Professor Chronicles Family Legacy Through the Lens of His Father’s Jewish Bookstore
Writing about family, Laurence Roth says, is never easy. His new book, Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore, explores his own life and his father’s as owner of one of the United States’ most respected Jewish bookstores and the complicated legacy it left behind.
“When you’re writing about family, it’s tough,” says Roth, Charles B. Degenstein Professor of English at Susquehanna. “You’re figuring out what to write, how to write it and how to navigate all the family issues that are part of the story.”
J. Roth/Bookseller of Fine & Scholarly Judaica lies at the center of Roth’s story. His father, Jack, now 93 and living with dementia, and his mother, Rochelle, 88, offered their son differing recollections about the store, which was one of the premier Jewish bookstores in America and a Los Angeles mainstay between 1966 and 1994. To better understand his family’s place in a larger narrative, Roth researched the evolution of Jewish bookselling in the United States — from the first Jew who ran a general bookstore in the 18th century to 19th-century Jewish bookshops on New York’s Lower East Side to mid-century ones in Los Angeles.
He also tracked the growth and decline of independent bookstores in the U.S.
“In 1994, there were a little over 7,000 independent bookstores in the United States, but there are only half as many today. The rise of Amazon decimated bookstores at the turn of the 21st century,” Roth says. “So many independent stores go unremarked in history and when they disappear, they’re too often completely forgotten.”
Jack Roth’s bookstore — first at 1070 South La Cienega Boulevard, then at 9427 West Pico Boulevard, and finally at 9020 West Olympic Boulevard — was what he believed a good bookstore should be: “clean, well-lighted” and free of tchotchkes. He wanted to serve the full spectrum of Jewish readers, and as time marched forward, he added more progressive topics from Jewish feminists and members of the LGBTQ community.
“That became his liability,” Roth says of his father’s decision. “A group of neo-traditionalist, Orthodox Jews boycotted the store and that, combined with the rise of retail giants, led to the store’s demise.”
Roth’s book is nearly 20 years in the making, first taking seed in 2006 when he presented Susquehanna’s John C. Horn Lecture. The presentation later became a book chapter and then a course before Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore arrived from Rutgers University Press last year.
Part critical analysis, part memoir, Roth’s book shares with readers his personal account of growing up in his father’s bookstore and the toll it took on his family.
“Everyone thinks it would be so much fun to own a bookstore, but it comes with a cost,” Roth says. “My father exhibited the traits of a collector — everything must be in its place, displayed just right. That kind of impulse, when you apply it to a family, leads to some real tension.”
Still, Roth sees Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore as part of a larger narrative about the role of independent booksellers in American life.
“Independent bookstores create community,” he adds. “They give readers and writers a place to meet and talk about the stories we need and want. That’s still essential today.”
Roth also directs the Jewish & Israel Studies Program and the Build Collaborative at Susquehanna. He is the author of Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories (Rutgers University Press, 2003) and coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures (Routledge, 2015).
