Emanuel Rackman, who later became President of Bar Ilan University, wrote that if Roth wanted to point out problems with the Jewish community, he ought to have published in a Jewish periodical-or better, published in Hebrew. “Publicly pleasing my parents, while privately pulling my putz.”In Roth’s early stories, collected in Goodbye, Columbus, he had proven the menace of his wit. He gave Western literature possibly its greatest alliteration. I mean, Portnoy had such a mouth on him-so subtle, so shmutzig. So Roth, through Portnoy, seemed the satirist par excellence, particularly of the American Jewish community. You put the Id back in Yid, Portnoy instructed, and you come to understand the Portnoy’s sexual angst suggested that Jews were anything but cool. Made Diaspora Jews and organized American Zionists inarguably (now, unimaginably)Ĭool. It was also just two years after the 1967 war, which had Had earned a kind of moral intermission-one that Portnoy seemed not to be Years after 1942 and twenty-one years after 1948. This was immediately assumed to mean Jews in general, which inġ969 seemed especially brazen, chutzpadick.

What most bothered Irving Howe was Portnoy’s mockery of his bourgeois The way: you still can get intelligent, graying people to laugh out loud simplyīy coupling the words “Alex” with “liver.” Really imagine, let alone afford, the analyst’s couch.

We remember Portnoy erupting on the analyst’s Portnoy, impaling with pitiless thrusts invasive mothers, plugged-up fathers,ĭizzying shikses in heat. Do you hear me, Alex? I have to see what’s in that bowl!”ĭoctor, do you understand what I was up against? My wang was all I really had that I could call my own. I tear off my pants, furiously I grab that battered battering ram to freedom, my adolescent cock, even as my mother begins to call from the other side of the bathroom door. “I promise!” and race from the kitchen-to where? Where else. Jack, make him promise, before he gives himself a terrible tsura, and it’s too late. “ Hamburgers,” she says bitterly, just as she might say Hitler, “where they can put anything in the world in that they want-and he eats them. Don’t eat French fries with Melvin Weiner after school.”

Who in the history of the world has been least able to deal with a woman’s tears? My father. Sophie (especially Sophie), The Monkey, “my father,” Cousin Heshie, Rabbi Warshaw, Dr. Its characters became instant archetypes. Irving Howe famously said that the cruelest thing one could do with Portnoy’s Complaint was “read it twice.” But why reread it when the first time was unforgettable? Back when the book was published, exactly 50 years ago, I knew people who sat around in coffee shops, student unions, and Hillel houses reading the entire book out loud to one another.

Portnoys complaint