Part 24, The Jews

A fortuitous library book sale find.

I guess you could say it was a night of firsts.  It was the first time I ever told anybody that I had a problem with being circumcised, and it was the first time I found out that I wasn't the only guy in the world who felt that way, and it was the first time anybody had ever offered me an explanation for why circumcision had become a cultural norm in the United States.

Until that night, sitting there drinking BEER on the couch in B.'s dorm, the closest thing to an explanation I'd heard for the 90 percent circumcision rate among my American-born peers was a vague insinuation that my mother had made years before that foreskins were something found far from urban centers among the lowly and uneducated.  She seemed to think that circumcision was a mark of sophistication, kind of like table manners or knowing how to say "chaise longue."

"You know why we're all circumcised, right?"

I let B.'s question hang in the BEER-fragranced air for a moment.

How do you answer a question like that?  Of course I didn’t know why we were all circumcised.  You grew up in America too, B.  You know how it works.  Nobody tells you why you're circumcised and you don't ask.  You're supposed to pretend like you don’t notice.  At least that was the cultural expectation that I had internalized by age 19.

Looking back though, it made sense that B. would have formulated a theory about America's curious history of male genital alteration.  For one thing, B. was a hypochondriac.  I mean a big time hypochondriac.  He was one of these people who would go to a party and bring up one anecdote after another about visits to specialists and painful treatments for conditions that defied any kind of straightforward diagnosis.  A delicate surgery in which bone harvested from his hip had been grafted onto his left wrist had appeared in a medical journal.  He seemed to take a special pride in that.

No, B. was not the kind of person to bear any aberrant bodily condition quietly, and for B., as for me, having a dark scar on your penis where your foreskin was supposed to be was an aberrant condition.  I never really thought about it at the time, but I think one of the reasons B. and I shared that perspective was that we'd both grown up in the midst of immigrant cultures that didn't practice circumcision.  B. had spent almost his whole life before college in Miami.  Many of his boyhood friends and classmates came from Cuba, their families having emigrated after Castro's revolution.

I waited until B. answered his own question.  "It was the Jewish doctors," he said.

"The Jewish doctors?" I said.  "How do you figure?"

"In Europe, if they wanted to know if you were a Jew, they'd pull your pants down.  If you were circumcised, you were a Jew.  When the Jews got to America, the Jewish doctors started circumcising everybody.  That way, nobody could tell who the Jews were."

I thought of a book I'd read in my senior year of high school, Mila 18, by Leon Uris.  It was about the Warsaw ghetto.  I learned from that book that during the German occupation, the Jews in Warsaw used women as couriers, never men or boys.  It was too dangerous for Jewish males to step outside the ghetto walls, because you never knew when a German soldier might tell you to pull down your pants.

The Jews, I thought.  Maybe B.'s on to something.  They are the people who invented circumcision, aren't they?

Then I thought of some of the other crazy ideas B. had.  He thought that you could contract a fatal illness if you rinsed off chicken parts and then baked them without patting them dry first.  I mean pat them all the way dry, leaving not so much as a droplet glistening on the bony end of a drumstick.

In fact, he seemed to regard eating in general as a life-or-death struggle against malevolent natural forces, kind of the way you might think about backpacking in the Amazon rain forest.  He believed so strongly in the potential lethality of seafood, undercooked meat, mayonnaise and most fruits and vegetables that he lived almost entirely on prepackaged food.  If it came in a box, he trusted it.  I guess that's why we ate so much Rice A Roni.

You would think I would have treated B.'s Jew theory of circumcision a little more critically, but I didn't.  I think part of me wanted to believe it.  Not out of any feelings of anti-Semitism on my part.  No.  Just the opposite.  I had a deep sentimental attachment to Jewish culture, particularly American Jewish culture.  I'd seen every Marx Brothers movie, every Woody Allen movie, every Mel Brooks movie and "Fiddler on the Roof."  I'd read Portnoy's Complaint, Goodbye Columbus and Oscar Levant's memoirs.  I used to play Sophie Tucker 78s on my grandmother's record player.

I loved Sophie Tucker.  She was like an older, more family-friendly version of my mom.

And then there was Mad Magazine.  Mad was full of Jewish humor.  I think that's where I learned most my Yiddish.

No, I think this crazy idea that circumcision had begun in America as some kind of vast Jewish conspiracy brightened my outlook a little bit.  It was another one of those ideas that I could bargain with.  My disfigurement had a purpose.  A heroic purpose.  It was camouflage for the Jews. It made America pogrom-and-Holocaust proof.

It was a comforting misconception, and one I might have held on to a little longer had a secular American Jew named Ed Wallerstein not published a book called Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy.

Part 21, Nerds

kurt_t, not always this cool.

I graduated from Spring Branch Senior High School in 1978, and the school closed in 1983.  As far as I know, our alumni association still sponsors football games. 

Let me tell you something about that.  If you go to a football game where one team consists of guys who graduated high school no later than 1983, that game is going to move kind of slow.  You're going to have plenty of opportunity to move around and mingle and catch up with your friends.

It was a muggy Texas evening in August 2003.  Down on the field at Tully Stadium, the Spring Branch Alumni Bears faced our much sprier arch rival, the Memorial Alumni Mustangs.  I was heading to the snack bar during what felt like the eighteenth timeout of the first quarter, when a blonde in a drill team outfit waved at me so hard her cowboy hat fell off.

"Kurt!" she said.  "Is that you?  Is that really you?!  Git over here!  I got somebody I want you to meet!"

It was my old pal Cindy.  I hadn't seen her since graduation, 25 years before.  The somebody she wanted to meet was her teenager daughter.

"How did you know my mom?" the girl asked me.  "Did you play football?"

Logical assumption.  I'm a big guy, and Cindy knew all the football players because she was on the drill team.  That's why she was there in the stands with the rest of the Bruin Brigade, wearing a blue and white miniskirt and tasseled boots.

"No," I said.  "I didn't play football.  I was a nerd."

Honestly, it was like telling somebody you'd been to Woodstock. 

When did the young people develop this fascination with nerds?  Was the Internet responsible for that?  Or Emo music?  Or Jerry Seinfeld's show?  What turned the corner for nerds?  I never figured it out.

Anyway, when I was in school there was no nerd mystique.  There was no glory in it.  Being a nerd just meant that every day at lunch time you sat at the nerd table in the cafeteria with your nerd peers, who spent a lot of time reading science fiction and discussing political theory.

We were an intellectually curious group.  I suppose that's what set us apart more than anything, our enthusiasm for the free exchange of ideas, all sorts of ideas.  No idea was too outlandish or far fetched for frank and thoughtful consideration.  The nerd clique welcomed Ayn Rand libertarians and crypto-monarchists.  It embraced advocates for space colonization and believers in ancient astronauts and pyramid power.  I think by senior year, the nerd table had given rise to at least five mutually conflicting theories about the ultimate disposition of the Lost Tribes of Israel.

You would think that in such an atmosphere I might have felt comfortable talking to one or more of my nerd friends about my frustration and bewilderment over America's weird cultural attachment to circumcision.  I often wondered if anybody else felt the same way I did.  Why not just ask around?

Well, I kind of did.  Once.  Almost.

Remember Alex Haley wrote a book called Roots that traced his ancestry back to a West African slave named Kunta Kinte?  And remember they turned the book into a miniseries on TV?  That miniseries came out in 1977, during my senior year in high school.

Well, "Roots" was probably the most popular thing that had ever been on TV since Ed Sullivan booked the Beatles.  I mean "Roots" was huge.  Everybody watched it.  White, people, black people.  Everybody watched "Roots."  And that included everybody at Spring Branch High.  Didn't matter if you were a cheerleader or a football player or a nerd.  Didn't matter if you were in the mime troupe or the science club or the Future Farmers of America, you watched "Roots."  It was definitely a cross-clique phenomenon.

It must have been episode one or two where a teenage Kunta Kinte and his friends went through a circumcision ceremony in Africa.  Nothing graphic.  You just see a big dude holding a cutting implement with two blades sticking out of it, and then LeVar Burton grimaces, and half a minute later he's saying something to his buddy like "Didn't hurt nearly as bad as I thought it would."

Well, that scene flooded my mind with new information.  For one thing, I had no idea that any culture practiced circumcision aside from Jews and Americans.  For that matter, it had never occurred to me that non-white people had foreskins.

I know.  Pretty naive, wasn't I?  But remember the first explanation my friends had offered for my missing foreskin?  I wasn't German.  Or I wasn't German enough at any rate.

I think without really thinking about it very deeply, I made a vague connection in my mind between foreskins and European people, just as I made a connection between circumcision and Jewish people and circumcision and white American people.

Who was going to teach me that those connections were oversimplified and imprecise?  My Health teacher?  No.  Health class was mandatory in those days, unless your parents objected on moral or religious grounds, but nobody ever said a thing in Health class about foreskins.  Even when we learned about condoms, nobody told us "If you have a foreskin, be sure to retract it before you put this thing on."

No, I guess if you had a foreskin, you were expected to figure that out on your own.  Health class proceeded as if foreskins didn't exist, as did Biology class, as did History class, as did the entire culture I lived in.

But then right there on national TV in front of millions, "Roots" broke America's conspiracy of silence about foreskins and circumcision.

Well, I decided if Roots could break the conspiracy of silence, I could break the conspiracy of silence.

And what better place to break it than at that most enlightened and cosmopolitan of forums, the nerd table?