A Holocaust novel that never mentions the word: Nemesis

OK so not everyone in book group loved Philip Roth's "Nemesis" - in fact some criticized Roth for committing the cardinal sin of fiction writing, telling not showing, and others were on him for weak, stilted dialog. These are egregious faults, but I just don't see Roth as guilty as accused: the so-called stilted dialog accurately captures Bucky's two-dimensional world view and his rigid moral code - we have to see him as a straight-arrow and a square to understand how out of character it is for him to resign his position in Newark and head off to the safety of the country, leaving the boys behind him. Some also were puzzled by the javelin-toss episode with which Roth ends the book - which I think was a brilliant way for him to leave us with the image of Bucky as a hero, even in what's essentially no more than a game (not a war hero, that is); also the device of having one of the boys narrate the story from much later in life gives it more of a verisimilitude than it would have if the story were Roth 3rd-person narration. Most important, we have to see the story as functioning on many levels, not just Bucky as an avatar for Roth, as noted in earlier posts, but also as the novel being the only Holocaust novel that never says the word - that's why Roth set it in 1944 (when apparently there was no polio outbreak in Newark) - to bring forward the distant echo of the extermination of the Jews in Europe. Also the novel is for me one of the greatest depictions of a society turned against itself - the suspicion of everyone as a potential carrier is as creepy as anything in a horror movie - and Roth's depiction of Newark - the neighborhood tensions, the heat, the noise of the sirens - and in contrast the beautiful and seemingly (but not really) countryside of Pennsylvania is one of the great strengths of this book, matching Roth's best writing from anywhere in his career.