New York City

New York City becomes more than the American destination Philip Roth returns to from England: it is the place where homecoming becomes perceptible in the body and in the street. Remembered through Eighty-first Street, encountered on long walks, and heard in the city’s argumentative public life, it offers a forceful contrast to his years abroad. Its significance lies not in uncomplicated comfort, but in the recognition that the unruly qualities that once might have seemed abrasive are also signs of belonging.

An immigrant’s New York

Olina’s account places New York within a different history of arrival. She describes herself as a Czechoslovakian woman who emigrated to the United States in 1968, after Russian tanks entered her country, and spent six years in America, living on the Upper East Side. The city appears in her story as a new home she fell in love with, a setting for rapid adaptation and for the pursuit of a life that might combine work, desire, and romance. She studied acting, reached a bikini test for Paramount but went no further, and then entered fashion; dissatisfied, she turned toward the possibility of writing a book.

Her memories of the Upper East Side are not simply a record of opportunity. She recalls the glamour and sexual disappointments of the world she entered: a celebrity building, a beautiful Black model whose garbage she volunteered to take out, and an actor who brought her to visit his girlfriend and made love to both women but brought the other woman to climax. Later, modelling a black Valentino dress, she went to bars at the Pierre and the Plaza hoping to discover whether men would like her. Their excessive attention made her hate her body; she tried to bind her breasts beneath her clothes and took voice and speech lessons to lose her accent. In her telling, New York’s attractions and its judgments are entangled: glamour offers access, but does not deliver the love she wants.

A remembered life on Eighty-first Street

For Philip, Eighty-first Street compresses an earlier New York life into a phrase he uses to compare the present with London. Asked what life there is like, he says it is not much different from the time he and his companion were criminals on Eighty-first Street. The joke makes the city a place of shared past transgression, not merely a backdrop to ordinary domestic life. Years later, the same address returns in his explanation of the writing that has distressed his wife: he recalls Rosalie Nichols arriving with her husband when they were moving from England, and says that he drew on her England and marriage in the English woman of his notebook.

The notebook dispute gives New York another kind of geography: bedroom, writing room, and the past carried between them. Philip explains that he sometimes sat in the bedroom while his wife slept and invented conversations with an imagined woman, as well as with other women. He presents the writing as both a form of imagined infidelity and a working practice, and describes it as mourning for a life he had led before marriage. His account also connects the fictional English woman to what he has observed while living in England and what he learned from Rosalie Nichols. New York thus holds the domestic scene in which the notebook is read and contested, while the city’s earlier streets and relationships supply parts of the material being turned into fiction.

The return and the recognition of home

After returning from England, Philip takes long walks through New York. Only after he has been back for several months does he fully recognize what he had missed; at intervals, he hears himself say aloud that he is home. The delayed recognition matters: homecoming is not presented as a conclusion reached at the border or airport, but as a meaning that surfaces during repeated movement through familiar streets.

What he finds missing is a particular public presence of Jewish life. He describes the Jews of New York as forceful, argumentative, brash, and unashamed, and calls the city an obstreperous Jewish center. His comparison makes the contrast with England emphatic: even Tel Aviv seems too Christian to him after London. This is Philip’s subjective account of belonging, not a neutral portrait of every New Yorker or every Jewish community. The city feels restorative because it lets him encounter Jewishness as conspicuous and contentious rather than muted or distant.

Street life and belonging

The return’s emotional force is clearest in Philip’s response to everyday confrontation. Driving to New Jersey to visit his father, he emerges from the Lincoln Tunnel and is called an asshole by a driver in the next car, without knowing what he has done to provoke the insult. Instead of taking offense, he smiles and encourages the man to press the accusation. The encounter condenses the city he welcomes: a place where strangers openly contest one another and where even an unexplained insult can feel like evidence of life lived without excessive deference.

He also watches Ed Koch, the Jewish mayor his liberal friends dislike, gesturing on television. Philip responds with affection to the mayor’s conspicuously ethnic manner, treating it as a public performance that draws him closer rather than putting him off. Together, the televised mayor and the driver at the tunnel turn New York’s argumentative energy into a form of recognition. Philip ends by accepting that he has returned to the bosom of the tribe, while also finding the fact odd. The city’s welcome is therefore both intimate and ironic: home is not a place without friction, but the place where friction itself can feel familiar, human, and rejuvenating.