Portnoy's Complaint

by Philip Roth

  Yes, Mother, imagine: for my little thing.

  The potent man in the family—successful in business, tyrannical at home—was my father’s oldest brother, Hymie, the only one of my aunts and uncles to have been born on the other side and to talk with an accent. Uncle Hymie was in the “soda-vater” business, bottler and distributor of a sweet carbonated drink called Squeeze, the vin ordinaire of our dinner table. With his neurasthenic wife Clara, his son Harold, and his daughter Marcia, my uncle lived in a densely Jewish section of Newark, on the second floor of a two-family house that he owned, and into whose bottom floor we moved in 1941, when my father transferred to the Essex County office of Boston & Northeastern.

  We moved from Jersey City because of the anti-Semitism. Just before the war, when the Bund was feeling its oats, the Nazis used to hold their picnics in a beer garden only blocks from our house. When we drove by in the car on Sundays, my father would curse them, loud enough for me to hear, not quite loud enough for them to hear. Then one night a swastika was painted on the front of our building. Then a swastika was found carved into the desk of one of the Jewish children in Hannah’s class. And Hannah herself was chased home from school one afternoon by a gang of boys, who it was assumed were anti-Semites on a rampage. My parents were beside themselves. But when Uncle Hymie heard the stories, he had to laugh: “This surprises you? Living surrounded on four sides by goyim, and this surprises you?” The only place for a Jew to live is among Jews, especially, he said with an emphasis whose significance did not entirely escape me, especially when children are growing up with people from the other sex. Uncle Hymie liked to lord it over my father, and took a certain pleasure in pointing out that in Jersey City only the building we lived in was exclusively Jewish, whereas in Newark, where he still lived, that was the case with the entire Weequahic neighborhood. In my cousin Marcia’s graduating class from Weequahic High, out of the two hundred and fifty students, there were only eleven goyim and one colored. Go beat that, said Uncle Hymie … So my father, after much deliberation, put in for a transfer back to his native village, and although his immediate boss was reluctant to lose such a dedicated worker (and naturally shelved the request), my mother eventually made a long-distance phone call on her own, to the Home Office up in Boston, and following a mix-up that I don’t even want to begin to go into, the request was granted: in 1941 we moved to Newark.

  Harold, my cousin, was short and bullish in build—like all the men in our family, except me—and bore a strong resemblance to the actor John Garfield. My mother adored him and was always making him blush (a talent the lady possesses) by saying in his presence, “If a girl had Heshele’s dark lashes, believe me, she’d be in Hollywood with a million-dollar contract.” In a corner of the cellar, across from where Uncle Hymie had cases of Squeeze piled to the ceiling, Heshie kept a set of York weights with which he worked out every afternoon before the opening of the track season. He was one of the stars of the team, and held a city record in the javelin throw; his events were discus, shot, and javelin, though once during a meet at School Stadium, he was put in by the coach to run the low hurdles, as a substitute for a sick teammate, and in a spill at the last jump, fell and broke his wrist. My Aunt Clara at that time—or was it all the time?—was going through one of her “nervous seizures”—in comparison to Aunt Clara, my own vivid momma is a Gary Cooper—and when Heshie came home at the end of the day with his arm in a cast, she dropped in a faint to the kitchen floor. Heshie’s cast was later referred to as “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” whatever that meant.

  To me, Heshie was everything—that is, for the little time I knew him. I used to dream that I too would someday be a member of the track team and wear scant white shorts with a slit cut up either side to accommodate the taut and bulging muscles of my thighs.

  Just before he was drafted into the Army in 1943, Heshie decided to become engaged to a girl named Alice Dembosky, the head drum majorette of the high school band. It was Alice’s genius to be able to twirl not just one but two silver batons simultaneously—to pass them over her shoulders, glide them snakily between her legs, and then toss them fifteen and twenty feet into the air, catching one, then the other, behind her back. Only rarely did she drop a baton to the turf, and then she had a habit of shaking her head petulantly and crying out in a little voice, “Oh, Alice!” that only could have made Heshie love her the more; it surely had that effect upon me. Oh-Alice, with that long blond hair leaping up her back and about her face! cavorting with such exuberance half the length of the playing field! Oh-Alice, in her tiny white skirt with the white satin bloomers, and the white boots that come midway up the muscle of her lean, strong calves! Oh Jesus, “Legs” Dembosky, in all her dumb, blond goyische beauty! Another icon!

  That Alice was so blatantly a shikse caused no end of grief in Heshie’s household, and even in my own; as for the community at large, I believe there was actually a kind of civic pride taken in the fact that a gentile could have assumed a position of such high visibility in our high school, whose faculty and student body were about ninety-five percent Jewish. On the other hand, when Alice performed what the loudspeaker described as her “piece de resistance”—twirling a baton that had been wrapped at either end in oil-soaked rags and then set afire—despite all the solemn applause delivered by the Weequahic fans in tribute to the girl’s daring and concentration, despite the grave boom boom boom of our bass drum and the gasps and shrieks that went up when she seemed about to set ablaze her two adorable breasts—despite this genuine display of admiration and concern, I think there was still a certain comic detachment experienced on our side of the field, grounded in the belief that this was precisely the kind of talent that only a goy would think to develop in the first place.

  Which was more or less the prevailing attitude toward athletics in general, and football in particular, among the parents in the neighborhood: it was for the goyim. Let them knock their heads together for “glory,” for victory in a ball game! As my Aunt Clara put it, in that taut, violin-string voice of hers, “Heshie! Please! I do not need goyische naches!” Didn’t need, didn’t want such ridiculous pleasures and satisfactions as made the gentiles happy … At football our Jewish high school was notoriously hopeless (though the band, may I say, was always winning prizes and commendations); our pathetic record was of course a disappointment to the young, no matter what the parents might feel, and yet even as a child one was able to understand that for us to lose at football was not exactly the ultimate catastrophe. Here, in fact, was a cheer that my cousin and his buddies used to send up from the stands at the end of a game in which Weequahic had once again met with seeming disaster. I used to chant it with them.

  Ikey, Mikey, Jake and Sam,

  We’re the boys who eat no ham,

  We play football, we play soccer–

  And we keep matzohs in our locker!

  Aye, aye, aye, Weequahic High!

  So what if we had lost? It turned out we had other things to be proud of. We ate no ham. We kept matzohs in our lockers. Not really, of course, but if we wanted to we could, and we weren’t ashamed to say that we actually did! We were Jews—and we weren’t ashamed to say it! We were Jews—and not only were we not inferior to the goyim who beat us at football, but the chances were that because we could not commit our hearts to victory in such a thuggish game, we were superior! We were Jews—and we were superior!

  White bread, rye bread,

  Pumpernickel, challah,

  All those for Weequahic,

  Stand up and hollah!

  Another cheer I learned from Cousin Hesh, four more lines of poetry to deepen my understanding of the injustices we suffered … The outrage, the disgust inspired in my parents by the gentiles, was beginning to make some sense: the goyim pretended to be something special, while we were actually their moral superiors. And what made us superior was precisely the hatred and the disrespect they lavished so willingly upon us!

  Only what about the hatred we lavished upo
n them?

  And what about Heshie and Alice? What did that mean?

  When all else failed, Rabbi Warshaw was asked to join with the family one Sunday afternoon, to urge our Heshie not to take his young life and turn it over to his own worst enemy. I watched from behind a shade in the living room, as the rabbi strode impressively up the front stoop in his big black coat. He had given Heshie his bar mitzvah lessons, and I trembled to think that one day he would give me mine. He remained in consultation with the defiant boy and the blighted family for over an hour. “Over an hour of his time,” they all said later, as though that alone should have changed Heshie’s mind. But no sooner did the rabbi depart than the flakes of plaster began falling once again from the ceiling overhead. A door flew open—and I ran for the back of the house, to crouch down behind the shade in my parents’ bedroom. There was Heshie into the yard, pulling at his own black hair. Then came bald Uncle Hymie, one fist shaking violently in the air—like Lenin he looked! And then the mob of aunts and uncles and elder cousins, swarming between the two so as to keep them from grinding one another into a little heap of Jewish dust.

  One Saturday early in May, after competing all day in a statewide track meet in New Brunswick, Heshie got back to the high school around dusk, and went immediately across to the local hangout to telephone Alice and tell her that he had placed third in the state in the javelin throw. She told him that she could never see him again as long as he lived, and hung up.

  At home Uncle Hymie was ready and waiting: what he had done, he said, Heshie had forced him to do; what his father had had to do that day, Harold had brought down himself upon his own stubborn, stupid head. It was as though a blockbuster had finally fallen upon Newark, so terrifying was the sound that broke on the stairway: Hesh came charging out of his parents’ apartment, down the stairs, past our door, and into the cellar, and one long boom rolled after him. We saw later that he had ripped the cellar door from its topmost hinge with the force of a shoulder that surely seemed from that piece of evidence to be at least the third most powerful shoulder in the state. Beneath our floorboards the breaking of glass began almost immediately, as he hurled bottle after bottle of Squeeze from one dark end of the whitewashed cellar to the other.

  When my uncle appeared at the top of the cellar steps, Heshie raised a bottle over his head and threatened to throw it in his father’s face if he advanced so much as a step down the stairway. Uncle Hymie ignored the warning and started after him. Heshie now began to race in and out between the furnaces, to circle and circle the washing machines—still wielding the bottle of Squeeze. But my uncle stalked him into a corner, wrestled him to the floor, and held him there until Heshie had screamed his last obscenity—held him there (so Portnoy legend has it) fifteen minutes, until the tears of surrender at last appeared on his Heshie’s long dark Hollywood lashes. We are not a family that takes defection lightly.

  That morning Uncle Hymie had telephoned Alice Dembosky (in the basement flat of an apartment building on Goldsmith Avenue, where her father was the janitor) and told her that he wanted to meet her by the lake in Weequahic Park at noon; it was a very urgent matter involving Harold’s health—he could not talk at length on the phone, as even Mrs. Portnoy didn’t know all the facts. At the park, he drew the skinny blonde wearing the babushka into the front seat of the car, and with the windows rolled up, told her that his son had an incurable blood disease, a disease about which the poor boy himself did not even know. That was his story, bad blood, make of it what you will … It was the doctor’s orders that he should not marry anyone, ever. How much longer Harold had to live no one really knew, but as far as Mr. Portnoy was concerned, he did not want to inflict the suffering that was to come, upon an innocent young person like herself. To soften the blow he wanted to offer the girl a gift, a little something that she could use however she wished, maybe even to help her find somebody new. He drew from his pocket an envelope containing five twenty-dollar bills. And dumb, frightened Alice Dembosky took it. Thus proving something that everybody but Heshie (and I) had surmised about the Polack from the beginning: that her plan was to take Heshie for all his father’s money, and then ruin his life.

  When Heshie was killed in the war, the only thing people could think to say to my Aunt Clara and my Uncle Hymie, to somehow mitigate the horror, to somehow console them in their grief, was, “At least he didn’t leave you with a shikse wife. At least he didn’t leave you with goyische children.”

  End of Heshie and his story.

  Even if I consider myself too much of a big shot to set foot inside a synagogue for fifteen minutes—which is all he is asking—at least I should have respect enough to change into decent clothes for the day and not make a mockery of myself, my family, and my religion.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumble, my back (as is usual) all I will offer him to look at while I speak, “but just because it’s your religion doesn’t mean it’s mine.”

  “What did you say? Turn around, mister, I want the courtesy of a reply from your mouth.”

  “I don’t have a religion,” I say, and obligingly turn in his direction, about a fraction of a degree.

  “You don’t, eh?”

  “I can’t.”

  “And why not? You’re something special? Look at me! You’re somebody too special?”

  “I don’t believe in God.”

  “Get out of those dungarees, Alex, and put on some decent clothes.”

  “They’re not dungarees, they’re Levis.”

  “It’s Rosh Hashanah, Alex, and to me you’re wearing overalls! Get in there and put a tie on and a jacket on and a pair of trousers and a clean shirt, and come out looking like a human being. And shoes, Mister, hard shoes.”

  “My shirt is clean—”

  “Oh, you’re riding for a fall, Mr. Big. You’re fourteen years old, and believe me, you don’t know everything there is to know. Get out of those moccasins! What the hell are you supposed to be, some kind of Indian?”

  “Look, I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in the Jewish religion—or in any religion. They’re all lies.”

  “Oh, they are, are they?”

  “I’m not going to act like these holidays mean anything when they don’t! And that’s all I’m saying!”

  “Maybe they don’t mean anything because you don’t know anything about them, Mr. Big Shot. What do you know about the history of Rosh Hashanah? One fact? Two facts maybe? What do you know about the history of the Jewish people, that you have the right to call their religion, that’s been good enough for people a lot smarter than you and a lot older than you for two thousand years—that you can call all that suffering and heartache a lie!”

  “There is no such thing as God, and there never was, and I’m sorry, but in my vocabulary that’s a lie.”

  “Then who created the world, Alex?” he asks contemptuously. “It just happened, I suppose, according to you.”

  “Alex,” says my sister, “all Daddy means is even if you don’t want to go with him, if you would just change your clothes—”

  “But for what?” I scream. “For something that never existed? Why don’t you tell me to go outside and change my clothes for some alley cat or some tree—because at least they exist!”

  “But you haven’t answered me, Mr. Educated Wise Guy,” my father says. “Don’t try to change the issue. Who created the world and the people in it? Nobody?”

  “Right! Nobody!”

  “Oh, sure,” says my father. “That’s brilliant. I’m glad I didn’t get to high school if that’s how brilliant it makes you.”

  “Alex,” my sister says, and softly—as is her way—softly, because she is already broken a little bit too—“maybe if you just put on a pair of shoes—”

  “But you’re as bad as he is, Hannah! If there’s no God, what do shoes have to do with it!”

  “One day a year you ask him to do something for you, and he’s too big for it. And that’s the whole story, Hannah, of your brother, of his respect and l
ove …”

  “Daddy, he’s a good boy. He does respect you, he does love you—”

  “And what about the Jewish people?” He is shouting now and waving his arms, hoping that this will prevent him from breaking into tears—because the word love has only to be whispered in our house for all eyes immediately to begin to overflow. “Does he respect them? Just as much as he respects me, just about as much …” Suddenly he is sizzling—he turns on me with another new and brilliant thought. “Tell me something, do you know Talmud, my educated son? Do you know history? One-two-three you were bar mitzvah, and that for you was the end of your religious education. Do you know men study their whole lives in the Jewish religion, and when they die they still haven’t finished? Tell me, now that you are all finished at fourteen being a Jew, do you know a single thing about the wonderful history and heritage of the saga of your people?”

  But there are already tears on his cheeks, and more are on the way from his eyes. “A’s in school,” he says, “but in life he’s as ignorant as the day he was born.”

  Well, it looks as though the time has come at last—so I say it. It’s something I’ve known for a little while now. “You’re the ignorant one! You!”