Philip Roth: The Biography

by Blake Bailey

There was the constant cake-making—marble, banana, angel food, chocolate layer, on and on—and at least two meals a day that included lunch, for which her sons were expected to come home even in high school, when Sandy, at least, would have preferred grabbing a sandwich at the coffee shop with the other “hip” kids; Bess, however, wouldn’t hear of it, and for the same reason as Mrs. Portnoy’s (“how do you think Melvin Weiner gave himself colitis? . . . Because he eats chazerai [garbage, pig food]!”). Dinner always included a cheap but tasty cut of meat, maybe a tongue or brust hammered into tenderness and served with plenty of gravy and raisins or what you will. It certainly wasn’t chazerai, though the writer Isaac Rosenfeld wondered whether the sheer volume of Jewish mothers’ “forced feedings” was the foundation for later “ulcers, diabetes, and intestinal cancer” (“No wonder we had bypass surgeries,” said Sandy)—the price one paid, maybe, for the sense of security a mother’s food provided in a hostile world.