Jesus—The Pansy of Palestine
Portnoy’s first sexual experience was in the house of Bubbles Girardi, an Italian-American teenage prostitute. He tells how he felt about Christianity which he encountered in her home:
Tacked above the Girardi sink is a picture of Jesus Christ floating up to Heaven in a pink nightgown. How disgusting can human beings be! The Jews I despise for their narrow-mindedness, their self-righteousness, the incredibly bizarre sense that these cave men who are my parents and relatives have somehow gotten of their superiority—but when it comes to tawdriness and cheapness, to beliefs that would shame even a gorilla, you simply cannot top the goyim. What kind of base and brainless schmucks are these people to worship somebody who, number one, never existed, and number two, if he did, looking as he does in that picture, was without a doubt The Pansy of Palestine. In a pageboy haircut, with a Palmolive complexion—and wearing a gown that I realize today must have come from Fredericks of Hollywood! Enough of God and the rest of that garbage! Down with religion and human groveling! Up with socialism and the dignity of man! 1Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, (New York: Random House, 1967; Reprint edition, 2002), 168.
Christians worships a Jew!
Portnoy’s father speaking of Christians:
They worship a Jew, do you know that, Alex? Their whole big-deal religion is based on worshiping someone who was an established Jew at that time. Now how do you like that for stupidity? How do you like that for pulling the wool over the eyes of the public? Jesus Christ, who they go around telling everybody was God, was actually a Jew! And this fact, that absolutely kills me when I have to think about it, nobody else pays any attention to. That he was a Jew, like you and me, and that they took a Jew and turned him into some kind of God after he is already dead, and then—and this is what can make you absolutely crazy—then the dirty bastards turn around afterwards, and who is the first one on their list to persecute? who haven’t they left their hands off of to murder and to hate for two thousand years? The Jews! who gave them their beloved Jesus to begin with! I assure you, Alex, you are never going to hear such a mishegoss of mixed-up crap and disgusting nonsense as the Christian religion in your entire life. And that’s what these big shots, so-called, believe! 2Ibid., 40
Portnoy at Christmastime
At Christmastime, when I have no school and can go off to ice-skate at night under the lights, I see the trees blinking on and off behind the gentile curtains. Not on our block—God forbid!—or on Leslie Street, or Schley Street, or even Fabian Place, but as I approach the lrvington line, here is a goy, and there is a goy, and there still another—and then I am into Irvington and it is simply awful: not only is there a tree conspicuously ablaze in every parlor, but the houses themselves are outlined with colored bulbs advertising Christianity, and phonographs are pumping “Silent Night” out into the street as though—as though?—it were the national anthem, and on the snowy lawns are set up little cut-out models of the scene in the manger—really, it’s enough to make you sick. How can they possibly believe this shit? Not just children but grownups, too, stand around on the snowy lawns smiling down at pieces of wood six inches high that are called Mary and Joseph and little Jesus—and the little cut-out cows and horses are smiling too! God! The idiocy of the Jews all year long, and then the idiocy of the goyim on these holidays! What a country! Is it any wonder we’re all of us half nuts?
But the shikses, ah, the shikses are something else again. Between the smell of damp sawdust and wet wool in the overheated boathouse, and the sight of their fresh cold blond hair spilling out of their kerchiefs and caps, I am ecstatic. Amidst these flushed and giggling girls, I lace up my skates with weak, trembling fingers, and then out into the cold and after them I move, down the wooden gangplank on my toes and off onto the ice behind a fluttering covey of them—a nosegay of shikses, a garland of gentile girls. I am so awed that I am in a state of desire beyond a hard-on. My circumcised little dong is simply shriveled up with veneration. Maybe it’s dread. How do they get so gorgeous, so healthy, so blond? My contempt for what they believe in is more than neutralized by my adoration of the way they look, the way they move and laugh and speak—the lives they must lead behind those goyische curtains! Maybe a pride of shikses is more like it—or is it a pride of shkotzim? For these are the girls whose older brothers are the engaging, good-natured, confident, clean, swift, and powerful halfbacks for the college football teams called Northwestern and Texas Christian and UCLA. Their fathers are men with white hair and deep voices who never use double negatives, and their mothers the ladies with the kindly smiles and the wonderful manners who say things like, “I do believe, Mary, that we sold thirty-five cakes at the Bake Sale.” “Don’t be too late, dear,” they sing out sweetly to their little tulips as they go bouncing off in their bouffant taffeta dresses to the Junior Prom with boys whose names are right out of the grade-school reader, not Aaron and Arnold and Marvin, but Johnny and Billy and Jimmy and Tod. Not Portnoy or Pincus, but Smith and Jones and Brown! These people are the Americans, Doctor—like Henry Aldrich and Homer, like the Great Gildersleeve and his nephew LeRoy, like Corliss and Veronica, like “Oogie Pringle” who gets to sing beneath Jane Powell’s window in A Date with Judy— these are the people for whom Nat “King” Cole sings every Christmastime, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose…” An open fire, in my house? No, no, theirs are the noses whereof he speaks. Not his flat black one or my long bumpy one, but those tiny bridgeless wonders whose nostrils point northward automatically at birth. And stay that way for life! These are the children from the coloring books come to life, the children they mean on the signs we pass in Union, New Jersey, that say CHILDREN AT PLAY and DRIVE CAREFULLY, WE LOVE OUR CHILDREN—these are the girls and boys who live “next door,” the lads who are always asking for “the jalopy” and getting into “jams” and then out of them again in time for the final commercial—the kids whose neighbors aren’t the Silversteins and the Landaus, but Fibber McCee and Molly, and Ozzie and Harriet, and Ethel and Albert, and Lorenzo Jones and his wife Belle, and Jack Armstrong! Jack Armstrong, the All-American Goy!—and Jack as in John, not Jack as in Jake, like my father… Look, we ate our meals with that radio blaring away right through to the dessert, the glow of the yellow station band is the last light I see each night before sleep-so don’t tell me we’re just as good as anybody else, don’t tell me we’re Americans just like they are. No, no, these blond-haired Christians are the legitimate residents and owners of this place, and they can pump any song they want into the streets and no one is going to stop them either. O America! America! it may have been gold in the streets to my grandparents, it may have been a chicken in every pot to my father and mother, but to me, a child whose earliest movie memories are of Ann Rutherford and Alice Faye, America is a shikse nestling under your arm whispering love love love love love! 3Ibid., 143-146
“There is no such thing as God”
Even if I consider myself too much of a big shot to set foot inside a synagogue for fifteen minutes—which is all he [Alex’s father] 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.”
“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!” […] “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!”
“Alex!” cries my sister, grabbing for my hand, as though fearful I may actually raise it against him.
“But he is! With all that stupid saga shit!”
“Quiet! Still! Enough!” cries Hannah. “Go to your room-”
– While my father carries himself to the kitchen table, his head sunk forward and his body doubled over, as though he has just taken a hand grenade in his stomach. Which he has. Which I know. “You can wear rags for all I care, you can dress like a peddler, you can shame and embarrass me all you want, curse me, Alexander, defy me, hit me, hate me-”
The way it usually works, my mother cries in the kitchen, my father cries in the living room-hiding his eyes behind the Newark News—Hannah cries in the bathroom, and I cry on the run between our house and the pinball machine at the corner. 4Ibid., 60-63
But I am something more, or so they tell me. A Jew. No! No! An atheist, I cry. I am a nothing where religion is concerned, and I will not pretend to be anything that I am not! I don’t care how lonely and needy my father is, the truth about me is the truth about me, and I’m sorry but he’ll just have to swallow my apostasy whole!
[…]Good Christ, Mother, the whole world knows already, so why don’t you? Religion is the opiate of the people! And if believing that makes me a fourteen-year-old Communist, then that’s what I am, and I’m proud of it! I would rather be a Communist in Russia than a Jew in a synagogue any day —so I tell my father right to his face, too. Another grenade to the gut is what it turns out to be (I suspected as much), but I’m sorry, I happen to believe in the rights of man, rights such as are extended in the Soviet Union to all people, regardless of race, religion, or color. 5Ibid., 72-74
Protesting his parents’ racism
My communism, in fact, is why I now insist on eating with the cleaning lady when I come home for my lunch on Mondays and see that she is there—I will eat with her. Mother, at the same table, and the same food. Is that clear? If I get leftover pot roast warmed-up, then she gets leftover pot roast warmed-up, and not creamy Muenster or tuna either, served on a special glass plate that doesn’t absorb her germs! But no, no. Mother doesn’t get the idea, apparently. Too bizarre, apparently. Eat with the shvartze? What could I be talking about? She whispers to me in the hallway, the instant I come in from school, Wait, the girl will be finished in a few minutes . . . But I will not treat any human being (outside my family) as inferior! Can’t you grasp something of the principle of equality, God damn it! And I tell you, if he ever uses the word nigger in my presence again, I will drive a real dagger into his fucking bigoted heart! Is that clear to everyone? I don’t care that his clothes stink so bad after he comes home from collecting the colored debit that they have to be hung in the cellar to air out. I don’t care that they drive him nearly crazy letting their insurance lapse. That is only another reason to be compassionate, God damn it, to be sympathetic and understanding and to stop treating the cleaning lady as though she were some kind of mule, without the same passion for dignity that other people have! And that goes for the goyim, too! We all haven’t been lucky enough to have been born Jews, you know. So a little rachmones on the less fortunate, okay? Because I am sick and tired of goyische this and goyische that! If it’s bad it’s the goyim, if it’s good it’s the Jews! 6Ibid., 74-75
Sister: Face it! You are a Jewish boy!
[I]nstead of crying over he-who refuses at the age of fourteen ever to set foot inside a synagogue again, instead of wailing for he-who has turned his back on the saga of his people, weep for your own pathetic selves, why don’t you, sucking and sucking on that sour grape of a religion! Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew! It is coming out of my ears already, the saga of the suffering Jews! Do me a favor, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass —I happen also to be a human being!
But you are a Jew, my sister says. You are a Jewish boy, more than you know, and all you’re doing is making yourself miserable, all you’re doing is hollering into the wind . . . Through my tears I see her patiently explaining my predicament to me from the end of my bed. If I am fourteen, she is eighteen, and in her first year at Newark State Teacher’s College, a big sallow-faced girl, oozing melancholy at every pore. Sometimes with another big, homely girl named Edna Tepper (who has, however, to recommend her, tits the size of my head), she goes to a folk dance at the Newark Y. This summer she is going to be crafts counselor in the Jewish Community Center day camp. I have seen her reading a paperback book with a greenish cover called A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. All I seem to know about her are these few facts, and of course the size and smell of her brassiere and panties. What years of confusion! And when will they be over? Can you give me a tentative date, please? When will I be cured of what I’ve got!
Do you know, she asks me, where you would be now if you had been born in Europe instead of America?
That isn’t the issue, Hannah.
Dead, she says.
That isn’t the issue!
Dead. Gassed, or shot, or incinerated, or butchered, or buried alive. Do you know that? And you could have screamed all you wanted that you were not a Jew, that you were a human being and had nothing whatever to do with their stupid suffering heritage, and still you would have been taken away to be disposed of. You would be dead, and I would be dead, and
But that isn’t what I’m talking about!
And your mother and your father would be dead.
But why are you taking their side!
I’m not taking anybody’s side, she says. I’m only telling you he’s not such an ignorant person as you think.
And she isn’t either, I suppose! I suppose the Nazis make everything she says and does smart and brilliant too! I suppose the Nazis are an excuse for everything that happens in this house!
Oh, I don’t know, says my sister, maybe, maybe they are, and now she begins to cry too, and how monstrous I feel, for she sheds her tears for six million, or so I think, while I shed mine only for myself. Or so I think. 7Ibid., 76-78
Portnoy’s fantasy of escaping his Jewish identity during adolescence
I am afraid to open my mouth for fear that if I do no words will come out—or the wrong words. “Portnoy, yes, it’s an old French name, a corruption of porte noir, meaning black door or gate. Apparently in the Middle Ages in France the door to our family manor house was painted…” et cetera and so forth. No, no, they will hear the oy at the end, and the jig will be up. Al Port then, Al Parsons! “How do you do. Miss McCoy, mind if I skate alongside, my name is Al Parsons—” but isn’t Alan as Jewish and foreign as Alexander? I know there’s Alan Ladd, but there’s also my friend Alan Rubin, the shortstop for our softball team. And wait’ll she hears I’m from Weequahic. Oh, what’s the difference anyway, I can lie about my name, I can lie about my school, but how am I going to lie about this fucking nose? “You seem like a very nice person, Mr. Porte-Noir, but why do you go around covering the middle of your face like that?” Because suddenly it has taken off, the middle of my face! Because gone is the button of my childhood years, that pretty little thing that people used to look at in my carriage, and lo and behold, the middle of my face has begun to reach out toward God! Porte-Noir and Parsons my ass, kid, you have got J-E-W written right across the middle of that face—look at the shnoz on him, for God’s sakes! That ain’t a nose, it’s a hose! Screw off, Jewboy! Get off the [skating] ice and leave these girls alone!
And it’s true. I lower my head to the kitchen table and on a piece of my father’s office stationery outline my profile with a pencil. And it’s terrible. How has this happened to me who was so gorgeous in that carriage. Mother! At the top it has begun to aim toward the heavens, while simultaneously, where the cartilage ends halfway down the slope, it is beginning to bend back toward my mouth. A couple of years and I won’t even be able to eat, this thing will be directly in the path of the food! No! No! It can’t be! I go into the bathroom and stand before the mirror, I press the nostrils upward with two fingers. From the side it’s not too bad either, but in front, where my upper lip used to be, there is now just teeth and gum. Some goy. I look like Bugs Bunny! I cut pieces from the cardboard that comes back in the shirts from the laundry and Scotch-tape them to either side of my nose, thus restoring in profile the nice upward curve that I sported all through my childhood… but which is now gone! It actually seems that this sprouting of my beak dates exactly from the time mat I discovered the shikses skating in Irvington Park—as though my own nose bone has taken it upon itself to act as my parents’ agent! Skating with shikses? Just you try it, wise guy. Remember Pinocchio? Well, that is nothing compared with what is going to happen to you. They’ll laugh and laugh, howl and hoot-and worse, calling you Goldberg in the bargain, send you on your way roasting with fury and resentment. Who do you think they’re always giggling about as it is? You! The skinny Yid and his shnoz following them around the ice every single afternoon—and can’t talk! “Please, will you stop playing with your nose,” my mother says. “I’m not interested, Alex, in what’s growing up inside there, not at dinner.” “But it’s too big” “What? What’s too big?” says my father. “My nose!” I scream. “Please, it gives you character,” my mother says, “so leave it alone!”
But who wants character? I want Thereal McCoy! In her blue parka and her red earmuffs and her big white mittens—Miss America, on blades! With her mistletoe and her plum pudding (whatever that may be), and her one-family house with a banister and a staircase, and parents who are tranquil and patient and dignified, and also a brother Billy who knows how to take motors apart and says “Much obliged,” and isn’t afraid of anything physical, and oh the way she’ll cuddle next to me on the sofa in her Angora sweater with her legs pulled back up beneath her tartan skirt, and the way shell turn at the doorway and say to me, “And thank you ever so much for a wonderful wonderful evening,” and then this amazing creature—to whom no one has ever said “Shah!” or “I only hope your children will do the same to you someday!”—this perfect, perfect-stranger, who is as smooth and shiny and cool as custard, will kiss me—raising up one shapely calf behind her—and my nose and my name will have become as nothing. 8Ibid., 142-151
Note: This page is one of several pages on Portnoy’s Complaint. View the list.
Endnotes
