The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

After all, she had given birth just three weeks ago. He was looking at the loins that had brought forth his first child. A son! She didn’t have her old shape back yet. He had to allow for that. Still, that didn’t make the view any better.

Only twenty-nine, and already she looked just like her mother.

There were Irishmen named Martin and Jews named Martin. There were Germans named Kramer and Jews named Kramer. But every Goldberg in the history of the world was a Jew, with the possible exception of this one.

Yale is terrific for anything you wanna do, so long as it don’t involve people with sneakers, guns, dope, lust, or sloth.”

The Mayor shook his head some more. He found the Christian churches baffling. When he was growing up, the goyim were all Catholics, unless you counted the shvartzer, which nobody did. They didn’t even rate being called goyim. The Catholics were two types, the Irish and the Italians. The Irish were stupid and liked to fight and inflict pain. The Italians were stupid and slob-like. Both were unpleasant, but the lineup was easy enough to comprehend. He was in college before he realized there was this whole other set of goyim, the Protestants. He never saw any. There were only Jews, Irishmen, and Italians in college, but he heard about them, and he learned that some of the most famous people in New York were this type of goyim, the Protestants, people like the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Roosevelts, the Astors, the Morgans. The term Wasp was invented much later. The Protestants were split up into such a crazy bunch of sects nobody could even keep track of them all. It was all very pagan and spooky, when it wasn’t ridiculous. They were all worshiping some obscure Jew from halfway around the world.