To the Editor:

I have only one reservation in regard to Irving Howe’s superb essay on Philip Roth [“Philip Roth Reconsidered,” December 1972]: he lets Roth off too lightly in an area important enough to warrant dissenting comment. Mr. Howe writes: “Portnoy’s Complaint is not, as enraged critics have charged, an anti-Semitic book, though it contains plenty of contempt for Jewish life.” At the risk of joining the ranks of the enraged, I should like to examine this statement.

To begin with, the line between “contempt for Jewish life” and anti-Semitism is a bit shaky. Among its various components, anti-Semitism has a generous admixture of contempt which may either spring from hate or lead to hate. But even if we accept the distinction made by Mr. Howe, Roth remains open to the heavier charge.

For the sake of argument I am prepared to grant that Roth’s unrelieved picture of Jewish grossness, chicanery, lechery, hypocrisy, and so on belongs in the realm of the extended Jewish joke; and that Roth’s vision of the Jewish family in Portnoy . . . is, according to the taste of the reader, satire, realism, or simply a hilarious lampoon of the Jewish tribe which should vex only the overly nervous Jewish bourgeoisie. After all, why should Jews be exempt from the social critic’s jibe or the prophet’s wrath? And who is more qualified than a fellow tribesman to reveal the sty hidden beneath ritually pure kashrut? Let me also grant that the tribe’s perpetually endangered state is no reason for a serious humorist to stay his hand. Such matters should be the concern of rabbis, professional Jews, and other philistines, not of the honest writer and his enthusiastic reader. Yet even after all these concessions to artistic probity are made—“I paint the world as I see it”—there remains in Portnoy a distillate of something describable only as plain unadulterated anti-Semitism. The fact that the more sophisticated the critic the more readily he has ignored its presence tells us something about the Jewish condition in the United States.

No disquisition on the nature of anti-Semitism is called for in this instance. Let us venture to be simple. Of what, in addition to lesser charges (Jews are pushy, vulgar, dishonest, shirkers of military duty, and generally unsavory), do anti-Semites accuse Jews? The gravamen of the anti-Semitic indictment straight through Hitler is that the Jew is the defiler and destroyer of the Gentile world.

Now what about hapless Portnoy, the amusing shlemiel on the analyst’s couch? He is neither so innocent nor so impotent. His boyhood pollutions are the prelude to his calculated pollution of his environment. In a classic description of what the Nazis called rassenschande (racial defilement), Portnoy explains that he lusts after blonde shikses not because he is drawn to them individually but because that is how he can “conquer America.” In sexual intercourse his pleasure is that “I can stick it up their backgrounds.” The scene in which he gloats at the contrast between his swarthy body and that of the fair Nordic patrician maiden he possesses is straight out of the Goebbels-Streicher script. Only the customary Roth technique of festooning the savage contour of his creation with amusing bits of idiom or local color—the dark Jewish body is at least half “undigested halvah and hot pastrami, from Newark, N.J.”—keeps the chuckling reader from realizing what has been perpetrated.

Nor is Roth content with depicting Portnoy as the willful violator of the Gentile sexual background. He must be revealed as the enemy of the Gentile world. For Portnoy, Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity, the phony Jewish liberal par excellence, offers as his prime achievement his exposure of an “Ur-Wasp” in the television quiz scandals: “Yes, I was one happy yiddel down there in Washington, a little Stern Gang of my own, busily exploding Charlie’s honor and integrity, while simultaneously becoming lover to that aristocratic Yankee beauty whose forebears arrived on these shores in the 17th century. Phenomenon known as Hating Your Goy and Eating One Too.”

This is not even funny. It’s plain vicious. And the voice is that of Roth not of Portnoy, for no “happy yiddel” would refer to himself as such in this context. The destruction of a goy is the sole positive achievement which Roth bestows on his creation. That the achievement is wholly out of character with fumbling Alex as heretofore presented only serves to underscore the act. Despite the disarming diminutive, the one happy yiddel emerges as the baleful Yid of tradition. The two crudest and most venerable stereotypes of anti-Semitic lore—the Jew as sexual defiler and malevolent destroyer with a supporting cast of cheats and vulgarians—move in a Jewish ambience whose authenticity is guaranteed by appetizing borsht, wonderfully mimicked intonations, and comic folkways. If the accent rings true, why doubt the words?

The literary decline of Roth is brilliantly traced by Mr. Howe. The same descending line may be noted in Roth’s social commentary on American Jewry—his chief if not sole theme. By current standards the stories in Goodbye, Columbus now seem less shocking though just as skillful as when they first appeared. To épater les bourgeois today Roth has to kick over the traces entirely. The antic humor of Portnoy provides the guise. America, while holding its nose, embraced Portnoy as a perceptive if extravagant depiction of American-Jewish life and Jewish literati led in bestowing the accolades. Now that Roth has shifted from Jewish mother to mammary gland, cosmic profundities are being discovered in what is in reality a bore. But The Breast continues a process already apparent in Portnoy. Like every cartoonist, Roth dismembers his characters by dehumanizing them so that they never appear whole. Then he pastes the bits together with a realistic Jewish glue so that the reader, sniffing the agreeable aroma of knishes, can rejoice in discovering what “they are really like” without feeling guilty.

While the pathology of anti-Semitism may be mysterious in its origins, its symptoms are all too obvious. . . .

Marie Syrkin
New York City

_____________

To the Editor:

In the course of “Philip Roth Reconsidered,” Irving Howe attacks Roth, his books, “the culture,” literary critics themselves, rabbis, and Jewish communal leaders. . . .

Mr. Howe makes random . . . assaults on Roth’s own real or imagined character; the author is “impatient,” “snappish,” “dismissive,” “raucous,” and “self-aggrandizing.” Either Roth and Mr. Howe are personal enemies or something about Roth’s books bothers Mr. Howe. In the latter case, the crux of the matter is perhaps Roth’s position outside “the tradition of Jewish self-criticism and satire.” If Roth lies outside this tradition, what separates him from it is his comedy. In fact, there is really no American tradition of good comic, sophisticated writing as there is in England, France, and Russia. Not being able to categorize a writer may be disorienting and even upsetting, but these responses can be useful ones for a literary critic in taking the measure of a writer and his books. Mr. Howe seems instead to be insulted.

A clue to his highly subjective critical opinions is his misreadings of “Eli, the Fanatic” and Portnoy’s Complaint. In both works, Mr. Howe’s mistake is to overlook the complexities: the yeshivah is clearly not Roth’s postulated solution to the crassness of Woodenton, and it is evident in the novel that Roth knows that members of other religions have sexual frustrations to contend with.

The mix in Roth of the robust, ambiguous, comic, and pathetic is perhaps difficult to grapple with and therefore disturbing. To deflect this disturbance onto personality issues and simplistic readings is to miss the point entirely and to derive solace from inappropriate lines of inquiry.

Carol Morgenstern
Hewlett, New York

_____________

Irving Howe writes:

Carol Morgenstern doesn’t read very well. She says that I attack Philip Roth’s “own real or imagined character” as “impatient,” “snappish,” “dismissive.” What I wrote was that “Roth’s own temperament as a writer is inclined to be impatient, snappish, and dismissive.” Roth’s character, real or imagined, and Roth’s temperament as a writer are two clearly distinguishable things. Hence it is gratuitous for Miss Morgenstern to wonder whether Roth and I are personal enemies. In case she is still worried about that, let me assure her that, as far as I’m concerned, we are not.

She writes that in Roth’s story “Eli, the Fanatic,” “the yeshivah is clearly not Roth’s postulated solution to the crassness of Woodenton.” It’s pointless of her to imply that I had supposed it was. For, actually, I wrote that I found it difficult to take at face value “the solemn espousal of yeshivah Orthodoxy as the positive force in the story.” To speak of “postulated solution” is to refer to proposals for the real world; to speak of “positive force in the story” is to refer to the way an element of plot works, or is meant to work, in a fiction. Indeed, one reason I was dubious about the yeshivah as a “positive force in the story” was my sense that this wasn’t the result of Roth’s conviction, but was being used, much too easily, “as a stick with which to beat Woodenton.”

There’s no space adequately to discuss Marie Syrkin’s letter. Let me only say that there should be a way of distinguishing between an anti-Semite and someone who dislikes us, or between an anti-Semitic book and someone whose book “contains plenty of contempt for Jewish life.”