![]() ![]() The novel, which featured scenes of self-love involving everything from baseball mitts to liver meat, detonated the wall between low comedy and high art. “LET’S PUT THE ID BACK IN YID!” the narrator explains at one point. Published in 1969, “Portnoy’s Complaint” was a provocative hand grenade rolled right into the literary and Jewish establishments.Ī hyperactive comic monologue delivered by the titular character to his psychoanalyst, the book’s pages ramble between obscene scenes of masturbation and erotic longing, Jewish guilt and family infighting. ![]() Over dinner with friends that night, Roth reflected on the bruising experience in the wake of “Goodbye, Columbus.” “English literature is anti-Semitic literature!” ![]() “You were brought up on anti-Semitic literature!” another charged as Roth fled the building. Roth, would you write the same stories if you lived in Nazi Germany?” members of the audience asked, Roth would later write in his autobiography, “The Facts.” Only 29-years-old, the Jewish writer had pocketed literary accolades and awards with his first book, 1959’s “Goodbye, Columbus.”īut to the students and professors at the Jewish college in New York City, the book’s portrayals of American-born Jews shaking free of their old world culture while navigating the sexual and culture tripwires of the 1950s were far too real and unflattering – a disgrace even. It was March 1962, and Philip Roth was sitting on a literature panel at Yeshiva University. ![]()
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