Goodbye Columbus Character Analysis

In Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus is a coming-of-age story, in which the twenty-three-year-old Neil Klugman, particularly in relation to his Jewish identity. The event that that precipitates this identity crisis is meeting Brenda Patimkin, with whom he has a relationship over the course of a summer. While Brenda and Neil are both Jewish, their differences in socioeconomic class create the central tensions of their relationship. Neil lives with his aunt and uncle in a lower-middle-class area of Newark, New Jersey, and works in a public library. Brenda is a college student at Radcliff College in Boston, Massachusetts, spending her summer vacation at her upper-middle-class family 's house.
In chapter one you see generational differences from Neil Klugman and Brenda Patimkin and her family. You see that because “Neil asks why she had a nose job. She says her nose was bumpy before, and that now she is prettier”. She also says that her brother Ron was going get a nose job also. She says she and her brother both look like their father. So Neil and Brenda are both Jewish and In 1959, about fourteen years after the end of World War II and the end of the Holocaust, some Jewish people were afraid of looking Jewish. Even in the united states, Jewish people faced discrimination. The nose Brenda and her brother inherited from their father identifies them as Jewish. Brenda and her brother want to

So she end beating him in basketball. Brenda and her family needed to go the airport to pick a family member. So they made Neil watch Julie. So Julie wanted to play pin pong so this time Neil didn’t let her win and she got really mad so you see the difference when Neil is in front of Brenda and her family and we he isn’t. When he is with them he let her win to try to impress them but when no one was there he beat her and didn’t give her more chance like the first time. So you see two types of