Books, Arts & Manners: Sophie’s Revenge

“Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I’m living it in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in the Jewish joke—only it ain’t no joke!” Thus 33-year-old Alexander to his shrink, in Philip Roth’s unsurpassable fable of smother-love and its victims, Portnoy’s Complaint. Sex-obsessed and guilt-ridden, the latter an intended fruit of a boyhood dominated and orchestrated by Sophie “patron saint of self-sacrifice” Portnoy, Alexander is burdened by that legend which an eternity of Yiddish mommas “engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel, not in GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU’LL BE A PARENT AND YOU’LL KNOW WHAT IT’S like.” He lashes out at Sophie and Jake, his impossibly true-to-life parents, tromps on shiksa tramps like a naughty child crunching ants, can’t make it with a Sabra—“impotent in Israel!”—and despises himself with the full fury of a man-child who screams from the depths of his tortured gut: “A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die”

Visiting the home of one of his college Gentile girlfriends, Portnoy discovers, in contrast to what passes for human discourse among his parents, that “the English language is a form of communication’. Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at. Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets—no, they’re little gifts, containing meanings!” Little spitballs containing loaded meanings, the four-letter words Roth used in his 1969 Indian-gift to Jewish Motherhood offended many. Others, more conversant with the syndrome Roth portrayed, loathed and even feared Portnoy’s Complaint because it divulged those sacred secrets, those closet verities, those mini-tragedies of lives petrified in superego debilities. What Jewish Mother (of any ethnicity) could bear to read about the Portnoys’ neighbor, Ronald Nimkin, “José Iturbi the Second,” a perfectly packaged and sanitized angel “with those golden hands!,” who hanged himself from the shower head with a note neatly pinned to his nice stiffly laundered sport shirt: “Mrs. Blumenthal called. Please bring your mah-jongg rules to the game tonight. Ronald”?

DB

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David Brudnoy

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“Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I’m living it in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in the Jewish joke—only it ain’t no joke!” Thus 33-year-old Alexander to his shrink, in Philip Roth’s unsurpassable fable of smother-love and its victims, Portnoy’s Complaint. Sex-obsessed and guilt-ridden, the latter an intended fruit of a boyhood dominated and orchestrated by Sophie “patron saint of self-sacrifice” Portnoy, Alexander is burdened by that legend which an eternity of Yiddish mommas “engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel, not in GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU’LL BE A PARENT AND YOU’LL KNOW WHAT IT’S like.” He lashes out at Sophie and Jake, his impossibly true-to-life parents, tromps on shiksa tramps like a naughty child crunching ants, can’t make it with a Sabra—“impotent in Israel!”—and despises himself with the full fury of a man-child who screams from the depths of his tortured gut: “A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die”

Visiting the home of one of his college Gentile girlfriends, Portnoy discovers, in contrast to what passes for human discourse among his parents, that “the English language is a form of communication’. Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at. Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets—no, they’re little gifts, containing meanings!” Little spitballs containing loaded meanings, the four-letter words Roth used in his 1969 Indian-gift to Jewish Motherhood offended many. Others, more conversant with the syndrome Roth portrayed, loathed and even feared Portnoy’s Complaint because it divulged those sacred secrets, those closet verities, those mini-tragedies of lives petrified in superego debilities. What Jewish Mother (of any ethnicity) could bear to read about the Portnoys’ neighbor, Ronald Nimkin, “José Iturbi the Second,” a perfectly packaged and sanitized angel “with those golden hands!,” who hanged himself from the shower head with a note neatly pinned to his nice stiffly laundered sport shirt: “Mrs. Blumenthal called. Please bring your mah-jongg rules to the game tonight. Ronald”?