Nemesis.

Nine hundred kilometres south, early in the evening, after a  warm, overcast Sunday I had spent at Lakeside, I was on a train heading to my home in the northern suburbs. During the afternoon, in between sporting events, I had taken a book to the sun-drenched lawn high up behind the bleachers (plastic bucket seats these days, powerfully sprung so that they won’t even support your bag of running gear without flipping up and flushing it onto the dusty concrete below). The novel was Philip Roth’s Nemesis (Jonathan Cape, 2010).

The grandfather, Sam Cantor, had come alone to America in the 1880s as an immigrant child from a Jewish village in Polish Galicia. His fearlessness had been learned in the Newark streets, where his nose had been broken more than once in fights with anti-Semitic gangs. The violent aggression against Jews that was commonplace in the city during his slum boyhood did much to form his view of life and his grandson’s view in turn. He encouraged the grandson to stand up for himself as a man and to stand up for himself as a Jew, and to understand that one’s battles are never over …

A family who could afford it rented a bedroom with kitchen privileges in a rooming house in Bradley Beach, a strip of sand, boardwalk, and cottages a mile long that had already been popular among North Jersey Jews. There the mother and the children would go to the beach to breathe in the fresh, fortifying ocean air …

Newark, Northcote, North Shore; New Jersey, Newmarket, Newtown. 

Whatever. 

Bondi.