Cosmopolitanism and Tragic Silence 133time, we could note the contemporaneous popularity of the eugen-
ics movement. As Edwin Black explains, the now debunked science
behind the movement developed at the turn of the century in the
west of the country and was championed by a number of Ivy League
academics. During the first few decades of the century, the ideol-
ogy was used to inform social and cultural policy in many states
(also spreading abroad to inspire the fledgling National Socialist
movement in Germany).^22 Segregation, according to Black, was but
one of the many sociopolitical expressions of eugenicist ideology in
America. Other, more assertive attempts to enforce “racial purity”
included the establishment of programs and laws that either encour-
aged or coerced the sterilization of young black Americans.^23
Clearly, the task of growing up as a black person in such a con-
text comes with considerable restrictions. The protagonist of Roth’s
novel is all too aware of these. Regardless of the fact that his com-
plexion is sufficiently pale enough for him to “pass” as Jewish, Silk’s
social status as “colored” condemns him to a life of struggle and
reduced options. It is at this juncture in the narrative that we begin
to see Roth suggesting that these dispiriting social circumstances
were the reason behind Silk’s life-altering decision. The connec-
tion is galvanized most strikingly in the memorable descriptions of
his father, whose repeated attempts to benefit materially from his
advanced cultural (particularly literary) knowledge end in humili-
ating failure. Living in an era in which culture is regulated through
the same discriminatory apparatuses that keep nonwhites out of
positions of political power, Silk’s “secretly suffering father [... ]
had inadvertently taught Coleman to want to be stupendous.”^24 H e
grows up and learns from an early age that, in spite of being well
educated, culturally refined, and an “amateur linguist, grammar-
ian, disciplinarian, and student of Shakespeare,” the most a black
man like his father can hope for is mediocrity and middle-class
comfort (p. 117). One particularly striking image of the frustrat-
ing sense of failure his father suffers is of the latter being forced, in
spite of his broad education and motivation, to find a demeaning
job in a dining car. In this environment, his adept grasp of “the
language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens” is rendered inutile
and is reduced to the linguistically disempowering and obsequious