524
JACK LUDWIG
* *
*
Lo,
behold, in the last days of the Senate, a gift arrived from the
Heavens. That noble scarecrow,
The Permanent Subcommittee on In–
vestigations
of the United States Senate, issued a subpoena requiring
City College to supply information about particular student organizations
and their faculty advisors. This gave the Center and Left a chance to
bristle together with common outrage. It was an old battle, a glorious
one, long since won, a shiver from the fifties and as the votes rolled
in to resist the subpoena, a kind of warm camaraderie spread through
the ranks of our Senate.
If
only the Permanent Subcommittee would
keep at it. We might all win together, happily, in a simple, black and
white, cause.
Mark J. Mirsky
SONS AND LOVERS
PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT.
By
Philip Roth. Random House. $6.95.
1
Long before
Portnoy's Complaint
was published, "Whacking
Off' and "Cunt Crazy" threatened to do in
The Evergree>n Review,
Sophie Ginsky took over as Ur-Jewishmother, Jack Portnoy's mono–
lithic constipation became a subject of national concern.
L ife,
which
wholly owns subsidiaries like Little, Brown, permitted Albert Goldman
to discuss the real Philip Roth, a small business and wholly-owned
subsidiary of Random House, a wholly-owned subsidiary of
Life's
com–
munications opposition, RCA. Advance sales were fabulous, paperback
rights and movie rights astronomical, exactly the sort of thing the
executors of the New York Protocols of Zion (Lit. Div.) could do once
they set their minds to it. Not that
goyim
were the only ones made
paranoid by
Portnoy's Complaint:
the usual Jewish response to Roth
turned up again - Roth had blackened the Jewish community's third eye.
Reviews were enthusiastic, but sometimes peculiar.
Saturday R eview
published Granville Hicks's good gray "yes" countered by Marya
Mannes' suffragetic "Nay!" Woman, said Miss Mannes, "gets the short
end of the stick even if she gets the long end of the antihero," an
anatomical conception I'm still doing my best to diagram. Not only
