If you’re a certain type of writer — one cognizant of history and sensitive to the nuances of setting — your name may become synonymous with the place you’re writing about. Contemporaries Amiri Baraka and Philip Roth were writers like that. Not only are they recognized as children of Newark, they’re both associated with a specific moment in the city’s history.  Roth returned to the unrest of the 1960s in book after book: the Zuckerman novels, his masterpiece American Pastoral, his final work and summary statement Nemesis, and others. Baraka, who decried institutional racism, called for Black liberation, and founded the Black Arts Movement, was arrested at the peak of the uprising in 1967.  Philip Roth’s boyhood home on Summit Avenue in the Weequahic neighborhood has been designated a historic site. Amiri Baraka’s son Ras is now the mayor of the city.“There’s a deep and profound critique of Newark in their writing,” says National Book Award winner and Rutgers University Newark professor John Keene, “but there’s also great love for the city — a city they both returned to.”Keene, who grew up in St. Louis but has taught in Newark for over a decade and lives in Jersey City, acknowledges the influence of both writers on his poetry and fiction. He grappled with their legacies and their motivations on October 16 in “Roth and Baraka: Two Visions,” the ninth annual Philip Roth Lecture Series at the Newark Public Library. (Roth aficionados will remember that Neil Klugman, the protagonist of debut novella “Goodbye, Columbus,” held a low-level job at the Library.)“They’re both giants,” says Keene “and I believe they’ve guided the way their readers think about the world.”Yet their feelings about the city and its convulsions were different,  and they were expressed differently. In Philip Roth’s books, Weequahic is often presented as a fragile idyll, a tight, wholesome Jewish-American community besieged and shattered by forces beyond the control of their narrators. This world is invaded and turned inside out by social change, communicable diseases, the ravenous demands of the rest of American society, and the assimilationist desires of young Jews. In his books, Newark is a lost Eden. It’s a fallen place, a city unrecoverable, “the car theft capital of the world,” as Swede Lavov, main character of American Pastoral, memorably calls it. Newark doesn’t get off easy in Baraka’s poetry, either. His writing is full of fire, recrimination, and fury at the indifference, injustice, and casual cruelty of the ruling class of the city. But even at his most condemnatory, Baraka is always pushing, prodding, and goading his community toward a more equitable destiny. Despite the occasional violence of his verse, there’s an undercurrent of optimism in his writing — one that has proven prophetic. “On a certain level,” says Keene, “Baraka would have been very critical of Roth. Their politics were so different.”The two writers did have a sharp exchange in 1964. Philip Roth wrote a thorny review of “Dutchman,” a play by Baraka, and Baraka fired back with a reply that accused Roth of having a distorted and naïve view of the world and race relations in particular. At that time, the poet lived in Harlem and was known by the name on his birth certificate: LeRoi Jones. The former Barringer High student returned to Newark in the late ‘60s, rechristened himself, adopted explicitly Marxist politics, and turned up the heat. Jersey City’s John Keene delivered the Philip Roth lecture at the Newark Public Library on October 16“Baraka comes back to Newark for overtly political reasons,” explains Keene. “His return to Newark is grounded in radical politics. It’s linked to the Black Arts Movement, Black social empowerment, Black Power. He sees Newark as the place to do this.”“He’d traveled. He spent time D.C. That’s broad vision is part of what’s important about Amiri Baraka. He was both a local leader and a national figure. He was one of the people who helped to push for the Black political convention. He was doing work that resonated on a local level but also had implications for larger movements.”After establishing himself as a novelist, Philip Roth taught for many years at the University of Pennsylvania and lived in Manhattan and rural Connecticut. But his fiction hung stubbornly in Newark. He was never shy about identifying the Newark Public Library as a lifeline for him as a young person. When the institution was threatened in the late ’60s, Roth made a public plea for its preservation. Upon his passing in 2018, he left seven thousand books to the NYPL — a collection that’s now accessible to Library visitors. “He was a writer of extraordinary skill,” says Keene, who remembers encountering the controversial, lust-soaked Portnoy’s Complaint as a young person. “From the sentence level to the plotting, he’s a master. He was also a person with an extraordinary imagination. His work draws upon autobiography in interesting ways. He wrote in so many modes: tragedy, comedy, satire. In his books, he dealt with race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality.”The ways in which Roth — and Baraka — treated those subjects were controversial at the time, and they remain controversial now. Roth’s treatment of his female characters has never been gentle. Some of Baraka’s early verse is aggressively homophobic. Both authors celebrated a brawny sort of masculinity that’s currently out of fashion. It’s hard to imagine contemporary publishers, squeamish as they are, letting any of that slide. Keene acknowledges the troublesome side of these writers’ works, but reminds us that they were men of their time, registering honest reactions to the world as they found it. “I would say the vast majority of Black American writers,” says Keene of Baraka’s enduring importance, “have had their consciousness shaped by the Black Arts Movement whether they know it or not, or whether they’ve accepted or rejected it. There were many components of his work that drew from the Movement, including things as simple as self-affirmation and taking pride as a Black writer.” The post Jersey City Poet John Keene Gives Talk on Philip Roth and Amiri Baraka appeared first on Jersey City Times.