He turned from the window and pointed a finger at me. ‘You’re a Jewish fella, am I right, Marx?’” The repeated "fella" reveals the good officer's detachment from any Other.
Even the captain’s military manliness is undermined by “the buttons straining to hold his blouse across his belly.” That “blouse” jars against the military uniform. So too the primeval Corporal Robert LaHill, “a dark, burly fellow whose hair curled out of his clothes wherever it could. He had a glaze in his eyes that made one think of caves and dinosaurs.“ Roth here presents a spectrum of prejudice/civilization -- as he does a spectrum of defenders of the faith.
For the army as for the individual soldier the highest motive is to be guarded against the baser instincts of self-service, delusion and prejudice. There are many false “defenders of the faith” but their failings don’t detract from those of honest virtue. Here the principled pragmatic Sergeant Marx is the true defender of the faith, both against its fraudulent abuser and the somewhat ambivalent institution Marx serves.
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