The Circumcision Flap

My father almost declined to have me circumcised. What his misgivings were I’m not sure. Fear of unpleasant medical side effects might have played a part — he tended to obsess over physical health to a degree my mother said was characteristically Jewish (though in this case, paradoxically so).

But I’m tempted to think they had even more to do with his queasiness about Judaism itself, his uncertainly regarding his place in the whole grand tradition. My dad never pretended to be anything but Jewish — a wise move, since he was never one of those Jewish guys who could pass for Andalusian or Abruzzese; it was his fate to wear the map of Anatevka on his face. But for him, Jewish identity was less a source of pride than — pardon the expression — a cross to be borne. Three-fifths of his wives were gentiles, each arguably more archetypal than the last. My mother was familiar fare — the type of working-class ethnic he might have gone to school with. Her successor, on the other hand, was bona fide WASP, and an Episcopalian, to boot. Next came a Texan with family roots in Normandy, cradle of the British class system. Short of marrying Daisy Duke or Brunhilde he couldn’t have picked a more exotic specimen.

Perhaps he thought leaving my ding-a-ling in its original wrapper would help me score with the blondies when my time came. On Forbes.com, Richard Hyfler writes that Jewish men’s oldest sexual insecurity relates to the foreskin and its absence. In Peretz Pntschik’s play Yiddishe Tereisias, or”The Jewish Teresias,” a traveling salesman named Tsurik wonders whether it was it was his missing schmegeggi that drove his wife to cuckold him with a Cossack:

he reminds himself that if Susan slept with Zyosha, he will never be able to win her back, quoting Bereshit Rabba (the midrash on Genesis) to the effect that it is hard for a woman who has slept with an uncircumcised man to separate from him.

In other words, since the compilation of the Midrash, and possibly before that, Jewish men have been living with their own version of “Once you go black, you’ll never go back” — “When you really want to make it, find you a sheygets,” or more simply, “Be a goy toy.” This would be an agonizing thought under any circumstance; added to all the other Jewish anxieties regarding Gentiles, it must have been utterly intolerable. Not only will your goyische neighbor raze your temple, convince the world you like to commit ritual murder, and have you sucking Zyklon B like it’s cool, he’ll steal your girl. And if your girl’s Jewish, then her kid will be one, too, which means you might end up in a minyan with the little creep and have to make nice.

Translate that into Yiddish, and it would make one honey of a curse.

For all circumcision’s disadvantages, real and alleged, the overwhelming majority of Jews have continued to practice it. If it falls out of favor in the general culture — and San Francisco’s proposed ban, up for votes this November, places that within the realm of possibility — then it will once again be what it was to begin with: a mark of tribal membership. In all my life, I’ve had exactly one opportunity to see circumcision in these terms, and it came during a visit to my Jewish ancestral homeland.

This meant not Israel but to Moscow. In the strictest sense, that’s no more an ancestral homeland than Taiwan; the Lindenman family hails from the western Ukraine. Still, it was considerably closer than Phoenix, and in any case, I was there less as a Jew — or a partial Jew — than an American Russophile. Pushkin and Lermontov meant more to me than Isaac Bashevis Singer or even Isaac Babel.

That’s how it started out, anyway. I hadn’t been there a week when I started believing in race memory — that is, recollections that are literally bred into the human genone. The Russians I met were friendly enough. They tend to be very gracious to foreigners who take a sincere interest in their language and culture. My accomplishments in the art of binge drinking did nothing to alienate them, I’m sure. But some neck-hair-prickling instinct that I could not have done anything to acquire kept me on my toes, warned me not to get too comfortable.

It may have been some instinct for tempting fate that made me start spending my time in the one place where you can’t do anything but get comfortable. I refer to the nudist beach in Serebriyanyi Bor, an enormous park straddling the Moscow River. American nudists — or naturists, as many like to be called — are so determined to give their lifestyle a family-friendly image that their official literature takes a downright prudish tone on sex. Next to them, the Shakers and Essenes sound like bacchantes on spring break. Their Russian counterparts make no such scruples. In a way, that was unfortunate because it meant that everybody’s sexual politics got dumped, so to speak, into my lap.

Living as an expatriate in a much poorer country without giving anyone cause to hate your guts takes a certain finesse, and never more so than where mating is concerned. A sizable number of women will marry an orangutan, provided he can get her U.S. residency. Flaunt your unearned drawing power too openly, and the men will come to resent you. It doesn’t matter that whoever you take home will dump you as soon as she’s legally able; that’s three years of conjugal bliss that should rightfully have gone to a local boy. On the other hand, it doesn’t do to be completely aloof, either. People will take you for a snob. “What, our women aren’t good enough for Your Highness? Screw you, buddy.”

No, the only sensible approach is be polite to everyone, mention your girlfriend back home, and if you’ve got any religious scruples, allude to them like a madman.

I don’t think I’ve ever identified more strongly with the Jewish people than I did on that beach. Until lifestyle issues catch up with them, Russians are some of the most beautiful people in the world, and when I say beautiful, I mean beautiful in a distinctly un-Jewish way. No, there’s no shortage of attractive Jews But in none of my visits to Jones Beach did I notice quite so many Jewish men who answered to adjectives like strapping and golden, or quite so many Jewish women who could be called statuesque. Perhaps this has less to do with genes than with the priorities of the Soviet educational system, which was calibrated partly to produce paratroopers, champion gymnasts and ballerinas. In a chess tournament, the two groups would be in a dead heat.

It should go without saying that mine was one of two circumcised units on the beach (more on the other, and its owner, in a bit.). If anyone had recited me the Midrashic warning on the potency of the uncircumcised, I wouldn’t have doubted it for moment. The absense of a foreskin seemed to betoken some profounder absence of virility. This was Yiddishkeit, boiled down irreducibly: being Jewish meant being an underdog in the bag-off stakes. In Goodfellas, Ray Liotta didn’t win Lorraine Bracco by pistol-whipping her caddish suitor, or even by getting her a ringside table at the Copa. He had her at “My name is Henry Hill.” If he’d been Henry Hillel, he could have done no right.

Indeed, it might have been that deep sense of humility that enabled me to behave with the proper reserve, and by that token, saved me a beating. It happened that the other circumcised guy was a Chechen named Zakir. From tsarist times forward, Russia has dealt Chechnya enough misery for a country fifty times its size. Only a couple of weeks before my arrival in Moscow, the Khasav-Yurt Accord ended a war between the two nations that was starting — or so it seemed in the Western media — to turn genocidal. Perhaps for that reason, the Chechens I met in Moscow were among the surliest people I’ve ever met in my life. I’ve been to rough neighborhoods and gotten my share of hard stares, but nothing nearly so toxic as the vibes the Chechens gave off. If looks could kill, they could have marched all the way to Khabarovsk.

It would have been nice if Zakir and I could have bonded — one circumcised guy from an oppressed minority group to another. I learned we had more in common even than that: one of his parents was an ethnic Russian; we could have spent one of those endless Russian summer days swilling vodka and hashing out our identity crises. It was not to be. He took an instant and intense dislike to me. Why? Cherchez la femme. Her name was Yulia, a 39-year-old Joni Mitchell look-alike who had been a policewoman until some black marketeer shot her in the kneecap. At six-one, she towered over me by five inches and — owing to her bad leg — tended to lean on my shoulder as she walked.

There was nothing carnal between us. No, our relationship conformed to what for me has always been a familiar pattern: a chaste friendship enlivened on the one hand by an erotic undercurrent, and softened on the other by a certain filial-maternal dynamic. If I were Jewish enough to believe in psychoanalysis, I’d have plenty to say about that, I’m sure. For the moment, let it suffice that all these nuances were lost on Zakir. When he looked at me and Yuliya, he imagined some foreign hotshot was shacking up with a girl he liked.

Barring some false starts, Tsurik, the salesman, Peretz Pntschik’s hero, reacts to the loss of his honor in an essentially honorable way. He opens himself to the possibility that it was his physical and emotional unavailability, not the design of his penis, that drove his wife into another man’s arms. This is all very admirable and menschlike, and I’m sorry to say Zakir was having none of it. No, he had to be a big jerk about it. Without confronting me directly, he would rant on in a tiresome vein about how Americans made up a gryaznyi narod, or filthy race. As evidence, he brought up our tolerance of blacks and Mexicans, and of miscegenation.

Had I been in randy-young-buck mode, I might well have gotten up into his grill — I’ve done stupider things. And who knows where that would have led? It was clear that Zakir’s friends were embarrassed by his behavior, but then, he was the home team — at least on one side of his family. If a half-Jew and a half-Chechen come to blows over a woman, whose side would tribal loyalty demand they take? And what if both parties are naked? It was the kind of problem that would have driven Emily Post and Metternich plum out of their gourds.

In the end, my having been slightly gelded by the presence of so many Asgaardian-looking people had a positive effect on my judgment. It didn’t take a Midrashic commentator to see that Zakir’s racist rants represented the displacement of all the abuse his own minority status had earned him. Russians, in fact, refer to Chechens, along with other Caucasians, as chernozhopye, or “black-asses.” In a society where people where people wear their prejudices so proudly, everyone needs someone to pick on. If Americans filled that bill for Zakir — all right, I’d play the part. Whenever he went off, I’d throw him a quizzical look as if I couldn’t understand. (In fact, given Zakir’s awful Caucasian accent, I often couldn’t.)

And all because of a circumcised member. George Clinton liked to tell people: “Free your mind, your ass will follow.” Maybe if you Jewify the penis, the ehart follows. Stranger things have happened.

One final word. Zakir ended up going too far even for his friends. On my next-to-last day on the beach, a group of them picked him up, threw him on the ground, and sat on him until he calmed down. Looking at me, they nodded solemnly. According to a vulgar Russian idiom, which I can no longer remember word-for-word, “to crush hedgehogs with one’s bare buttocks” means to behave recklessly. These gentlemen had done something even braver with theirs: they’d crushed a Chechen.

So if I had sons, would I have them circumcised? Probably so. It certainly can lead to some rewarding cultural exchanges. And in any case, I’d hate to see them end up in the clutches of some back-alley mohel.