Portnoy’s Complaint

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."

"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, Ha

"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, Ha

"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 Tew, 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!"

"A lex!” 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 Ha

– 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- Ha

No! There's more here than just adolescent resentment and Oedipal rage-there's my integrity! I will not do what Heshie did! For I go through childhood convinced that had he only wanted to, my powerful cousin Heshie, the third best javelin thrower in all New Jersey (an honor, I would think, rich in symbolism for this growing boy, with visions of jockstraps dancing in his head), could easily have flipped my fifty-year-old uncle over onto his back, and pi

Yes, I must give in, I must, particularly as I know all my father has been through, what minute by minute misery there has been for him during these tens of thousands of minutes it has taken the doctors to determine, first, that there was something growing in my mother's uterus, and second, whether the growth they finally located was malignant… whether what she had was… oh, that word we ca

And it was. A copy of Dragon Seed by Pearl S. Buck is open on the table beside the bed, where there is also a half-empty glass of flat ginger ale. It's hot and I'm thirsty and my mother, my mind reader, says I should go ahead and drink what's left in her glass, I need it more than she does. But dry as I am, I don't want to drink from any glass to which she has put her lips-for the first time in my life the idea fills me with revulsion! "Take." "I'm not thirsty." Look how you're perspiring." "I'm not thirsty." "Don't be polite all of a sudden." "But I don't like ginger ale." "You? Don't like ginger ale?" "No " "Since when?" Oh, God! She's alive, and so we are at it again-she's alive, and right off the bat we're starting in!