Portnoy’s Complaint

IN EXILE

On Sunday mornings, when the weather is warm enough, twenty of the neighborhood men (this in the days of short center field) play a round of seven-i

Meanwhile, all the way from the outfield comes the badinage of one who in appearance is more cement-mixer than Homo sapiens, the prince of the produce market, Allie Sokolow. The pisk he opens on him! (as my mother would put it). For half an i

I tell you, they are an endearing lot! I sit in the wooden stands alongside first base, inhaling that sour springtime bouquet in the pocket of rsy fielder's mitt-sweat, leather, vaseline-and laughing my head off. I ca

I remember all this where? when? While Captain Meyerson is making his last slow turn over the Tel Aviv airport. My face is against the window. Yes, I could disappear, I think, change my mime and never be heard from again - then Meyerson banks the wing on my side, and I look down for the first time upon the continent of Asia, I look down from two thousand feet in the air upon the Land of Israel, where the Jewish people first came into being, and am impaled upon a memory of Sunday morning softball games in Newark.

The elderly couple seated beside me (the Solomons, Edna and Felix), who have told me in an hour's flight time all about their children and grandchildren in Cinci

And that's the phrase that does me in as we touch down upon Eretz Yisroel : to watch the men.

Because I love those men! I want to grow up to be one of those men! To be going home to Sunday di

Our eighth-grade class visits the courthouse to observe the architecture. Home and in my room that night, I write in my fresh new graduation autograph album, under YOUR FAVORITE MOTTO, "Don't Step on the Underdog." MY FAVORITE PROFESSION? "Lawyer." MY FAVORITE HERO? "Tom Paine and Abraham Lincoln." Lincoln sits outside the courthouse (in Gutzon Borglum's bronze), looking tragic and fatherly: you just know how much he cares. A statue of Washington, standing erect and authoritarian in front of his horse, overlooks Broad Street; it is the work of J. Massey Rhind (we write this second u

A nice little Jewish boy? Please, I am the nicest little Jewish boy who ever lived! Only look at the fantasies, ow sweet and savior-like they are! Gratitude to my parents, loyalty to my tribe, devotion to the cause of justice!