Society & Culture
Nemesis by Philip Roth, published in 2010, eight years before he died, has got to be one of the most subtly instructive elegiac novels written about a widespread raging disease. In this case, polio. In Greek mythology Nemesis was the goddess of indignation and retribution, typically against pride. And yet Roth’s tale is about a young man who is just the opposite of proud. Nemesis is set in the stifling hot summer of 1944 when polio struck this country with renewed vengeance, especially in the Northeast — this was 11 years before the Salk vaccine and 16 before the Sabin. Roth’s fictional narrative tells the story of how the resurgent infantile paralysis virus that had crippled FDR 20 years earlier, affected one of the disease’s epicenters — a small Jewish community in Newark N.J., and, in particular, an adored 23-year-old physical education teacher, Eugene Cantor, known as Bucky, who was working that summer as a playground supervisor. To his shame, Bucky had been exempted from the draft