Philip Roth and the “End of the Holocaust”

ABSTRACT:Philip Roth’s 2007 novel, Exit Ghost, the final installment of the long-running Zuckerman series, examines the ways a writer’s legacy can be transformed after death. This essay considers how Roth’s novel extends the problem of a writer’s posthumous reputation to the problem of Holocaust memory in a coming world without witnesses. In Exit Ghost, the failure of Nathan Zuckerman and Amy Bellette to prevent the publication of a biography that will transform the reputation of another dead writer points toward the scandalizing process by which the Holocaust itself may be rendered unrecognizable with the passage of time. This essay further understands the motivations and limitations of the late-life alliance between Nathan and Amy through the lens of the last work of Italian writer and survivor, Primo Levi—a work referred to by Amy in Exit Ghost that is painfully attuned to the challenges facing Holocaust memory at the end of the twentieth century.