Jewish identity and belonging

Jewish identity and belonging take shape in Nathan's homecoming as a discovery of what he had been longing for without fully knowing it. After returning from England to New York City, he finds that the city's conspicuous, combative Jewish life gives him a sense of recognition that London could not provide. Belonging here is neither an abstract inheritance nor a quiet assurance; it is a vivid public presence, experienced through voices, manners, irritation, and conflict.

Homecoming and Recognition

Nathan describes walking through New York City and, from time to time, stopping with a smile as he hears himself say, "Home." The recognition arrives gradually. He explains that he had been back for several months before he understood what he had missed so acutely. Homecoming therefore precedes its explanation: the city first restores a feeling, and only afterward can he name its source.

That source is Jews. The simple answer gives the exchange its force because Nathan does not present his longing as a carefully reasoned conclusion. It emerges as a belated recognition of an absence. His account makes identity something encountered in a particular place and among other people, not merely something privately possessed.

The distinction matters to his sense of return. Nathan does not say that England contains no Jews; his companion points out that it does. His reply is about the kind of presence he associates with New York City. What he missed was not a population counted against another population, but a way of occupying public life that he felt was more forceful and less guarded.

New York and England

Nathan characterizes the Jews he longs for through a deliberately unruly catalogue: argumentative, brash, angry, impudent, and unwilling to accommodate. He imagines them eating with their elbows on the table and getting under other people's skin. These traits are not offered as a neutral inventory of Jewish people. They are the terms of Nathan's personal, comic ideal of belonging: a community whose visibility and friction make it impossible to mistake for a polite abstraction.

The contrast with England is pointed. When his companion suggests that England was too Christian for him, Nathan answers by extending the joke to Tel Aviv, which he calls too Christian by comparison with New York City. The exaggeration overturns a simple contrast between Jewish and non-Jewish places. For Nathan, the decisive measure is not religious or national classification alone, but the intensity of Jewish life as he experiences it in the city he has returned to.

His reference to New York as an obstreperous Zion makes the contrast still sharper. The phrase turns the city into a joking alternative to a more formal idea of Jewish national belonging. Nathan's attachment is expressed not through solemnity but through noise, disagreement, and everyday unruliness. The comic register does not cancel the seriousness of his homesickness; it is the language through which he can acknowledge it without making it sentimental.

Public Friction and Jewish Presence

Nathan makes that attachment concrete through his response to Ed Koch, whom he identifies as the Jewish mayor his liberal friends dislike. On television, Koch's emphatic gestures and voice move Nathan to lean forward and kiss the screen. The gesture is intimate and comic, but its object is public: Nathan responds to a Jewish political figure's conspicuousness, not to a private memory or a ritual observance.

A roadside encounter gives the same idea a rougher, unscripted form. Driving toward New Jersey to visit his father, Nathan emerges from the Lincoln Tunnel and is called an asshole by a driver in the next car. He says he does not know what he has done wrong, yet smiles and urges the stranger to intensify the confrontation. The insult matters less as an account of a dispute than as an instance of the truculence Nathan welcomes. He experiences the driver's unrestrained aggression as invigorating, as evidence of a social world in which people push to be first and do not soften their presence for the sake of accommodation.

Nathan's language makes this enthusiasm provocative. He embraces qualities that polite accounts of communal identity might treat as defects: complaint, anger, and impudence. In his telling, these are not simply personal habits but signs that Jewish life has force and appetite. His claim remains his own, shaped by a returner's sharpened perception; the scene does not establish a universal definition of Jewish identity. It shows instead what this particular homecoming makes newly valuable to him.

Exile, Return, and the Limits of the Metaphor

Nathan's companion describes his return as a return to the bosom of the tribe. Nathan accepts the description and calls it odd, while she finds it unsurprising. Their exchange captures a small but important tension: Nathan has experienced the need for Jewish belonging as a revelation, yet the idea of going home seems legible to the person who has watched him return. The feeling is personal, but it also draws on a familiar narrative of departure and recognition.

The conversation makes that narrative explicit by invoking the Odyssey as an epic of exile and return. The companion then asks which role she occupies in Nathan's version, offering Nausicaa and Calypso as possibilities. The allusion keeps the homecoming from settling into a simple story of recovery. Nathan has returned to a place where he recognizes a missing part of himself, but the exchange also recalls that his life in England involved relationships and a history that cannot be erased by arrival. Belonging is renewed, not made uncomplicated.

Elsewhere, the book recounts political pressure surrounding movement between countries: Philip Roth describes being stopped by police in Prague in 1975, escaping on a trolley, and later being unable to obtain another visa to Czechoslovakia. That episode is not presented as an account of Jewish identity, and its political coercion should not be confused with Nathan's experience of cultural return. Read beside the homecoming, however, it underscores how different kinds of belonging can be shaped by borders: one scene turns on a felt recognition of communal life, while the other shows state power constraining travel and association. Nathan's return to New York City is significant precisely as a personal and cultural homecoming, rather than a claim that every form of displacement is the same.