Unpacking My Father's Bookstore
by Laurence Roth
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Pub Date Sep 09 2025 | Archive Date Oct 17 2025
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Description
Laurence Roth takes readers through the bookshelf-lined corridors of his family’s history to reveal momentous shifts in bookstore culture and American Jewish identity at the end of the twentieth century.
Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore brings to life the history of J. Roth / Bookseller of Fine & Scholarly Judaica, 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—Roth crafts a richly felt narrative about his family’s Jewish experience in America.
Reflecting on the business of bookselling and the ways literature has shaped the American Jewish perspective, Roth weaves a rich narrative that is at once personal and learned as he tells the story of his father’s life. He recalls how, as he watched and learned, he slowly discovered through the objects of his father’s profession how bookstores and identities are assembled. The story is a reminder, too, that while most independent bookstores 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.
Advance Praise
“J. Roth Bookseller was a literary and cultural institution in Los Angeles’s Jewish community. Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore is testimony to the proposition that there is more to a bookstore than books. Roth describes the multi-generational journey that affixed this storefront’s imprint on America’s second-largest Jewish community.” —Zev Yaroslavsky, former Los Angeles County supervisor
“Unpacking my Father’s Bookstore serves as poignant testimony to the value of old-fashioned bookselling, a family business, and the transmission of Jewish knowledge through the generations—l’dor vador.” —Allegra Goodman, author of Isola
“This isn’t only a paean to the legendary Los Angeles bookstore, where browsing was a hermeneutical activity, but a eulogy to a father-and-son relationship and a map of how Jewish knowledge circulated in America in the second half of the twentieth century. Kudos to Laurence Roth for hearing the call of memory. Bookstores are where our minds feel grounded and our hearts find meaning.” —Ilan Stavans, coeditor of How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish
“A brilliant family memoir and history of American bookselling. Attractively written and always compelling, this provides both an intimate, child’s-eye view of the world and a profound understanding of the nature of cultural transformation.” —Bryan Cheyette, author of The Ghetto: A Very Short Introduction
“This beautifully rendered work brings readers into the lush spaces of a beloved Jewish bookstore in midcentury Los Angeles. Moving gracefully between memoir and a larger story about the world of Jewish books, bookstores, and American Jewish readers, Roth unpacks his father's bookstore. In so doing he rearranges the books to tell his own story.” —Laura Levitt, author of The Objects that Remain
“Roth ushers us into the history of Jewish books in a way no other literary scholar could. This remarkable book gives us an insider’s tour while offering an intimate, moving portrait of one American Jewish family as well as a sharp, detailed, and thought-provoking account of how books move through and transform our lives.”
—Josh Lambert, author of The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781978836600 |
| PRICE | $29.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 330 |
