by Michael P. Kramer –

I first met Roth in 1969, which is to say, I began reading Roth in 1969. I was seventeen years old, a junior in yeshiva high school in Brooklyn. I was a good boy, a yeshiva bokhur. I rarely fought with my parents, did well in school. Even the principal liked me, which, I admit, was something of an embarrassment to me then. But while I was a good boy, I was seventeen and it was 1969. The year of Woodstock, of sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll—of which I was familiar with at least one. America was bombing Cambodia, and the anti-war movement was gaining steam. Neil Armstrong took one small step for man, a giant leap for mankind, and Philip Roth published Portnoy’s Complaint. Revolution was in the air, and, in my timid, hormone-sotted way, I breathed it in.

Nicole Krauss has said that she read Portnoy when she was twelve, and that her mother had given it to her. That could never have happened in the working-class home I grew up in, where my father read the newspaper until he started snoring under it and my mother read, well, whatever I gave her to read. I was a bookish kid—I remember writing doggerel when I was ten—but I had no real guidance. I read whatever caught my eye in the library. Sports books. Mysteries. In high school I was trained in Bible and Talmud and Hebrew and something called Jewish Philosophy, and also in Math and Science, History and, yes, Literature. Needless to say, however, Philip Roth was not on the literature syllabus. I didn’t even know who Philip Roth was. Until one day in Jewish Philosophy class.

It was not really a class in Jewish Philosophy. It was more like a chapel requirement, a feeble attempt to prepare us with platitudes for the bourgeois respectability of Orthodox Jewish manhood—which is where we were all headed in any case, most of us. It was taught by a rabbi—a good man, no doubt, a learned man, but one wholly unsuited to the task. He was short, bespectacled, with a funny moustache, and not one of us took him seriously. One day he took it upon himself to warn us about a dangerous, self-hating Jew named Philip Roth who had just published a very evil book called Portnoy’s Complaint, a book offensive to all that was good and holy, to God and Judaism, to the victims of the Holocaust, to Jewish mothers and fathers, a book full of schmutz and shikses, full of onanism and orgies, a book that was definitely not good for the Jews, a book that would no doubt bring down the wrath of God upon any Jew who would dare read it, and the fury of the goyim upon all Jews, whether they read it or not.

I’m paraphrasing, of course—filling in the gaps in my memory with the criticisms that hounded Roth ever since he started publishing the stories in what would become his first book, Goodbye, Columbus. Still, while I don’t remember his exact words, this is unquestionably the ignorable gist of what he said. What is remarkable about the harangue, however, is that I do remember part of it distinctly. I remember with great clarity one of the words the rabbi used in his harangue, a single word whose use stunned me so that the memory has stayed with me more than half a century. The word is, “orgies.” But he didn’t say it that way. He said, “orggies.” Orggies. And I remember thinking to myself, “He doesn’t know how to pronounce the word orgies. He purports to be an expert on sex and literature, we’re supposed to take his warnings seriously, and he doesn’t know how to pronounce the word orgies.”

“What else doesn’t he know?” Don’t ask how I knew how to pronounce the word, but apparently I did. And no doubt I should have appreciated the rabbi more for his unfamiliarity with a word well beyond his ken, but I didn’t. In any case, the rabbi had been unmasked, and the last modicum of authority that poor man held over us went flaccid at that unfortunate mispronounced moment.

Schmutz and shikses, onanism and orgies—a more enticing review could not have been written. One of my classmates soon got hold of the book that we were not supposed to read, and it made the rounds, passed from hand to sweaty hand, and my life with Philip Roth commenced. I read the book in a fever. Turns out the rabbi was right, at least about the schmutz, some of it eye-opening, some of it repulsive, all of it outrageous—and hilarious. But however titillating and offensive and funny and frightening to a seventeen-year-old yeshiva boy in Brooklyn, I knew even then that the schmutz was not the point, that something else was going on. Through the hormonal miasma of my youth, I could see that Alexander Portnoy had what to complain about, that he had a problem, that he was deeply, deeply unhappy, that the book was not an orgiastic celebration but a painful rant on a psychiatrist’s couch.

Through a glass darkly, I understood then—though I hardly would have been able to articulate it this way—that the schmutz was a symptom of a disease called assimilation, of an almost-bankrupt Jewish community that had embraced the idea of America with such passion that it was rapidly losing its ability to hold on to its members, no Rothian pun intended. Portnoy’s parents embraced the idea of America—American culture, movies, music, sports. Their heroes were American heroes, their values American values. At the same time, their Judaism was being emptied of its content. They kept kosher at
home but had no problem with the pork at the Chinese restaurant. They worked on Saturdays but could not fathom not wearing a suit on Rosh Hashana. They dreamed the American dream but were haunted by anti-Semitism and by their own sense of difference, of chosenness. They embraced America but were wary of Americans, of Christian Americans—those below them, those above them, those beyond them—and they held tightly on to the taboo of intermarriage. Beyond the schmutz, this is what caught my attention.

For all of Portnoy’s sexual conquests in America, however, the episode that struck me most then—the one that stayed with me for decades—was when, towards the end of the novel, in a last-ditch effort to save himself from himself, to make a man of himself, whole and in control, Portnoy comes to Israel to immerse himself in a sea of Jewishness. Like many American Jews, he is overwhelmed as soon as he lands at the airport. “The writing on the walls is Jewish—Jewish graffiti! The flag is Jewish…. Returned! This is where it all began! Just been away on a long vacation, that’s all! Hey, here we’re the WASPs!” The taxi drivers are Jewish, the policemen are Jewish. “At the hotel I ask the clerk for a room. He has a thin moustache and speaks English as though he were Ronald Colman. Yet he is Jewish too.” And on and on. But then he turns to Israeli women. He meets at the beach a hayelet (soldier) with “green eyes and tawny skin, as sleek as a seal in the water.” They have a few beers–the beers are Jewish, too—and he invites her to his hotel room, where, much to his chagrin, he cannot perform. Impotent in the Promised Land. Next, he meets an idealistic kibbutznikit, “a hardy, red-headed, freckled ideological hunk of a girl,” the child of American olim (immigrants) from Philadelphia. I won’t go into details, but it was—in Portnoy’s words—his final downfall and humiliation. “You should go home,” she says to him. “You should go home.”

Dimly, dimly the seventeen-year-old yeshiva boy understood that, as schmutzy as the novel was, as hilarious as it was, Philip Roth was on to something. Jack and Sophie Portnoy may or may not have been modeled on Roth’s own parents, and they certainly were not like my parents, but they were real. I knew these people. Nice people, good people, likeable people—and in my adolescent intolerance, I looked down upon them and their milk-toast American Judaism. Poor Alexander Portnoy! What chance did he
have? On one hand, America the beautiful. America the desirable. On the other hand, Jewish guilt, nothing more. Had he only known real Judaism, real religion, real Zionism. Impotent in the promised land! Could it have been any clearer? Could my little mustached rabbi, who looked and sounded nothing like Ronald Colman, could he have been more wrong? Portnoy’s Complaint should not be burnt at the stake; it should be required reading! It was not an abomination. It was the holy of holies!

How easy to be arrogant then, at seventeen in 1969.

I’ve lived with Philip Roth all my life since then. Professionally I’ve taught him and I’ve written about him, but mostly I’ve read him and read him and read him. Like good friends sometimes do, we’ve drifted apart only to renew our friendship later in life. Sometimes our paths crossed at just the right moment: I read Patrimony, his memoir about his father‘s illness and death, when I was in New York caring for my ailing father. I read it on the subway and could not hold back the tears. I never felt closer to him.

Over the years, I’ve liked some of his books more than others, but now, having faced the innumerable nemeses one encounters even in an unremarkable life such as my own—the limits of strength and talent and wisdom, the recalcitrance of failure and infirmity, the grim realization that you alone are not emplotting your life—I read him now with a kind of calm, melancholy joy. I no longer feel the certainty I once did about the etiology of Portnoy’s Complaint, and certainly not about the cure, and I still smile with ironic satisfaction when I think of that honorary doctorate from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2014. How different the beginning of his career from its end!

Funny, no?

Michael P. Kramer is a scholar, editor, translator, and Professor Emeritus of English at Bar-Ilan University. He lives in Jerusalem.

Art by Zeev (Shoshke) Engelmayer