On August 24, 2020, as I attempted the first pee of the morning, I felt a tightness on the underside of my penis. A tiny hair had formed a tourniquet around a skin bridge on the genital. I was not in immediate pain, but I knew that something irrevocable had happened, as if time itself had caught up to me with an abacus in hand, demanding a full accounting.
My penis was shaped by the Cold War and God’s covenant with Abraham. My father, born in a small village outside Leningrad in 1938, had been circumcised. By the time of my birth, in 1972, Jewish children were generally not circumcised in the Soviet Union, part of a long-standing campaign against religion. Seven years later, soon after our arrival in the United States, my father fell under the influence of some “Chabadniks,” Hasidic followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who were going door to door telling Soviet Jews in Brooklyn and Queens that they had to circumcise their boys. The surgery was performed under general anesthesia at Coney Island Hospital, the Chabadniks singing and praying joyfully in an adjoining room, and resulted in an immediate infection as well as painful urination that lasted until I was nine.
Most poorly performed circumcisions stem from two misjudgments on the part of the circumciser: either too much or too little foreskin is removed. In my case, it was too little (and, one might add, given that I was seven years old instead of the eight days prescribed by the Torah, too late). After the infection had subsided, the shaft of my penis was crowded by a skyline of redundant foreskin that included, on the underside, a thick attachment of skin stretching from the head to the shaft of the genital, a result of improper healing that is called a skin bridge. A small gap could be seen between this skin bridge and the penis proper. In texture and appearance, the bridge reminded me of the Polly-O mozzarella string cheese that got packed in the lunchboxes of my generation. It produced no pain on its own after the infection had died down and the two years of difficult urination were over, but the strangeness of my penile appearance—and the manner in which it was brought about—became lodged in my consciousness. In my novel “Absurdistan,” which was written in the mid-two-thousands, when I was in my early thirties, the hero, Misha Vainberg, is also circumcised under Hasidic auspices and under pressure from his religion-obsessed father. “Eighteen is too old for cutting the dick,” Misha begs the Chabadniks who have driven him to a Brooklyn hospital, but he is told by one of them that “Abraham was ninety-nine when he performed the bris with his own hands!”
I had long used humor to articulate the trauma of non-neonatal circumcision, the forcible removal of a part of me that had been intended by nature as a nexus of pleasure. But, looking down at the hair that had wrapped itself around my penile skin bridge in the shape of a gift bow on the morning of August 24, 2020, I knew that my luck had run out and that the forty-year interregnum between the brute pain of the initial procedure and whatever would happen next was over.
I mention luck because lucky is exactly how I felt in the preceding weeks and months and years. Lucky and guilty, I should say. For the past decade, I had spent the better part of every year in the mid-Hudson Valley, and I was there with my family at the dawn of the pandemic, a safe hundred miles from the growing calamity in the city. Since my wife and I had a child, seven years ago, I had committed myself to living longer, to walking for two hours a day and swimming at least a mile in the pool on our property. Once a sickly child (asthma), I now felt stronger both through exercise and through the panoply of designer drugs with names like metformin that were supposed to catapult me past the usual circumscribed life expectancy of a post-Soviet male. I had halved my alcohol consumption to two drinks per day or fewer. My involvement in several television projects had frequently taken me to Los Angeles. Phrases like “talk soon” and “let me circle back” dripped off the tongue with the smooth consistency of the chia parfait that now constituted the entirety of my breakfast.
As the pandemic surged and my television projects died, as they mostly do, I celebrated being with my family and conducted masked grocery runs to local villages. Some of my favorite people lived nearby and together we hosted weekly barbecues, where I watched my son pitter-patter along the deck while learning his first Weird Al Yankovic songs, an American boy lost amid a diorama of safety and plenty. The novel I had started writing, set in a country house just like my own, was proceeding at a quick pace. The main characters were nearly all immigrants, but unlike those in my previous works they had mostly escaped their backgrounds. The immigrant children of my fiction had taken charge of their lives, as I had mine. But only fools and Americans think they can outrun the past.
My problems can be traced back to Chapter 17 of Genesis. God tells the ninety-nine-year-old Abram that he will be the father of many nations, super fruitful, and that his kids will be the sole owners and operators of the land of Canaan; that his ninety-year-old wife, Sarai (soon to be Sarah), will bear him an Isaac (or Itzhak—“he who will laugh”); and that henceforth he will be called Abraham. There’s only one small catch: “Every male among you shall be circumcised.”
Perhaps the best-known proponent of circumcision is Maimonides, the medieval Sephardic Jewish philosopher and Torah scholar who lived within the Islamic communities of Egypt and Morocco. “The bodily injury caused to that organ is exactly that which is desired,” Maimonides wrote. “There is no doubt that circumcision weakens the power of sexual excitement, and sometimes lessens the natural enjoyment.” A friend from Jewish day school, David J. Fine, who is now himself a rabbi, recently quipped, “Maimonides didn’t have too much sex. He worked very long hours.”
The reduction of sexual excitement remained a theme in Jewish commentary on circumcision, but it also took on a strange self-effacing aspect. Some Jewish scholars thought that uncircumcised men would prove too irresistible for Jewish women, and that men without a foreskin would not be led into constant temptation. “It is hard for a woman with whom an uncircumcised man has had sexual intercourse to separate from him,” Maimonides wrote, praising the circumcised Abraham for his chastity. In a comprehensive volume on the subject, “Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised?,” the Harvard professor Shaye J. D. Cohen quotes a medieval rabbi, Isaac ben Yedaiah, at length in a section titled “Envy of the Gentile Foreskin”:
Therefore, circumcision denies pleasure to both women and men. And, according to this logic, Cohen explains, “the woman will become sexually frustrated and will lose interest in sex, allowing the man to devote his spiritual and physical energies to the contemplation of God and other noble pursuits”—among them the study of the Torah.
European Christians considered Jews effeminate owing to their circumcisions, deeming them a studious, unathletic, hemorrhoidal people unable to gallop through Palestine bedecked in armor and spearing unbelievers. In fact, the Israelites almost certainly inherited the custom from the Egyptians, who, according to the British scholar Rebecca Steinfeld, saw the procedure as a masculine test of strength. The oldest reference, she observes, is found in an Egyptian tomb, built around 2400 B.C. Two young noblemen are shown having their genitals cut by temple priests. An inscription reads “Hold him and do not allow him to faint.”
The tradition has continued in the Middle East to the present day. In Israel, circumcision fever truly broke the thermometer in the nineteen-nineties, as waves of Jews arrived from the detritus of the former Soviet Union. According to Haaretz, doctors competed to see how many immigrants they could circumcise in a day, while, not to be outdone, one of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox burial societies managed to circumcise the corpses of recent arrivals who had died in the Holy Land.
Alex Moshkin, a comparative-literature professor at Koç University, in Istanbul, moved to Israel from Stavropol, in southern Russia. “Many fathers themselves did not do the procedure,” Moshkin told me. “They kind of pushed their kids to do it. The older people were, like, ‘I don’t think I need this.’ ”
The newly arrived immigrants were also pressured by ultra-religious Jews and by Israeli society in general. As Moshkin observed, “These rabbis—many of whom didn’t speak the language of the immigrants—often spoke on religious matters or the need to shed one’s Russian skin in favor of a new Israeli identity and a new Israeli name.” The immigrants felt that they needed to change, he said, “in order to belong to the Israeli collective.” The motivation of families in America was not altogether different. We all wanted to belong.
The hair knot around my skin bridge could not be prized loose using tweezers, and any attempts to dislodge it with my fingers only tightened it around the string of superfluous skin. My wife’s research led to one remedy: Nair. For days, we applied the hair-removal lotion with calligraphic precision. The knotted hair appeared smaller in diameter, but it remained wrapped around the bridge. In fact, it was now digging into the skin, releasing what looked like a stream of pus. I noticed this during my long swims, especially while doing the breaststroke; not pain, exactly, but a sharp ping of discomfort as the underside of the penis came into contact with my swim trunks.
Several days later, I sought medical attention in a neighboring village. Because of the pandemic, a pleasant middle-aged woman was performing triage outside the doors of the urgent-care facility. When I tried to explain my predicament to her, she said, “Oh, honey, it must hurt so bad to have an ingrown hair in your Gentile region.” If only that region had stayed Gentile. The local urgent-care doctor tried his hand with some forceps but was clearly not an expert at removing tiny hairs wrapped around extraneous pieces of penile skin. I would have to go to the city to seek a specialist.
My primary-care doctor recommended a urologist on the Upper East Side. Like many of the urologists I would subsequently meet, he was middle-aged, Jewish, and possessed of an easy humor. Let’s call him Dr. Funnyman. In fact, the first thing I noticed when I went to see him was a Jewish-humor anthology on his desk. He asked me if I was famous, and I did my customary blush and said no, I certainly didn’t think of myself that way. “You’re not Dr. Shteynshlyuger, the urologist?” he asked. When I informed him that I was Gary Shteyngart, the novelist, he told me he had never heard of me but loved the work of Michael Chabon.
Dr. Funnyman took out a pair of forceps and in a matter of seconds had cut the hair tourniquet from the skin bridge. “I’m amazing!” he said. I was overcome with gratitude and relief. I took a photo of the offending hair to memorialize my liberation. Dr. Funnyman told me that the skin bridge had been strangled by the hair to such an extent that it would probably soon separate into two pieces hanging off the penis. If this happened, I could come back and he would give me local anesthesia and remove them with cauterization, a relatively simple procedure that he had performed before. That night, I drank vodka with friends on the Lower East Side, and when I got home to my apartment in the city I locked myself in the bathroom for an hour and wept without quite knowing why.
Within forty-eight hours, the skin bridge had broken into two parts, “a minimal stump distally with a larger stump proximally,” according to the doctor’s notes, the latter of which was an unsightly piece of skin flapping in the summer wind. I have always imagined that beyond its pleasurable utility the penis must be an incomprehensible thing to most heterosexual women, like a walrus wearing a cape that shows up every once in a while to perform a quick round of gardening. Neither my past lovers nor my wife had remarked on the condition of my phallus, but now my genital was truly unbound, as it had always been in my imagination, its freakishness undeniable. It was time to return to the city for my second circumcision of a lifetime, an unlikely double mitzvah, or good deed.
On September 8, 2020, my wife drove me to a pharmacy on Second Avenue, where Dr. Funnyman had left a scrip for Valium. Buzzed and dissociated, I floated into his office and put on a gown. The doctor, the nurse, and I were all wearing masks as a precaution against COVID, which reminded me of being seven again and having a mask placed on my face and being told to count in reverse in a language I barely knew as the general anesthesia took hold. I remembered the colors around me changing into a medley of greens and yellows as the world pulled away, like the impossible sensation of entering a tunnel backward. I remembered being scared even as I lost consciousness and needing my mother even more than I usually did. When I woke, I would be given the name of Abraham’s son Itzhak (a name I never used once I had made my exodus from Jewish day school), but on this day in 2020 I hoped to remain Gary. This is a minor procedure, I told myself.
My gown was lifted and a metal grounding pad was attached to my left thigh with a bandage. Dr. Funnyman said that this would keep me from being electrocuted while I was being cauterized. That sentence did not inspire confidence. I grabbed the nurse’s hand as lidocaine was injected into the shaft of my penis, and she gave me a squeeze ball to pulverize instead. (Later, Dr. Funnyman laughed and said I had been “a lightweight.” He also explained that he was joking about the electrocution.) I could not see what happened next or, mercifully, feel very much, although according to the notes “the distal stump was simply fulgurated using a pinpoint Bovie. The proximal end was resected and then fulgurated giving an excellent cosmetic result.” To “fulgurate,” in medical terms, is to destroy by means of the heat from an electrical current. From my supine perspective, I saw and smelled smoke, pieces of my penis being burned away. After it was over, I examined the result. The skin bridge was no more, which, speaking “cosmetically,” was positive. But parts of the remaining redundant foreskin were inflamed and, along with the termini of the erstwhile skin bridge, covered in what looked like a dense layer of Eastern European soot. Dr. Funnyman told me I would be able to resume normal activities soon, but in the meantime parts of my genital would swell and “look funny” for a week.
Four days later, when I was back in the Hudson Valley, my wife and I hosted a barbecue, and I found myself recounting the event. Two close friends who live upstate have cancer, and I hit the comedy notes of the story, as if trying to emphasize its ludicrous nature compared with what they were suffering, but also perhaps to show that I now also understood something about physical pain. In any case, my prognosis was a quick and complete recovery, and I imagined the skin-bridge excision as a brief interlude in a future work of fashionable autofiction.
The afflicted area improved slowly, but peeing was now painful. A part of the redundant foreskin that had always resembled two flaps was becoming more swollen. Two weeks after the surgery, as I was finishing an hour-long walk, it felt as if hot clothespins had been attached to the areas where the skin bridge had been excised and were pulling ever downward. Whenever any clothing came into contact with the affected area, a Klaxon of pain would sound across my central nervous system.
I wrote to Dr. Funnyman, who replied that, given my initial soreness, he was not surprised that it was taking me longer to heal than expected. “For slow learners like yourself, this could take six weeks,” he wrote. I assumed he meant “slow healers” instead of “slow learners,” but I came away with the feeling that the fault was somehow in my body and its inability to “learn” how to respond to a minor genital bonfire. In a later e-mail, the doctor surmised that “there’s something about your skin chemistry that’s just different from the average bear.” I took umbrage until my wife explained Yogi Bear to me. Perhaps the doctor was right. Something within me was wrong. I was not a very average or fast-learning bear.
My condition began to take over my daily life, like a game of Twister but with each wrong move resulting in a jolt of groin pain. To get out of my car without the affected organ scraping unduly against my underwear, I began to propel myself from the seat in one quick motion, until one day I hit my head hard on the doorframe, and spent weeks nursing a headache. Eventually, I quit driving. Lifting grocery bags became impossible. Sitting on a hard chair excruciating. Drying my groin with a towel unbearable. Wearing jeans unbelievable (only sweatpants would do). Playing hide-and-seek with my son out of the question. Even sleeping required a fort of pillows placed in strategic locations to keep my penis airborne through the night. I had been advised to use numbing lidocaine jelly, and to wear soothing Xeroform gauze held in place by an improvised bandage. My wife, upon seeing the shaft of my organ covered in bandage and gauze, sadly compared it to the Elizabethan collar worn by dogs (not that I was in danger of licking myself). Erections became dangerous, and at night I turned away from my wife so that I would not smell the deliciousness of her hair. I began to wonder: Was this the rest of my life?
I decided to expand my medical horizons. My primary doctor recommended a specialist in “minor outpatient urological procedures” whom I will call Dr. Neuroma. I visited the doctor’s aerie in the medicinal slab of the Weill Cornell tower on York Avenue. The doctor, younger than Funnyman but not as funny, could not give a full examination, because touching either of the termini of the former skin bridge produced intolerable pain. He ventured an opinion. In all likelihood, I was suffering from a penile neuroma. Some readers may be familiar with Morton’s neuroma, a highly painful malady that often manifests itself between the toes and may make walking difficult. This was that but in the penis. “A tiny nerve gets swollen,” the doctor said. “A nerve was snapped or cut during the surgery, and the proximal end is angry or inflamed or trying to reach for the other end, but there’s no other end to receive it and that may be felt as pain.” In this interpretation, my nerves were a bunch of ragtag troops stranded on a remote island who had not been informed by general staff that the war was over.
The doctor left for what felt like twenty minutes to answer a pressing text message. When he returned, he said that my problem was a rare outcome, “one chance in a hundred, bad luck for you and bad luck for the doctor.” He also told me that he expected I would get about “eighty per cent better” and would learn to live with the rest of the pain. In the meantime, I should “keep it moist and lubricated down there,” and take gabapentin, a drug that was primarily used as an anti-seizure medication but that could also reduce nerve pain. I walked out of the hospital building into a surprisingly hot October day with the softly spoken but uncontestable words of the doctor ringing in my ears. “Penile neuroma.” “Bad luck for you.” “Live with the pain.”
My primary-care physician had recommended another doctor, whom I will call Dr. Cortisone. After the razzle-dazzle of Cornell, this doctor’s office felt more familiar in a urological context, smaller and lower ceilinged, its walls festooned with quotes from Maimonides and a waiting room populated with older Rothian Jews huddled over copies of the Post while waging a final battle with their prostates. The doctor examined my penis and pronounced it wonderful. He even thought the initial Lubavitcher-inspired circumcision had been done with care and did not speak ill of the clumps of redundant and now inflamed foreskin. Dr. Cortisone told me I did not have a neuroma. He recommended three hot baths per day and instructed me to apply a dab of one-per-cent cortisone cream to the stumps thrice a day to reduce inflammation. Additionally, he thought the anticonvulsant drug gabapentin was too strong to be deployed this early. “This is a minor issue that will heal given enough time,” he said. I was not a chronic-groin-pain patient hobbled for life. The key was to forget the pain and move on.
Back home, I stripped off my Elizabethan collar and applied the first dabs of cortisone. My penis stung, but with a sense of joy. Everything was going to get better. And yet Dr. Neuroma was a highly respected Cornellian urologist, and when not responding to text messages he conveyed an air of deep institutional knowledge. So was it a neuroma or not? Would I heal up to eighty per cent and no more, or would I get to live a normal life? Why did everyone have a completely different approach to the issue? And what was the issue?
Dr. Neuroma had told me that, when it came to the male genital, MRIs and other modern tools were “low yield,” and that any further surgery might only make matters worse. When I talked to my friend Mary Karr, the poet and memoirist, she was surprised by how few diagnostic tools were available for the penis. “Why can’t they slap it between two pieces of glass?” she asked. “As fond as people are of dick, that I can’t believe.” She was right. It startled me how little literacy my otherwise literate male friends had about the organ. When I mentioned the glans, some responded with a version of “You mean the mushroom part?”
Things got worse. The cortisone had dried out the affected areas, and my pain was easing to some degree, but my wounds were now covered with long unsightly scabs. Dr. Cortisone thought this was a sign of progress and assured me that the scabs would fall off during one of the long hot baths. “You’re ninety-five per cent of the way there,” he told me. Not completely convinced by the doctor’s excitement, I took some photos of my penis and sent them to my primary-care doctor. “That’s just horrible!” he cried. He told me to return to the city and seek further care.
After consulting with a dermatologist and receiving yet another prescription for lidocaine, I visited a highly recommended and very handsome surgeon who happened to work down the street from the dermatologist. He was a good listener and did not dismiss my concerns. Dr. Handsome agreed with my primary doctor. The scabs were a problem and their very presence kept me from healing. He made an analogy between my penis and the hot molten magma building within a volcano. (Dr. Handsome doesn’t remember this, but I recall at least one of us drawing a volcano on a pad.) “If you want,” he said, “I can get rid of the scabs with just some Q-tips and some saline solution.” True to his word, he removed the thick scabs very gently and with a minimum of pain. For the first time since the initial surgery, I felt that I was being cared for and looked after. Is this it? I thought. Is this my liberation? “In seven to ten days,” the doctor said, “the new skin will grow in and I expect you’ll feel great.”
In seven to ten days, I was in the worst pain of my life. There were some improvements. My penis was no longer covered with scabs, and yet walking for more than ten minutes was impossible. I was losing my mind. I had finally tried gabapentin, but it brought about a mild psychosis during which I wasn’t sure what was real and what was not. The penis is an outcropping of privilege in the male of the species, but it is also a pleasure palace constantly sending signals to the brain. Having pain in the region amounts to a never-ending genital tinnitus. It is impossible to think of anything else.
I’ve always had a rational fear of dying, but when I imagined a life without being able to walk or swim or have sex or travel or do anything without pain or an Elizabethan collar, I wondered what it would be like to kill myself. I looked out the window and onto the fresh snow gathered below and considered the coldness of its eternal compress. Shortly thereafter, I read a BBC article about Alex Hardy, a British man who had committed suicide in 2017 after being circumcised in Canada as a young adult. He did not share his travails with anyone after his operation, but in a long farewell note to his mother he wrote that “these ever-present stimulated sensations from clothing friction are torture within themselves; they have not subsided/normalised from years of exposure. . . . Imagine what would happen to an eyeball if the eyelid was amputated?” That analogy perfectly articulated my own experience.
Male circumcision is an important part of Islam—two-thirds of circumcised men are Muslim—as well as Judaism, though I can speak with a modicum of knowledge only of the faith in which I was brought up. My friend David Fine, the rabbi, has a progressive outlook on many issues, but he is staunch on this subject. He tells me that a man need not be circumcised to be Jewish; in the matrilineal tradition of the religion, a boy born to a Jewish mother is automatically Jewish, and yet, to Fine, circumcision means that “we are God’s partners in creation.”
The Talmud specifies that, if a child’s older brothers die of complications from the procedure, the child should be spared circumcision. In “Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised?,” Shaye Cohen, quoting Rabbenu Tam, the well-known twelfth-century Talmudist, writes that even “a man who was left uncircumcised out of ‘fear of the pain of circumcision’ . . . is not to be considered an apostate since his ‘heart is directed at heaven.’ ” If adult men may be excused from the procedure because of their fear, what are we to say of an infant about to experience what is likely the greatest pain of his young life? Or of a seven-year-old who wants only to please his father?
The Jewish religion generally seeks to ameliorate unnecessary suffering among its faithful. And, outside orthodoxy, large swaths of the Torah are subject to interpretation. Is a practice born of ancient Egyptian feats of endurance indispensable enough for us to continue cutting one of the most sensitive parts of the male anatomy, where any miscalculation may lead to tragedy?
Yet, even for highly assimilated Jews, circumcision, according to Diane Wolf, a sociologist at the University of California at Davis, “is really the last ritual to go.” In such families, she singles out fathers as the main drivers of the practice. “What is the connection there, between masculinity and circumcision?” she asked me. When it came to her own son, she opted for the brit-shalom naming ceremony (a version of which, sometimes called the brit bat, is also performed for girls). When her son asked her why he wasn’t circumcised, she told him, “You are a Jew in your head and your heart, not your penis.”
The question of whom circumcision is for becomes even more fraught for Soviet Jews in North America and Israel. Sasha Senderovich, who teaches at the University of Washington, and was born in the Russian city of Ufa, said of the post-Soviet foreskin, “It could be seen as a Jewish bodily mark all its own—a mark, for example, of a circumcision that could not have been performed because it might have invited the unwanted attention of suspicious neighbors or the state.” For Senderovich, “the uncircumcised Jewish penis is not a problem that needs to be fixed.”
In the nineteenth century, circumcision expanded beyond a religious custom. The squeamish Victorians believed that the procedure would lead to better hygiene (and discourage masturbation). American physicians reasoned that Jews had far fewer sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis because of their missing foreskins. In truth, Jews may have suffered from lower rates of these diseases by having less sex outside their communities. Today, some doctors support circumcision because certain studies show that it may lower the risk of H.I.V. transmission and infant urinary-tract infections.
On the other side of the ledger, though, two out of every million boys circumcised in the United States die from the procedure, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians; other studies place the death toll higher. Estimates of complications vary from around 0.2 per cent of surgeries to as much as ten per cent. Most are relatively minor, but some have resulted in amputation of the glans or the entire organ. Among ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, the centuries-old practice of the mohel, or ritual circumciser, suctioning the blood from the penis by mouth has resulted in several infants being infected with herpes; in 2011, a boy died. The belief that babies don’t fully experience pain during circumcision because their central nervous systems aren’t developed has been shown to be false. A 1997 circumcision study at the University of Alberta ended enrollment early because doctors found the procedure too traumatic for babies who were not anesthetized, while even a form of injected anesthetic, the dorsal penile nerve block, did not eliminate all pain.
Many people around the world, from parents to legislators, are reconsidering the practice. The parliaments of both Denmark and Iceland have debated banning the procedure, and the proportion of infant boys circumcised in the United States between 1979 and 2010 dropped from sixty-five per cent to fifty-eight, according to the C.D.C. It is possible to envision a near future in which the majority of male American infants begin their lives with their genitalia intact.
Outside the snow-glazed window of my New York apartment, the pandemic was raging and the President had declared that he had won an election he had just lost. As a former citizen of a failed superpower, I was always looking for signs of irrevocable collapse, ready to whisk my family to the airport and then to whichever half-decent country would take us (Ireland, by that point). But how would I propel myself to the airport in my Elizabethan penis collar? How would I leave behind the nearly dozen doctors (and one excellent hypnotist) who were now taking an active interest in my situation?
My seven-year-old son knew that something was wrong. During our brief walks in the country, one of my hands held on to his little one, while the other hunted through the pocket of my sweatpants, trying to keep my collar in place. He made me a daily menu where I could mark off which dishes I wanted for lunch and dinner. I was the child now, dependent on my son’s and my wife’s hugs and soothing words.
On the advice of my psychologist, I began to keep a journal tracking my pain level on a scale of zero to five. Peeing was the most painful (I could now urinate only sitting down). The relatively pain-free moments almost always accompanied the presence of family and friends:
“I miss you,” my wife said, despite the close quarters in which we lived. “For the first time in the fifteen years that I’ve known you, your humor is gone.”
I told her that I felt like an “unperson.” She asked me why. It was not an easy question to answer. As an adult, prior to the hair in my “Gentile region,” I had not been wrapped up in my penis and its affairs in the way of some men I have known. In fact, I suggested to my wife that I would be fine with getting rid of it to stop the pain. She was not enthusiastic. But the idea of “unpersonhood” stuck with me. Back in New York, I walked through the lobby of my building and into the city with the nub of a secret, a hand in my sweatpants holding up the bandage that was, in turn, holding up a part of me that was now entirely foreign to me, like an angry animal that would not retract its claws. My psychologist recommended that I revisit Gogol’s masterpiece “The Nose,” in which a proboscis escapes the body of a minor St. Petersburg official to carry on a life of its own. “You are mistaken, my dear sir,” the nose says when its owner confronts it at a prayer service and demands that it return to his face. “I exist in my own right.”
In my memoir “Little Failure,” I had written about having a hole cut in my underwear by my mother so that my infected penis could breathe the murky Queens air. Soon after the operation, relatives came to visit me in my sickbed and take a gander at my broken boyhood. Now other memories returned as well. Even after I healed from the initial circumcision, I despised the remains of my penis so much that on the rare occasion I was alone in my family’s apartment I would stand in front of the mirror with my genital tucked between my legs, marvelling at the purity of myself without the wrecked mountain roads that crisscrossed my organ’s underside. Back then, I could barely speak English, and the children in Jewish day school made fun of me both for being Russian—a “Commie”—and for being poor on a government-cheese order of magnitude. Recently, I learned that the Biblical penalty for not being circumcised is karet, which means being cut off from one’s community. As a seven-year-old, I had been duly circumcised in a miserable hospital, and still I was subjected to my classmates’ playground version of karet, having been both cut and cut off.
The months passed. I got better, I got worse, I got better. I had seen so many doctors that my urine was now infected with klebsiella, a bacteria commonly found in hospital settings. A nurse who was present during an examination of my genitalia fainted on the spot, which did not improve my hopes for recovery or my self-esteem.
My wife introduced me to a friend and college classmate of hers, the plastic surgeon Olivia Hutchinson. Dr. Hutchinson and one of her partners examined me and told me that my nerve trauma would take a while to heal, that the nerves were now embedded within fibrous scar tissue, and that the collagen fibres were still settling after the cauterization. Despite the pain it caused, I was instructed to “palpate,” or massage, the inflamed and fibrous lower stub of the former skin bridge, in order to loosen some of the scar tissue and to allow the traumatized nerves to grow straight. This was sometimes agonizing, but it really helped. Dr. Hutchinson showed me how to tend to the tiny wounds that collected lint, bandage material, and dead skin.
Each visit to Dr. Hutchinson lessened my anxiety, until I came to believe that kindness must constitute at least a third of a doctor’s repertoire. While she focussed on the physical aspect of my pain, she did not discount the psychological part of it. Another doctor, a urologist at N.Y.U. Langone, made a similar observation: “If you stubbed your toe in 1999, you’ll forget about it. This is a traumatic event your mind can’t let go.”
The final breakthrough came after a visit with Dr. Robert Moldwin, the director of the Pelvic Pain Center at Northwell Health, in the village of Lake Success, on Long Island. Dr. Moldwin prescribed an ingenious compound cream containing amitriptyline, a tricyclic antidepressant. He helped me further understand the mind-body connection: “First, there’s a significant organic component to the pain, and patients start to feel helpless, they catastrophize it. Chronic pain carries a high likelihood that the patient will dwell on it. The pain can then become embedded in the spinal column, in the brain.” As spring settled over the East Coast and masks started to come off, I found that, while the cream helped ease the genital pain, it still, at times, reminded me of the unfortunate young British man Alex Hardy’s formulation of an eyeball with the eyelid amputated.
What am I left with in the end? I hope I will continue to get better, though I doubt I will ever be completely right again. I may have to slather my genital with ointments for the rest of my life. There are new associated complications from the various medications, and the treatment of my post-traumatic stress will continue. Even with excellent insurance, I have spent many thousands of dollars for medical care and will continue to spend more.
While discussing the topic with my friends, I came across four instances of pain and disfigurement as a result of late circumcisions or of surgeries to correct botched childhood circumcisions. In the Philippines. In Canada. In Portland. In a neighboring village.
The man who lives near me, a forty-eight-year-old musician, is the son of Italian farmers who moved to the U.S. They did not speak English, yet were somehow persuaded by American doctors to have their son circumcised, a procedure rarely done in Italy. He remembered, as I did, a period of difficult urination. “I was screaming,” he said, “but the masculine Italian response was just to laugh about it.” A second surgery was performed to correct the first when he was around six years old. He told me that the psychological effects of both surgeries have been lasting: “It’s affected my sexual performance and my experiences around partnering and creating bonds with people.”
We will never know the full extent of such stories, because men are not supposed to talk about these things. We must either laugh it off or be stoic about what happened “down there,” like the Egyptian nobles of 2400 B.C.
On January 5th, at the epicenter of my time of troubles, and, soon, my nation’s, I took a walk down a road leading past red barns and other frigid structures that frame the winter landscape of our country home. I could smell leaves rotting in the snowbanks and found it strange that they had survived this long. A loud wailing wall of wind had built itself up around me and I shivered in my sweatpants as one hand held up the bandage around me. I was listening to a podcast called “Time to Say Goodbye,” and its format, three Asian Americans trashing neoliberalism, reminded me of my friends back in the city, many of whom I had not seen in almost a year because of the pandemic and my condition. Their voices made me less lonely, and behind me our house shivered in the distance, a place of love and care. It was just after four, but the sun was setting, and in its descent it punched its rays through the thick clouds of our latitude, as it sometimes does on the covers of evangelical brochures. As a militant agnostic, I believe there are things one just can’t know, layers of endlessness that wash up against our brief earthbound corporeality. The moon is typically gendered as female, but the sun is all over the place: the male Ra to the ancient Egyptians, the goddess Amaterasu in Japanese mythology. The sun was retreating to make room for the winter night, but I clung to the last bits of warmth. Despite what I held in my hand, I could not assign gender to the setting orb. I felt that, if anything, the Sun was beyond gender, and, in Their divinity and mercy, They would not want me or my brothers to feel this much pain. ♦
