Discontent

A brief about the book after about two and a half months since the North Korean brigades, well trained and armed by the Soviets and Chinese communists, crossed the 38th parallel towards South Korea on June 25, 1950, and the start of the Korean War, joined Robert Treat University, a small university located in downtown Newark, named after the city's founder in the seventeenth century, and I was the first member of our family to attend university, as none of my cousins had completed high school, and my father and his three brothers had not finished elementary school. My father told me: "I started working to earn money when I was ten years old. My father was the neighborhood butcher, and I used to deliver orders to customers on my bicycle when I was a high school student, except during baseball game seasons, and in the afternoons when I attended debates held between high schools, because I was a member of my school's team. Since the day I left my father's shop, where I worked sixty hours a week until I graduated from high school in January and started university in September — perhaps from the day I began studying at Robert Treat University — my father began to feel afraid that I would die, perhaps related to the war in which the US armed forces hurriedly engaged under the auspices of the United Nations to support the inexperienced and poorly equipped South Korean army; or perhaps his fears came from the heavy losses our forces suffered due to the intense fire from the communists, and his fear that I might be drafted into the military if the conflict prolonged, as happened in World War II, and that I might fight and die on the Korean battlefield, just as my cousins Abi and Dief were killed in World War II. Or perhaps his fears stemmed from his financial worries; last year, he opened the first supermarket near our family’s shop to sell kosher (halal) meat, and my father's shop's sales steadily declined because the supermarket sold meat and poultry at lower prices, and fewer families cared much about buying kosher meat and chicken from a trusted shop certified by the rabbis after the war, owned by a member of the kosher butchers' union in New Jersey. Or perhaps his fear for me came from his concern for himself, as this man nearing fifty began to suffer from constant painful coughing spells, despite having always enjoyed a life full of health and vitality, which made me worried about him. But that did not stop him from keeping his cigarette lit in the corner of his mouth all day long. The author, Philip Roth, the number of pages 159, published in 2020, published by Dar Al-Mada for Printing, Publishing, and Distribution. The cover of the book is paperback.