Reading Patrimony, one moment (although somewhat brief) that I found to be significant is Roth’s description of his grandfather’s blue shaving mug. To him, it is not just a mug, but the “one family heirloom” (27). He describes how his grandfather had always been a distant figure in his life, speaking only Yiddish and not “given to fondling the American grandchildren” (27). Roth says the mug “ . . . brought him much more fully to life for me, not as a grandfather but, even more interestingly then, as an ordinary man among men” (27). For Roth, the mug symbolizes his grandfather’s momentary respite in a barber’s chair from “the exigencies that had trapped him and that . . . accounted for his austere, uncommunicative nature” (28). Roth seems to feel he can foster a connection with his grandfather through the mug that he never could in real life. Roth continues, “His mug emitted the aura of an archaeological find, an artifact signaling an unexpected level of cultural refinement, an astonishing superfluity in an otherwise cramped and obstructed existence – in our ordinary little Newark bathroom, it had the impact on me of a Greek vase depicting the mythic origins of the race” (28). Such diction shows how truly Roth cherishes the mug. Further on in the memoir, Roth’s father gives him the mug as a gift (118).
