Portnoy’s Complaint

That Alice was so blatantly a shikse caused no end of grief in Heshies household, and even in my own; as for the community at large, I believe there was actually a kind of civic pride taken in the fact that a gentile could have assumed a position of such high visibility in our high school, whose faculty and student body were about ninety-five percent Jewish. On the other hand, when Alice performed what the loudspeaker described as her “piece de resistance”- twirling a baton that had been wrapped at either end in oil-soaked rags and then set afire-despite all the solemn applause delivered by the Weequahic fans in tribute to the girl's daring and concentration, despite the grave boom boom boom of our bass drum and the gasps and shrieks that went up when she seemed about to set ablaze her two adorable breasts-despite this genuine display of admiration and concern, I think there was still a certain comic detachment experienced on our side of the field, grounded in the belief that this was precisely the kind of talent that only a goy would think to develop in the first place.

Which was more or less the prevailing attitude toward athletics in general, and football in particular, among the parents in the neighborhood: it was for the goyim. Let them knock their heads together for "glory," for victory in a ball game! As my Aunt Clara put it, in that taut, violin-string voice of hers, “Heshie! Please! I do not need goyische naches!" Didn't need, didn't want such ridiculous pleasures and satisfactions as made the gentiles happy… At football our Jewish high school was notoriously hopeless (though the band, may I say, was always winning prizes and commendations); our pathetic record was of course a disappointment to the young, no matter what the parents might feel, and yet even as a child one was able to understand that for us to lose at football was not exactly the ultimate catastrophe. Here, in fact, was a cheer that my cousin and his buddies used to send up from the stands at the end of a game in which Weequahic had once again met with seeming disaster. I used to chant it with them.

Ikey, Mikey, Jake and Sam,
Were the boys who eat no ham,
We play football, we play soccer-
And we keep matzohs in our locker!
Aye, aye, aye, Weequahic High!

So what if we had lost? It turned out we had other things to be proud of. We ate no ham. We kept matzohs in our lockers. Not really, of course, but if we wanted to we could, and we weren't ashamed to say that u)e actually did! We were Jews-and we weren't ashamed to say it! We were Jews-and not only were we not inferior to the goyim who beat us at football, but the chances were that because we could not commit our hearts to victory in such a thuggish game, we were superior! We were Jews-and we were superior!

White bread, rye bread
Pumpernickel, challah,
All those for Weequahic,
Stand up and hollah!

Another cheer I learned from Cousin Hesh, four more lines of poetry to deepen my understanding of the injustices we suffered… The outrage, the disgust inspired in my parents by the gentiles, was beginning to make some sense: the goyim pretended to be something special, while we were actually their moral superiors. And what made us superior was precisely the hatred and the disrespect they lavished so willingly upon us!

Only what about the hatred we lavished upon them?

And what about Heshie and Alice? What did that mean?

When all else failed. Rabbi Warshaw was asked to join with the family one Sunday afternoon, to urge our Heshie not to take his young life and turn it over to his own worst enemy. I watched from behind a shade in the living room, as the rabbi strode impressively up the front stoop in his big black coat. He had given Heshie his bar mitzvah lessons, and I trembled to think that one day he would give me mine. He remained in consultation with the defiant boy and the blighted family for over an hour. "Over an hour of his time," they all said later, as though that alone should have changed Heshie's mind. But no sooner did the rabbi depart than the flakes of plaster began falling once again from the ceiling overhead. A door flew open-and I ran for the back of the house, to crouch down behind the shade in my parents' bedroom. There was Heshie into the yard, pulling at his own black hair. Then came bald Uncle Hymie, one fist shaking violently in the air-like Lenin he looked! And then the mob of aunts and uncles and elder cousins, swarming between the two so as to keep them from grinding one another into a little heap of Jewish dust.