Governor Hochul’s announcement of a state disaster emergency due to the discovery of polio wastewater on Long Island is a headline that seems more suited to 1942 than 2022. Even in an age well acquainted with contagion, the reappearance of polio is liable to send a shudder down the spine of anyone even passingly acquainted with the disease’s ravages. 

A case of polio was detected in Rockland County earlier this summer, the first in America in a decade. New York’s health commissioner, Mary Bassett, warns that “the risk of paralytic disease is real,” and health officials told Politico that “for every one case of paralytic polio observed, there may be hundreds of other people infected.” 

I’d only known about polio from books, or one book in particular: Philip Roth’s “Nemesis,” a fruit of the Pulitzer Prize winner’s last creative burst, and his final novel. Finished in 2010, six years before his death, it is a novel set in the summer of 1944 in the neighborhood that was both home and muse to Roth: Weequahic, which around mid-century was a predominantly Jewish district of Newark.

“Nemesis” is a quiet book, but a devastating one. It is fiction steeped in fact, and tallies the toll of an outbreak. Its protagonist is Bucky Cantor, sound of mind and superb of body, whose only flaw is eyesight so poor it kept him out of the war. Instead he runs the playground, taking care of the neighborhood children.

Bucky can teach his charges how to field a ground ball, but he is powerless to stop the disease’s spread, a slow motion tragedy that stiffens limbs and steals breath. Bucky yields to his girlfriend’s entreaties to leave the city and join her at a bucolic summer camp. Roth has said of his own childhood fear, “That was a very heavy burden to carry when you’re playing center field, you know?” 

Roth captures the beauty of the country as seen through the eyes of the city, but it is only a matter of time before the scourge comes to the countryside, and in a tragic twist Bucky is both victim and carrier, his life knocked out of joint by polio. Long after the disease is conquered, Bucky stays broken by the conviction that he was “the Typhoid Mary of the Chancellor playground. I was the playground polio carrier.” 

My own grandfather was afflicted by the disease, and suffered physical ailments for a lifetime. “Nemesis” preserves that generation’s trauma, the horror of children twisted and maimed. As Bucky reflects, “I don’t know why God created polio in the first place.” It appears that polio is nearly as old as human beings, with painted depictions executed by artisans of ancient Egypt surviving from three millennia ago.

Polio’s reappearance is nothing less than defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. The vaccine appeared in the 1950s, and a push to eradication was announced in 1988. It seemed as if Bucky’s plangent question — “Why destroy our irreplaceable children?” — would soon no longer have to be asked. The “pointless, contingent, preposterous” affliction appeared to be in permanent retreat, and set on a course to extinction.       

As the narrator of “Nemesis” — himself a polio survivor — puts it in the book’s final pages, set decades after that nightmarish summer, “the significance of polio has disappeared completely. Nobody anymore is defenseless like we were.” Defenseless they certainly were. Before the vaccine, polio induced 20,000 cases of paralysis — many of them in children — in 1952 alone. 

If at one time, as Bucky says, “polio is polio — nobody knows how it spreads. Summer comes and there it is, and there’s nothing much you can do,” Jonas Salk’s invention of the vaccine in 1956 tilted the terrain decisively, though there is no post-infection treatment. Of one victim, Roth writes: “the look in his eyes was gruesome.”