THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021 55
occasion I was alone in my family’s apart-
ment I would stand in front of the mir-
ror 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 Rus-
sian—a “Commie”—and for being poor
on a government-cheese order of mag-
nitude. Recently, I learned that the Bib-
lical 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 mis-
erable hospital, and still I was subjected
to my classmates’ playground version of
karet, having been both cut and cut off.
T
he 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 com-
monly found in hospital settings. A
nurse who was present during an ex-
amination 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. Hutchin-
son 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. De-
spite 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 some-
times 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 less-
ened 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 psycho-
logical part of it. Another doctor, a urol-
ogist at N.Y.U. Langone, made a simi-
lar 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 an-
tidepressant. He helped me further un-
derstand the mind-body connection:
“First, there’s a significant organic com-
ponent 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 col-
umn, 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, re-
minded me of the unfortunate young
British man Alex Hardy’s formulation of
an eyeball with the eyelid amputated.W
hat am I left with in the end? I
hope I will continue to get bet-
ter, though I doubt I will ever be com-
pletely right again. I may have to slather
my genital with ointments for the rest
of my life. There are new associated com-
plications 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 con-
tinue to spend more.
While discussing the topic with my
friends, I came across four instances of
pain and disfigurement as a result oflate circumcisions or of surgeries to cor-
rect botched childhood circumcisions.
In the Philippines. In Canada. In Port-
land. 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 doc-
tors to have their son circumcised, a
procedure rarely done in Italy. He re-membered, as I did, a period of diffi-
cult 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 ef-
fects of both surgeries have been last-
ing: “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 na-
tion’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 sweat-
pants 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 trash-
ing 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 some-
times does on the covers of evangeli-
cal 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 corporeal-
ity. 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 my-
thology. 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.