Family secrets

Marco Roth tackles encrypted transmissions from his father in a tale of family deceptions.

By JUDY BOLTON FASMAN
The Scientists A Family Romance (photo credit: Courtesy)
The Scientists A Family Romance
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Secrets are as ubiquitous and distinctive as a family’s DNA. And secrets form the nucleus of literary critic and academic Marco Roth’s fine new memoir and first book, “The Scientists: A Family Romance.”
As Roth ably demonstrates, a writer not only grapples with uncovering secrets but must also have mastery over the sweet anticipation of the revelation. The result for Roth is the impulse to make memoir out of memories. “What I learned and what I failed to learn interests me, because, whatever I am, I am not an unbroken storyline. If I have more-than-ordinary need to relive the past on the page, it may be because I have a more-than-ordinary fear of reliving that past elsewhere.”
Roth and his father Eugene Roth Jr. share center stage in “The Scientists”; his mother is relegated to the background. The elder Roth, a researcher in New York, working on sickle-cell anemia, contracted the HIV virus when he accidentally pricked himself with a needle from an infected patient. “My microscopic sibling, HIV,” writes Roth, “must have arrived sometime when I was in second or third grade.” However, Roth wasn’t aware that his father had HIV until he was 14 years old. Five years later, the elder Roth’s condition deteriorated. He ended his life by taking cyanide.
The author sifts through the clues of the life his father led, and its accompanying silences and evasions. It’s not surprising that Roth doesn’t give AIDS, one of the most politicized diseases in recent history, a social, political or even cultural context. For the purposes of his story, the disease is viewed solely from the perspective of its role in his family lore. This is the illness that shadowed Roth’s early life and transformed his father’s death into a dream, an event that Roth “remembered before it actually happened.” What would otherwise have been political is uniquely personal in this book.
Apart from AIDS, though, what looms large in the dark Central Park West apartment in which the writer grew up, are the tall bookcases in which science texts mingled with Russian novels in English. The family was nominally Jewish. Eugene briefly flirted with Orthodox Judaism and learned Yiddish mainly to rebel against his egomaniacal father, who flouted Eastern European Jewish tradition by giving his son the same name as himself. Marco, an only child, recalls his mother telling him that when Eugene was born his father held him aloft and proclaimed that he was born free.
Judaism and Zionism were, though, ultimately foreign to Eugene. His alienation from Judaism was such that he expressly forbade his wife and son to say Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, for him. In some ways this memoir, subtitled “A Family Romance,” is as much an unspoken Kaddish as it is a microcosm of the Russian novels so beloved by Eugene. Think of the “Anna Karenina” principle that all happy families are alike, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. Roth is not the only writer in the family. Six years after Eugene’s death in 1999, his sister, the novelist and memoirist Anne Roiphe (a contributor to The Jerusalem Report), published “1185 Park Avenue,” an account of their gloomy, loveless childhood. Roiphe pierced the veil of secrecy that dominated her younger brother’s life by strongly inferring that Eugene contracted AIDS as a result of being a sexually active gay man. Roth quotes his aunt, “…if his AIDS was in fact contracted in the more usual way I would have been heartbroken – heartbroken because he would have lived so long bending beneath the deceptions forged in other ignorant and cruel times.”
Roth responds, “I stumbled over these sentences. Why would anyone write such a thing in a work of ‘non-fiction memoir?’ I wondered. She was outing him without outing him.” He adds, “I realized I had only one question for her. What did she know? Who or what were her sources? I didn’t want to sue her or protest, only to demand what she also wanted – ‘the full truth.’”
Roth is spurred on by his aunt’s biography to pursue a fuller truth about his father. Although he never confronts Roiphe directly, he suggests that her “version of the family script” was influenced by her own older daughter’s battle with heroin addiction and AIDS.
Ultimately, though, Roth retreats from the heat generated by family truth-seeking and speculation. He returns to the Russian masters his father pressed into his hands when he was in high school. He rereads Ivan Goncharov’s “Oblomov” and Ivan Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons,” sifting for literary clues, listening for messages that the father meant to impart to his son. “Perhaps, for all the moments of resonance with my own life that I’d recognized on the few occasions that I’d followed my father’s recommendations and read about these ambivalent and doomed young men,” writes Roth, “it was my father’s life all along that he was trying to pass on to me through these encrypted transmissions of what it felt like to be him.”
Those moments of filial identification often get buried in the last third of the book, which goes on too long about various Russian literary masters. Roth’s discursiveness fails to convey enthusiasm for his extensive reading and doesn’t advance the story of family deceptions in which the reader has become so invested.
What this reader latched on to, and I suspect others will as well, are the atmospheric details of a time and place weighted down in secrecy and trapped in a “family romance” that the author is compelled to relive on the page.