ABOUT THIS BOOK

Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore brings to life the history of J. Roth / Bookseller of Fine & Scholarly Judaica, which was a microcosm of the Los Angeles Jewish community from 1966 to 1994 and one of the premier Jewish bookstores in the United States. Blending critical analysis with a personal account of growing up in his father’s bookstore, and connecting both to larger forces that helped shape Jewish and American book retailing in the twentieth-century, Laurence Roth crafts a richly felt narrative about his family’s Jewish experience in America. It is a reminder, too, that while most independent bookstores like J. Roth Bookseller disappear from history, these retailers often had outsized effects on their communities. Breaking with conventional modes of scholarship, Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore tells a unique and troubled story that rarely gets told, one that is both personal and analytical, theoretical but rooted in the everyday.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

LAURENCE ROTH is the Charles B. Degenstein Professor of English and director of the Jewish & Israel Studies Program and The Build Collaborative at Susquehanna University, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories (Rutgers University Press, 2003), and coeditor, with Nadia Valman, of The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures.

REVIEWS

"Roth ushers us into the history of Jewish books in a way no other literary scholar could. This remarkable book gives us an insider's tour while offering an intimate, moving portrait of one American Jewish family as well as a sharp, detailed, and thought-provoking account of how books move through and transform our lives."— Josh Lambert, author of The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature

"This beautifully rendered work brings readers into the lush spaces of a beloved Jewish bookstore in midcentury Los Angeles. Moving gracefully between memoir and a larger story about the world of Jewish books, bookstores, and American Jewish readers, Roth unpacks his father's bookstore. In so doing he rearranges the books to tell his own story."— Laura Levitt, author of The Objects that Remain

"When I was a child, my family flew to Los Angeles to see Grandpa Cal and Grandma Florence every year. On these trips, we visited the Huntington Library, the La Brea Tar Pits, the LA County Museum, and, of equal importance, J. Roth Fine and Scholarly Judaica. This spacious store was a treasure house overflowing with every kind of Jewish book. Seforim, novels, history, memoir, and children's books lined the shelves. Here, we would stock up on resources unavailable in Honolulu. Scholarly books, cookbooks, even Aleph-Bet coloring books for my sister and me. Unpacking my Father's Bookstore serves as poignant testimony to the value of old fashioned bookselling, a family business, and the transmission of Jewish knowledge through the generations--l'dor vador."— Allegra Goodman, author of Isola

"Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore is a brilliant family memoir and history of American bookselling. Attractively written and always compelling, this provides both an intimate, child's-eye view of the world and a profound understanding of the nature of cultural transformation."— Bryan Cheyette, author of The Ghetto: A Very Short Introduction

"This isn't only a paean to the legendary Los Angeles bookstore, where browsing was a hermeneutical activity, but a eulogy to a father-and-son relationship and a map of how Jewish knowledge circulated in America in the second half of the twentieth century. Kudos to Laurence Roth for hearing the call of memory. Bookstores are where our minds feel grounded and our hearts find meaning."— Ilan Stavans, coeditor of How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish

"J. Roth Bookseller was a literary and cultural institution in Los Angeles's Jewish community. Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore is testimony to the proposition that there is more to a bookstore than books. Roth describes the multi-generational journey that affixed this storefront's imprint on America's second-largest Jewish community."— Zev Yaroslavsky, former Los Angeles County supervisor

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Sotheby’s, Manhattan, 1985

objects

commerce

place

Greystone Park, New Jersey, 1935

gender

collection

U.S.S.R., 1976

design

sound

networks

Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, 2021