Portnoy’s Complaint

And there, to cause me to kick my ass even more, there all blue below me, the Aegean Sea. The Pumpkin's Aegean! My poetic American girl! Sophocles! Long ago! Oh, Pumpkin- baby, say it again, Why would I want to do a thing like that? Someone who knew who she was! Psychologically so intact as not to be in need of salvation or redemption by mel Not in need of conversion to my glorious faith! The poetry she used to read to me at Antioch, the education she was giving me in literature, a whole new perspective, an understanding of art and the artistic way… oh, why did I ever let her go! I can't believe it-because she wouldn't be Jewish? "The eternal note of sadness-" "The turbid ebb and flow of human misery-"

Only, is this human misery? I thought it was going to be loftier! Dignified suffering! Meaningful suffering- something perhaps along the line of Abraham Lincoln. Tragedy, not farce! Something a little more Sophoclean was what I had in mind. The Great Emancipator, and so on. It surely never crossed my mind that I would wind up trying to free from bondage nothing more than my own prick. LET MY PETER GO! There, that's Portnoy's slogan. That's the story of my life, all summed up in four heroic dirty words. A travesty! My politics, descended entirely to my putz! JERK-OFF ARTISTS OF THE WORLD UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR BRAINS! The freak I am! Lover of no one and nothing! Unloved and unloving! And on the brink of becoming John Lindsay's Profurno!

So it seemed, an hour out of Athens.

Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Beer-She'va, the Dead Sea, Sedom, 'Ein Gedi, then north to Caesarea, Haifa, Akko, Tiberias, Safed, the upper Galilee… and always it is more dreamy than real. Not that I courted the sensation either. I'd had enough of the improbable with my companion in Greece and Rome. No, to make some sense out of the impulse that had sent me running aboard the El Al flight to begin with, to convert myself from this bewildered runaway into a man once again-in control of my will, conscious of my intentions, doing as I wished, not as I must-I set off traveling about the country as though the trip had been undertaken deliberately, with forethought, desire, and for praiseworthy, if conventional, reasons. Yes, I would have (now that I was unaccountably here) what is called an educational experience. I would improve myself, which is my way, after all. Or was, wasn't it? Isn't that why I still read with a pencil in my hand? To learn? To become better? (than whom?) So, I studied maps in my bed, bought historical and archeological texts and read them with my meals, hired guides, rented cars-doggedly in that sweltering heat, I searched out and saw everything I could: tombs, synagogues, fortresses, mosques, shrines, harbors, ruins, the new ones, the old. I visited the Carmel Caves, the Chagall windows (me and a hundred ladies from the Detroit Hadassah), the Hebrew University, the Bet She'an excavations- toured the green kibbutzirn, the baked wastelands, the rugged border outposts in the mountains; I even climbed a little ways up Masada under the full artillery fire of the sun. And everything I saw, I found I could assimilate and understand. It was history, it was nature, it was art. Even the Negev, that hallucination, I experienced as real and of this world. A desert. No, what was incredible and strange to me, more novel than the Dead Sea, or even the dramatic wilderness of Tsin, where for an eerie hour I wandered in the light of the bleaching sun, between white rocks where (I learn from my guidebook) the tribes of Israel wandered for so long (where I picked up as a souvenir-and have in fact right here in my pocket-such a stone as my guide informed me Zipporah used to circumcise the son of Moses-) what gave my entire sojourn the air of the preposterous was one simple but wholly (to me) implausible fact: lamina Jewish country. In this country, everybody is Jewish.