Necessary Encounters: Revisiting Philip Roth's Central-European Legacy

Abstract: This article focuses primarily on Philip Roth's 1976-1990 interviews with Central-European writers, collected in his 2001 collection Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work . Current developments at the Eastern borders of Europe in the aftermath of Russia's invasion of the Ukraine trigger my reexamination of this part of Roth's nonfiction and inform my claim that in Shop Talk , as in his editorship of Penguin's "Writers from the Other Europe" series (1974-89), Roth has contributed to opening the American mind to aspects of "the other Europe" that might have otherwise remained unexplored. The selection of passages from Roth's work as critic and interlocutor is meant to illustrate sociohistorical intricacies of a cultural space that still sparks tension, confusion, and conflict. My aim is to establish relevant connections and raise awareness of the presentness of issues that continue to frame and shape contemporary realities and debates.