Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint

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 upon 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 atleast the third most powerful shoulder in the state. Beneath our floorboards the breaking of glass began almost immediately, as he buried 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) fifteenminutes, 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 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.”