Confessions of a Jewish Motherlover

...Not, after all, a race of crazy, suffering, brilliant, life-embracing Herzogs and Fixers and Salks and One-eyed Generals...

...And, while all the foregoing no doubt fits neatly under the heading of "Chuckles we doubt ever got chuckled," I suppose Portnoy, for once, allows them actually to feel a little sorry for us...

...I'd like a woman you could sleep with and then hang in a cupboard till next time...

...The true "Playboy Philosophy" in a nutshell was, I think, articulated some years ago by Jill Tweedy in the New Statesman, when she quoted a male friend's wistful admission, "You know what I'd like...

...And Alex Portnoy's are, I would guess, considerably more extravagant, or at least more resourcefully milked to a climax, than the monotonous and tepid daydreams of pneumatic lechery with which the average Playboy reader is obliged to satisfy himself...

...and, far from least, Bruce Jay Friedman's Stern and A Mother's Kisses...

...At the same time, the book's pubescent recipient, gratefully aware that he won't be expected to repeat it in the form of a book report (possibly the one educational practice that may yet turn Jews into nonreaders), will also appreciate its reassurance that he's not the only kid in the world cursed with the humiliating itch to derive pleasure from his own flesh...

...More seriously, one might wonder whether he was well-advised to choose a patently Jungian analyst for the spilling of his Freudian guts...

...Although comical domineering Jewish mothers have long been one of the staples of bad Yiddish theater and good American-Jewish fiction, it is only in recent years that The Jewish Mother as a disembodied monster has become a firmly established target of knee-jerk-reflex comedy...

...You also wonder what festering psychic wounds might have been inflicted by the legendary Brenda Patimkin of "Goodbye, Columbus," since, when Portnoy finally gets around to having relationships with actual women instead of with his hand, his descriptions of sex have some of the frantic repulsiveness commonly encountered in the way homosexuals write about those they consider afflicted with vaginolatry...

...But Fuchs makes you understand why and how Max Balkan's mother became such a cossack, and what it was that turned the father into a resigned has-been whose only place of refuge and momentary peace was the toilet...

...CONFESSIONS OF A JEWISH MOTHERLOVER BY SHIMON WINCELBERG Like the English gentleman rumored to have stated that he had no fear of letting Lady Chatterley's Lover be read by his wife or daughter, but should hate to have it fall into the hands of his gamekeeper, I would recommend Portnoy's Complaint, despite some people's impression of it as a "dirty book," as an almost ideal gift for a boy of bar-mitzvah age who has just begun to discover the terrifying joys of what we oldsters quaintly used to be told was "self-abuse...

...They're "Jewish Mothers...

...And yet he is able, by the force of his character and intellect, to attain a remarkable degree of quite unsentimental compassion for this wretched man...

...Aside from this, there is an irresistible fascination, after all, in reading about something as private as another person's masturbation habits and fantasies...

...For the sake of perspective rather than name-dropping or overkill, it is interesting to compare Portnoy's wry or peevish self-pity with the attitude of Kafka attempting to sort out his tortured feelings toward his truly monstrous father...

...There is, to cite only one example, a somewhat similar father-mother relationship in Daniel Fuch's memorable Depression novel, Homage to Blenholt...

...Nor do we lose sympathy for Stephen Dedalus when his "cursed Jesuit strain . . . injected the wrong way" forbids his kneeling even to please his dying mother...

...This is followed by the pleasant irony of how he is struck impotent at a Miami Beach-type resort the author (possibly for tax purposes) calls "Israel," a place he describes with a kind of grudging respect, but also with disappointingly tourist-brochure superficiality...

...is easy to feel merely ribald about Alex's affliction, and wonder whether this permanent inflation of his much-battered-but-unbowed member is not properly the province of the urologist...

...While you can frequently smile with Alex Portnoy's clever mockery of himself and his family, the ferocity he turns on anything associated with Jews?their history, religion, social habits, faults, ideals-Is so totally lacking in irony or satiric exaggeration, you feel as though the book has suddenly shifted from the conventions of fiction to something less easily definable, and that instead of being entertained by Portnoy's petty agonies of immaturity, you have been briefly cornered by the hot breath and glittering eye of his creator...

...What better illustration have we had that what King James' translators called "casting his seed upon the ground" (the very transgression, it will be remembered, for which Dorothy Parker named her canary Onan) does lead to softening of the brain...

...or further, that the very intemperateness and unreliability of the character's gripes and accusations are intended, satirically, to show them up as being unreasonable...

...To the Roth/Portnoy mentality, that's explanation enough...

...That, and that alone, is their biological and social function...

...a terribly funny old Nichols and May skit about the guilt-spinning mother of a cringing nasa scientist...

...Here, Complaint follows in the more genial (if also less brilliant) footsteps of, among others, Dan Greenburg's How to Be a Jewish Mother...

...Now we don't have to envy them any more for their Jewish vitality, compassion, joyous absurdity, self-mockery, and brilliant use of our King's English...

...contains more historical and psychological truth...

...the laughter it induces is simply deeper than Portnoy's rapid-fire gag-reflex...

...More than all the dire, improbable warnings about blindness or insanity, Complaint is an almost sure bet to scare the daylights out of him...

...I don't for a second mean to suggest that the very real and painful guilt-giving talent of some Jewish mothers is not a legitimate target for the novelist or entertainer...

...One almost tends to suspect Roth of trying to have it both ways-to get in his licks at a number of hated targets, yet remain personally immune to counterattack...

...I think I have already implied some personal irritation at Portnoy/Roth's attempt to make his Jocasta of a mother emblematic of The Jewish Mother, without seeing any need to suggest that her (and all her prototypes') unrelieved awfulness is the consequence of anything but her natural wish to keep her son in the impossible status of both baby and "lover...

...I should point out, in all fairness to Philip Roth's indisputable talent, that whatever hearty laughs there are to be gotten out of constipation, masturbation and misguided mother-love, he surely gets...

...But yelping little Portnoys, man and boy, trying ineptly to repay Lindsay's restless black constituents for the 400 years they made them scrub their kitchen floors and gave them tunafish for lunch...

...Portnoy's clever, self-mocking voice far too soon becomes as frantic and unconvincing as an attempt to disguise a case of post-coital depletion...

...Or even that his pest of a mother may be right about other things, like the need for a balanced diet (furnishing all 22 of the vital amino acids, in case she didn't know) and the drab advantages of marrying an alas attainable nice Jewish girl...

...If that is so, and not just my defensive refusal to see myself reflected in the book, Roth must indeed have had his life blighted by some unspeakable educators, rabbis and parents, and surely deserves every dollar he can make back on what he's been obliged to spend on the couch...

...Nothing at all like the image they tried until now to fob off on us in their obediently acclaimed novels...

...In contrast, the ungracious way Portnoy denies his aging parents the (to me) mystifying pleasure of his company only induces us to feel still another twinge of contempt...

...I'll spare you my theories about how this parallels the rise of the New Left, with its prominent young Jewish-bom theoreticians innocently inviting the State to whither away, while hitting on their vulgar, slumlord, countryclubbing, temple-building parents with everything but the original draft copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion...

...To some of our Anglo-Saxon critics, Complaint is surely a delicious revelation by a defector who must have known New York's literary Jewish Mafia from the inside...

...A relatively bright spot in Complaint finally occurs in an amusing final section, where Alex gets over his verbal diarrhea long enough to sketch for us his glum and inevitably disastrous affairs with three gentile girls (and if, all along, you've been waiting for your money's worth of erotic stimulation, at this point you are apt to realize you've been had...

...In the process, though you may not envy Max Balkan his parents, you are able at least to experience them as human beings, not walking anthologies of a self-pitying son's grievances, and even share some of Max's agonized love for them...

...and advertised by the tireless Norman Mailer) virtually independent of a cooperating body, is felt to be an achievement worthy of the most heroic quests, Alex Portnoy certainly is right up in there in demonstrating to gentile skeptics that American Jewish bachelors, while emasculated to a man by the Universal Jewish Monster Womb, have at least retained full use of their equipment...

...he leaps to no wild conclusions applicable to all Jewish fathers, or the synagogues they may mechanically attend...

...Normally, when an author speaks through the mouth of a character of undisputed repulsiveness, the conventions of American fiction lead you to assume that the author's own views are, if not the very opposite, not identical with his protagonist's...

...When Alex makes some of his hyperbolic generalizations about Jews (or, for that matter, about Christians, whom he hates just as much, if not more), I, at least, am left with the impression that he's speaking for the author...

...And he quickly slips from a novelist's brilliant creation into a stand-up comic who has overstayed even the patience of his tipsy, uncritical audience while going on and on, taking the same burlesque sledgehammer to the same three or four stale walnuts...

...Through water and fire/Would she go for her child...

...With Portnoy, no such easy assumptions are possible...

...Here and there, she may even still entertain a tiresome reluctance to see The Pill as her passport to "Paradise Now...

...There, too, the parents are seen from the viewpoint of the sensitive son struggling against what they, with all dreams long beaten out of them, want him to be...

...In an age where the Perfect Orgasm (as discovered Shimon Wincelberg's new play, The Windows of Heaven, just premiered at Stockholm's Royal Theater...

...For Complaint's primary target is of course Alex's mother, or rather The Jewish Mother, to Roth clearly one and the same thing...

...Shirley" (as Herman Wouk once termed her with affectionate derision) may not have the same inexhaustible patience and ingenuity for exotic bedmanship as Portnoy's "Monkey...

...But even if, for the last third of the book, my narrow sectarian prejudices make it perfectly possible for me to be on Portnoy's side, I can't help feeling let down in comparing it to the beautifully realized subplot that dominated Roth's far more ambitious Letting Go, where he really made you feel the day-to-day texture of a sexual relationship which has turned sour...

...Having, at the moment, two Jewish Mothers in my own immediate family, one of whom I actually sleep with, I must admit to being an interested party in this discussion...

...Especially when I remember Roth's early short stories, with their tacit assumption that any practicing Jew must be either an unblushing hypocrite ("Defender of the Faith," "The Conversion of the Jews") or some kind of a nut ("Eli the Fanatic," which I still think one of his best...

...Kafka understood with devastating clarity what literally crippling self-doubts and guilt-feelings his father had implanted in him...

...conceivably even in gentile families) have this driving need to forcefeed and devour their gifted sons like so many Strasbourg geese...

...And early in the morning she will be at least as apt to mope around with mysterious cramps as be up on a ladder baking fresh cornbread and papering your walls to resemble an acid-trip through Williamsburg, Virginia...

...Nor is Homage a bit less funny than Complaint...

...You can almost hear their chuckling: So that's what the bastards are really like...

...For all his confident bandying of psychological jargon, he never grants us the slightest clue as to why such mothers (who, let's face it, do exist...

...Me, I suspect even a sentimental cabaret song like Mein Yid-dishe Momme...

...But, where Greenburg's book is a shrewd and funny (if not always very original) piece of observation, and the Jewish Mother invented or (Heaven forbid) remembered by Friedman is in truth even more monstrous than Sophie Portnoy, neither of them gives you that continuous nudge in the ribs to insist that the women being talked about are typical of your mother...

...Portnoy's shikses, as compared to the anaphrodisiac Jewish girls represented by his practically faceless older sister, may indeed be able to offer erotic feasts undreamt of in the entire gamut of titles emitted by Olympia Press...

...In her moments of rage, though, one thing she won't call you is a lousy Jew...

...But, as the book lugubriously demonstrates, again and again, their end is more bitter than wormwood, not to mention sharper than a two-edged sword...