Shop Talk by Philip Roth

country reach editions of tens of thousands. I suppose that

a wave of literary and television garbage will break over our market—we can hardly prevent it. Nor am I alone in realizing that, in its newly won freedom, culture not only gains something important but also loses something. At the beginning of January one of our best Czech film directors was interviewed on television, and he gave a warning against the commercialization of culture. When he said that the censorship had protected us not only from the best works of our own and foreign culture but also from the worst of mass culture, he annoyed many people, but I understood him. A memorandum on the position of television recently appeared that states that
television, owing to its widespread influence, is directly able to contribute to the greatest extent toward a moral revival. This of course presupposes ... setting up a new structure, and not only in an organizational sense but in the sense of the moral and creative responsibility of the institution as a whole and of every single member of its staff, especially its leading ones. The times we are living through offer our television a unique chance to try for something that does not exist elsewhere in the world.
    The memorandum does not of course ask for the introduction of censorship, but of a supraparty arts council, a group of independent authorities of the highest spiritual and moral standards. I signed this memorandum as the president of the Czech PEN club, although personally, for myself, I thought that the desire to structure the TV of a free society in this way was rather utopian. The language of the memorandum struck me as the kind of unrealistic and moralistic language that can emerge from the euphoria of revolution.
    I have mentioned that, among intellectuals especially,

utopian ideas have begun to surface about how this country will link the good points of both systems—something from the state-controlled system, something from the new market system. And these ideas are probably strongest in the realm of culture. The future will show to what extent they are purely utopian. Will there be commercial television in our country, or will we continue only with subsidized, centrally directed broadcasting? And if this last does remain, will it manage to resist the demands of mass taste? We'll know only in time.
    I have already told you that in Czechoslovakia literature has always enjoyed not only popularity but esteem. This is borne out by the fact that in a country with fewer than twelve million inhabitants, books by good writers, both Czech and translated, were published in editions of hundreds of thousands. What's more, the system is changing in our country at a time when ecological thinking is growing tremendously (the environment in Czechoslovakia is one of the worst in Europe), and it surely makes no sense for us to strive to purify the environment and at the same time to pollute our culture. So it is not really such a utopian idea to try to influence the mass media to maintain standards and even educate the nation. If at least some part of that idea could be realized, it would certainly be, as the authors of the memorandum say, a unique event in the history of mass communications. And after all, impulses of a spiritual character really have, from time to time, come from this little country of ours in the center of Europe.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
    [1976]
    Some months after I first read Bruno Schulz and decided to include him in the Penguin series "Writers from the Other Europe," I learned that when his autobiographical novel,
The Street of Crocodiles,
appeared in English fourteen years ago, it had been reviewed and praised by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Since Schulz and Singer were born in Poland of Jewish parents within twelve years of each other—Schulz in 1892 in the provincial Galician city of Drohobycz, Singer in Radzymin, near Warsaw, in 1904—I telephoned Singer, whom I had met socially once