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American Jewish Fiction that will be done to their father but also Hitler’s contemporaneous military victories in Europe—affects them in different ways. Vic remains fiercely loyal, while Ernie falls in with an aspiring hoodlum, shoplifts, and visits a prostitute across the Canadian border, in Windsor. As the title suggests, though, both boys spend most of their time waiting: for news of their father’s death, for Hitler’s latest atrocity, for an opportunity to live up to Jake’s impossibly high standards. The effete Marxists, Orthodox astronomers, corrupt politicians, and thugs they encounter don’t offer Vic and Ernie much in the way of models for a life as honest as Jake’s but less fraught with danger and violence. Since some of this material seems based on historical detail, perhaps it is no wonder that Litwak himself left Detroit for San Francisco. Highly praised by Irving Howe, and the recipient of several Jewish book awards, Waiting for the News captures the gritty tension that results from attempting to live honestly in a rough city. Further reading: Litwak’s other books are To the Hanging Garden (1964), also set in Detroit; College Days in Earthquake Country (1971), a nonfiction account of student and faculty protests at San Francisco State University, where Litwak taught for decades; The Medic (2001), a fictionalized version of Litwak’s experiences in World War II; and Nobody’s Baby (2005), a collection of short stories, including the top O. Henry Prize winner of 1990. Litwak’s father, Isaac, was, like Jake Gottlieb, a labor leader in the Detroit laundry industry, and he has been mentioned in connection with one of Jimmy Hoffa’s scandals in the late 1950s; Isaac Litwak’s career receives some attention in Steve Babson’s history, Working Detroit (1986). Another captivating novel about union organization, in which a Jewish leader features prominently, is Chester Himes’s Lonely Crusade (1947). Those interested in Jewish Detroit should also seek out Elliot Feldman’s dark comedy Sitting Shiva (2002), and Sidney Bolkosky’s history, Harmony and Dissonance (1991). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63pPortnoy’s Complaint By Philip Roth RANDOM HOUSE, 1969. 274 PAGES. P ortnoy’s Complaint is the most notorious, talked-about novel in the American Jewish tradition; it also happens to be one of the finest. Though Roth has spent more energy developing the character of Nathan Zuckerman, and in recent years has written exceptional novels starring none other than Philip Roth, it seems clear that 100 or 200 years from now, the author will be remembered as the creator of Alexander Portnoy—sex-crazed, often impotent, obsessed with the slings and arrows of his Jewish family. Portnoy tells the story of his life in a hilarious rant, wheeling through the events of his childhood and adult life with a stand-up comic’s sense for incident and a postmodernist’s eye for subtle underlying patterns. Having barely survived 90 his early years with a stereotypical Jewish mother—straight out of Dan Greenburg’s nonfiction bestseller, How to Be a Jewish Mother (1964)—and a perpetually constipated father, the young Portnoy soon discovers his first love, masturbation, which he practices with a ferocious intensity rarely matched by anyone, except perhaps just about every teenage boy on the planet. “My wang was all I really had that I could call my own,” he explains. His second object of fascination, shikses (that is, non-Jewish girls), carries him well into his 20s. He applies a nickname to each of his non-Jewish girlfriends: there’s the Pumpkin, the Pilgrim, and finally the Monkey, who matches his nymphomanic lusts but can’t spell (she leaves a note for the maid asking her to “polish the flor by bathrum pleze & don’t furget the insies of windose”). By the end of the novel, Portnoy has landed in post-1967 Israel, where he finds himself as out of place and neurotic as ever. The book then shudders to a stop with an unforgettable “PUNCH LINE,” spoken by Portnoy’s Freudian analyst: “Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” Sensibly enough, many readers have found the attitude toward women in Portnoy’s Complaint repulsive; a smaller number have also objected to the book as an unsavory portrait of the modern American Jew. At the same time, many serious readers—both male and female—have found it not only a riotously comic emblem of late 1960s culture, but also a lasting work of art with something important to say about American Jewish life...

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