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MARK SHECKNER
dom. For example, here is Alex's own dietary analysis of the difference
between himself and Smolka, that same Smolka who gets blown by
Bubbles Girardi after Alex, crestfallen, leaves her house having come
in his own eye while bringing
himself
off. "He lives on Hostess cup–
cakes and his own wits. I get a hot lunch and all the inhibitions
thereof. " But for ultimate aphrodisiacal virtue there is the lobster, a
terror beyond
chazerai,
an unambiguous threat to sanity and life. So–
phie Portnoy's historic bout with lobster, paralysis, and an Irish in–
surance salesman is textbook hysteria. "See how I'm holding my
fingers" she instructs her son, a neophyte in primitive religious phe–
nomena, " I was throwing up so hard, they got stiff just like this, like I
was paralyzed...."
Sophie's symptoms are prophecies for her son. Within an hour of
eating a lobster with brother-in-law Marty at Sheepshead Bay, Alex
has his cock out on the 107 bus, "aimed at a
shikse."
It
is to protect
him from such madness that a mother must keep up her dietary vigi–
lance. Naturally this education in taboo-by-diet falls to the mother, for
she understands better than anyone how food, love, power and posses–
sion are arranged.
Is it any wonder then that this same Sophie invites Jake's new
cashier from the office for a nice, home-cooked Jewish meal? Hardly,
for once Anne McCaffrey has dined with the Portnoys she's hooked,
and not on Jake but on his wonderful
haimische
family . "This is your
real Jewish chopped liver, Anne. Have you ever had real Jewish
chopped liver before?" So much for that affair, for if lobster is the
Spanish fly of the Jews, real chopped liver is their saltpeter, the all–
inhibiting cold hors d'oeuvre of the constipated husband. Could Jake be
slipping it to that new cashier on the side? Not after that meal. For
this is a totem feast and that is
his liver
they 're passing around.
So it is not just a happy conjunction of horniness and opportu–
nity that sets Alex to banging that fresh liver behind the billboard
on
his way to a bar mitzvah lesson.
It
is another symbol of Alex's private
Kulturkampf,
with the liver falling victim
to
his relentless, educated
cock. What price such victory? To have your mother serve up the con–
ques t two hours later, healthy as milk, dryas matzo, warm and safe as
your own Jewish childhood. In other words, defeat. (In the "Salad
Days" section of
My Life as a Man,
Roth tries to carry this oral logic
over into the plant kingdom by having Sharon Shatsky entertain Na–
than Zuckerman with a floor show in whir:h she applies to herself a
