ellauri106.html on line 106: That same year, rather than wait to be drafted, Roth enlisted in the army. Roth enlisted in the Army that year to avoid being drafted and assigned to unpleasant duty like the infantry. Fortunately he suffered a back injury during basic training and was given a medical discharge. Who knows. He returned to Chicago in 1956 to study for a PhD in literature but dropped out after one term. It was a yeasty environment for a young writer. Saul Bellow was a contemporary and with some what similar backgrounds and interests they could not avoid being rivals. During that year he met a lovely shiksa waitress Margaret Martinson, a single woman with a small child. He was smitten. An intense, but often troubled relationship ensued. At the end of the year he dropped out of the U of C and headed to the University of Iowa to teach in its creative writing program. None the less, whatever he may have said, Roth was not happy there, perhaps because the semi-rural Midwesterness of Ames was alien to him. After a while with Martinson in tow he moved on to a similar position at Princeton, another WASP bastion but one with even more prestige. Everyone who knew him recognized Roth as an early comer. He later continued his academic career at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught comparative literature before retiring from teaching in 1991. Roth started teaching literature in the late 1960s at the University of Pennsylvania. The 1969 feature film adaptation of Goodbye, Columbus coincided with the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint, which soon became a best-seller amid controversy for its prurient content. (Those who've read it will likely not forget Portnoy's "love affair" with mom´s slab of liver in the fridge.)
ellauri106.html on line 180: Not far behind will be some Jewish critics who always found Roth’s portraits embarrassing for their relentless sexuality and discomfort with aspects of the culture that were at odds with his identity as an American. Others were angered at his voraciously espoused atheism—“I’m exactly the opposite of religious, I’m anti-religious. I find religious people hideous. I hate the religious lies. It’s all a big lie.” Some Jewish critics hounded him from the beginning of his career. Rabbi Gershom Scholem, the great kabbalah scholar, said Portnoy’s Complaint was more harmful to Jews than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And Roth was heckled and booed at an early appearance at Yeshiva University which stunned and shocked the author.
ellauri106.html on line 259: Martinson inspired “The Monkey” (Mary Jane Reed) in novel Portnoy’s Complaint and Maureen Tarnopol in My Life as a Man.
ellauri109.html on line 555: Roth could not stand the lurid brand of notoriety. Years later, he told friends that he wished he’d never published “Portnoy’s Complaint.” It was by far his best-selling book.
ellauri109.html on line 611: The reaction to “Portnoy’s Complaint,” a decade later, was of another order. “This is the book for which all anti-Semites have been praying,” Gershom Scholem, the eminent scholar of Jewish history and mysticism, wrote. “I daresay that with the next turn of history, which will not be long delayed, this book will make all of us defendants at court.”
xxx/ellauri178.html on line 155: Portnoy’s Complaint “was concerned with the comic side of the struggle between a hectoring superego and an ambitious id….”
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