Philip Roth’s decision to write a fable of American politics and hate was less about surface prejudice than it was about every human being’s capacity to ignore the suffering of others. “The deepest reward in the writing and what lends the story its pathos wasn’t the resurrection of my family circa 1941 but the invention of the family downstairs, of the tragic Wishnows, on whom the full brunt of the anti-Semitism falls – the invention particularly of the Wishnows’ little boy, Seldon, that nice, lonely little kid in your class whom you run away from when you’re yourself a kid because he demands to be befriended by you in ways that another child cannot stand. He’s the responsibility that you can’t get rid of.”