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"Eli, the Fanatic" (1959), the major story in Goodbye, Columbus, exposed postwar American Jews who found themselves acculturating nicely when over a third of their people had just perished in Europe. How are they to countenance the wretched remnant of the Old World that they or their parents had striven to leave behind? From the moment he encounters Leo Tzuref, a survivor whose very name evokes Yiddish tsuris (trouble), Eli Peck feels off balance, caught between the neon lights of Woodenton and the dark yeshiva [that Leo opens]. He is so callow as to tell Tzuref it would have been better in prewar Europe "for Jews and Gentiles to live beside each other in amity"--amity! Roth's storytelling genius fashions a kind of medieval morality play in which Eli shuttles between two opposing forces--man's expedient law and God's absolute Law. What's more, on every page a precise comic touch lightens and enlivens without trivializing the story's charged matter. At times, Tzuref's Talmudic quibbling with Eli sounds dizzyingly like Chico and Groucho Marx ("Sanity Clause? Go on! There ain't no Sanity Claus!"). When the assimilated American lawyer becomes Eli, the Fanatic, taking on the greenhorn's black suit, we recall Eliyahu hanavi, Elijah, the prophet (1 Kings 21) taking on his mantle, zealous for the Lord and not Baal. Even here, risking comedy and satire--the "special underwear," the "new Byzantine mosaic entrance" to Ted's shoeshop, the ironic "Excuse me, rabbi, but you're wanted…in the temple"--Roth still deepens the crisis. Perhaps Eli has merely "flipped," as the slang has it. Or is a flip a conversion? Something does come to birth during this story, set in May 1948, just when the State of Israel was declared. After two novels that were less well received than Goodbye, Columbus, Roth published Portnoy's Complaint (1969), which electrified his career overnight. This first-person explosion of male sexual selfhood appeared, as Murray Baumgarten points out, amidst urban unrest and conflagration, anti-Vietnam protest, 1960s sexual liberation and the burgeoning women's movement.
Approximate Word count = 1292
Approximate Pages = 5.2
(250 words per page double spaced)
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