Sophie Portnoy's Complaint

"DR. SPEILVOGEL," cries Alexander Portnoy from the psychiatrist's couch, "this is my life, my only life, and I'm living it in the middle of a Jewish joke!" But what Portnoy overlooks in his complaint is the fact that there is another person trapped in that joke-Sophie Portnoy, the archetypal castrating Jewish mother, standing over her little boy with a stainless steel bread knife when he refuses to eat. The joke is a funny one, no doubt-and by elevating a stand-up routine into a comic art form, Philip Roth gave popular American culture the definitive stereotype of the Jewish mother. As for the Jewish grandmother, she is merely Sophie Portnoy writ large.

But it's almost ten years since Portnoy's Complaint first appeared. Things have changed. The women's movement has extended its unsettling influence back in time, so that women-and men-have begun to look at their female forebears in a different light. The history of Jewish immigration to this country has acquired a certain vogue, spurred on by a general mood of nostalgia and in particular by the movie Hester Street. And there seems to be a new respect for the elderly, aroused not only by the militancy of a group like the Gray Panthers, but also by the increasing popularity of oral history-a discipline that relies on the memories of old people. In short, it's no longer kosher to ridicule elderly Jewish women.

It would be unfair to say that Sydelle Kramer and Jenny Masur, who edited this collection of ten oral histories of Jewish grandmothers, are cashing in on an idea whose time has come-especially since the distribution of the book has been limited and publicity modest. But they do take a certain polemical tone, consciously setting out to destroy what they perceive to be a sexist stereotype, proclaiming in their introduction that "the women of this book will . . . allow a public so long accustomed to hearing Portnoy's complaint the opportunity to read the whole story." While not attempting a scholarly work, they have provided zealously researched, if intrusive, footnotes and a little bit of American history. The analysis in Jewish Grandmothers smacks vaguely of condescension, but the editors have wisely let the subjects of the book do almost all of their own talking.

NOT SURPRISINGLY, these ten grandmothers have quite a bit to say: pogroms, revolutions, stormy trans-Atlantic crossings, continual struggles for existence and self- fulfillment fill their memories. Coming from a wide variety of backgrounds, they emerge, if not as flesh-and-blood individuals, then at least as something much more than stereotypes.

Sarah Rothman (a pseudonym) inherited her grandfather's lucrative watch repair business as a young and inexperienced girl-"What I went through, I don't know why I'm living that long, I'm telling your. I broke plenty of watches." But gaining experience, she acquired a sense of independence; after she emigrated to the United States, she asserted her independence by marching on picket lines and getting an illegal abortion. Rose Soskin was only 13 when a 35-year-old Polish doctor decided he would marry her. "In the Old Country, when a doctor wants to marry you, you marry." By the times she was 14 she was a mother. But when she got to this country she divorced her husband, remarried, and "started to realize life".

Most of the women in this book were rebels in some way. Few rebelled in a political sense-Anuta Sharrow belonged to a revolutionary study group in Kiev, but her first love was music. Nor was their rebellion directed specifically against their parents; interestingly enough, in the one case where this pattern does fit, a daughter rebelled against her mother, a university lecturer, by adopting a traditional feminine role. They were rather rebels in alliance with their parents, mounting what protest they could against a culture that had a stranglehold on the Jewish population in general-and a double one on Jewish Women. Over and over again, the theme that emerges from these autobiographies is the struggle for education-a struggle against the anti-Semitic government that enforced a rigid quota system to limit Jewish attendance at state schools, and a struggle against the Jewish religion itself, which set up learning as the highest good and then decreed that is was the preserve of Jewish men only.

After the women's stories move to this country, they tend to follow a similar pattern. First an eager attempt to combine ten-hour days in sweat shops with night school or high school, then surrender to the necessities of existence, to marriage, to children, and finally, in most cases, to prosperity. Here the stories fade, but you can still fill in the details-vacations in Florida, presidencies of ladies auxiliaries, retirement. The metamorphosis from rebellious young woman, clamoring for education, to the more familiar image of Jewish grandmother, gloating over snapshots of her grandchildren, seems complete. But no, not quite-many of these women, free at last, go back to school. Anuta Sharrow was the oldest student at Chicago Musical College; Ida Richter began to write novels; Katya Govsky earned a certificate to teach adult education. For some, it seems to be too late. "I was always happy," concludes Mollie Linker. "But if I would have had an education, with my mind, if I had taken the time, I probably would turn out to be something else." "No, I didn't accomplish what I wanted," says Pearl Moscowitz. "Because I wanted an education."

WHAT IS MOST STRIKING about these ten portraits is not what they reveal about their subjects-after all, how much can be communicated in a 10- or 15-page monologue, told in an idiom that depends more on tone and inflection than on mere words ? The really starling thing about this book is what it reveals about the little old ladies who take their shopping bags to Bloomingdales, who attend B' nai Brith functions, who sit on park benches outside old age homes. I know I've been startled like this before-for instance, when a staid and jewel-bedecked elderly woman, whom I had automatically dismissed as uninteresting, somehow began to recount a tale of wandering barefoot and starving through wartime Russia with her little boy, begging for food and shelter. And there is the vague memory-did I invent it ?-of hearing my own grandmother tell a story of hiding in an oven while the Cossacks rode through her village in a pogrom.

I can't ask my grandmother to repeat the story now; she has a disease that often prevents her from remembering who I am, much less spinning tales of the Old Country. If I had read this book sooner, perhaps I would have pressed her for details while there was still time. "Oral history" tends to be a somewhat clinical procedure, despite the best efforts of its practitioners; "conversation" is a much more satisfying method of communication. But for those who, like me, seem to have missed their chance, this book provides a respectable alternative. Of course these women have left things out of their accounts, romanticized, glossed over, exaggerated, prettified. Of course it's not the whole story. But then, neither was Portnoy's Complaint.