Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore

Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore brings to life the history of J. Roth / Bookseller of Fine & Scholarly Judaica, which was a microcosm of the Los Angeles Jewish community from 1966 to 1994 and one of the premier Jewish bookstores in the United States. Blending critical analysis with a personal account of growing up in his father’s bookstore, and connecting both to larger forces that helped shape Jewish and American book retailing in the twentieth-century, Laurence Roth crafts a richly felt narrative about his family’s Jewish experience in America. It is a reminder, too, that while most independent bookstores like J. Roth Bookseller disappear from history, these retailers often had outsized effects on their communities. Breaking with conventional modes of scholarship, Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore tells a unique and troubled story that rarely gets told, one that is both personal and analytical, theoretical but rooted in the everyday.

LAURENCE ROTH is the Charles B. Degenstein Professor of English and director of the Jewish & Israel Studies Program and The Build Collaborative at Susquehanna University, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories (Rutgers University Press, 2003), and coeditor, with Nadia Valman, of The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures.