Word: mother
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...comedian out to tell the definitive Jewish joke. He is also the talented son, risen to the post of Assistant Commissioner for the City of New York Commission on Human Opportunity. His parents--"the two outstanding producers and packagers of guilt in our time"--are the expected, overprotective Jewish mother and her long-suffering, constipated husband (whose constipation seems to rival Luther's in cosmic significance.) Togther they praise and badger Portnoy until he finds himself in a paradoxical position: his family considers him among "princes . . . and saviours and sheer perfection on the one hand, and such bumbling incompetent, thoughtless...
...just an excuse for the telling of a story. In the case of Portnoy, we never forget that he is lying on the couch. He is recreating the past from a specific, highly-emotional point in the present. Emotion recollected in tranquillity turns into hysteria. Each time Portnoy's mother Sophie reappears, another bit of horror is added. Portnoy justifies it all by saying she wears "the old self-conscious on her sleeve!" In any case, she soon seemed to me more like the witch out of Disney's Snow White than anyone else (which only serves to show where...
...children from the coloring books come to life, the children they mean on the signs we pass in Union, New Jersey, that say CHILDREN AT PLAY and DRIVE CAREFULLY, WE LOVE OUR CHILDREN.") It is more damning than anything in Roth's last novel, a story of an unwed mother in the great Midwest called When She Was Good (1967). And there are a few bits reminiscent of Goodbye, Columbus (1959), like an incident in which a Jewish businessman insists that the theme from Exodus be pumped into an operating room "so everyone should know what religion he is." Still...
...becomes the first of the lie-down comics. Raised in Newark and now holding the post of Assistant Human Opportunities Commissioner in New York City, he renders his past absurd in an attempt to lessen its painful grip on him. He keens the familiar tale of the strongwilled, overattentive mother and the castrated father. He tells how his mother fondled him during toilet training, how she eroticized the insides of his ears while removing the wax, and how she forced him to eat at knife point. Portnoy is continuingly being floored by the fact that she could be so unconscious...
Subject to Suppression. Pushkin's strange shape and nature were the products of a bizarre lineage. On his mother's side, he was great-grandson of an African slave originally presented to Czar Peter the Great. His father's family, as he put it, was "the detritus of a decrepit aristocracy" that went back 600 years into feudal times. Born in 1799 in Moscow, Pushkin was left largely on his own by indifferent parents. As a boy he was impressed by French liter ature, especially the savage wit of Voltaire, and absorbed Russian folklore from his peasant...