The Story of "Hannah P": Recovering Portnoy's Sister

Despite his palpable misogyny and misanthropy, Alex Portnoy has become an alienated "everyman," a modernist anti-hero. By contrast, there is virtually no critical literature on his older sister, Hannah, who fits neither of the prevailing stereotypes for fictional Jewish women: the Jewish Mother and the Jewish American Princess. This essay considers why we as critics and readers don't see Hannah, and how her erasure raises questions about the Jewish woman in the imagination of the time and today. To begin to explain Hannah's absence and reduction, the essay offers a counter-reading of Roth's famous text, in the spirit of Virginia Woolf 's meditation on "Shakespeare's sister," that finds evidence of a counter-narrative in which Hannah Portnoy is not the loser and nebbish her brother makes her out to be, but a powerful presence he can only barely acknowledge. Encrypted in Alex's misogynist and hysterical male rants is the almost lost story of his/the Jewish sister.