Unabridged

In most of these books, those quoted below, circumcision is a plot point, and the issue is only whether or not a character is circumcised, and why. The treatment varies widely, depending on whether the culture is circumcising or intact.

Horse Heaven and 3001, on other pages, deal with sexual consequences of intactness and circumcision respectively, in very different ways, and Tales of the City with growing up intact.

• 3001: The Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
• The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
• Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life by Michael Greenberg
• Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx
• The Captain and Thomasine by Don Floyd
• The Circumcision by György Dalos
• Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese
• Diary (Sunday December 24, 1911) by Franz Kafka
• The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
• Glue by Irvine Walsh
• Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley
• Live from Golgotha by Gore Vidal
• Lucky Town by James Brown
• The Measure of his Grief by Lisa Braver Moss
• The Obama Identity by Edward Klein and John LeBoutillier
• Rabbit At Rest by John Updike
• The Satyricon by Petronius
• Sellevision by Augusten Burroughs
• Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
• The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
  
• The Temple by Stephen Spender
• Trowim Way Leg by Tim Flannery
• Witz by Joshua Cohen
  
  
• Love's Labours Lost, The Merchant of Venice
  and Othello by Shakespeare

Indeed, The Ask isn’t really a Jewish novel, but there are, throughout its pages, tinges of the Jewish experience. For one thing, Milo routinely kvetches over his decision to not have his son circumcised.

Meanwhile, his son, Bernie, has his own obsession—more age-appropriate—with the extra tubing. “Do superheroes have foreskins?” he asks his dad. “Does Goliath have a foreskin?” Lipsyte, as is his talent, turns a meaningful family moment into comedy just in time: “Not for long,” Milo answers. “Not when David’s done with him.” When Bernie asks who David is, Milo tells him, “A foreskin collector.”

The Millions, September 9, 2010

In one essay, he explores what he regards as the unnecessary business of circumcision, particularly regarding his own sons: “My brother was unimpressed. To him, I am the worst traitor: a non-believer who was brought up to believe.”

The Telegraph, March 13, 2010

... He stood up, said you bet he'd like to see Jack's room, recalled one of Jack's stories about this old man. Jack was dick-clipped and the old man was not; it bothered the son, who had discovered the anatomical disconformity during a hard scene. He had been about three or four, he said, always late getting to the toilet, struggling with buttons, the seat, the height of the thing, and often as not left the surroundings sprinkled down. The old man blew up about it and this one time worked into a crazy rage.

"Christ, he licked the stuffin out a me, knocked me down on the bathroom floor, whipped me with his belt. I thought he was killin me. Then he says, 'You want a know what it's like with piss all over the place? I'll learn you,' and he pulls it out and lets go all over me, soaked me, then he throws a towel at me and makes me mop up the floor, take my clothes off and warsh them in the bathtub, warsh out the towel, I'm bawlin and blubberin. But while he was hosin me down I seen he had some extra material that I was missin. I seen they'd cut me different like you'd crop a ear or scorch a brand. No way to get it right with him after that."

First published in the New Yorker, October 13, 1997

This story gets it right, that when a circumcised boy discovers what he is missing - especially something his father has - he is traumatised. In a circumcising society he may take comfort from being the same as his peers, but for many this only delays the shock and loss.

Grew up a girl, became a soldier, dressed as a woman, defended herself in stunning Jamestown court case.

The Thomas/Thomasine Hall case of 1629 was about America’s first known intersexual, her struggle for identity in a male-female world and her choice to dress as a woman despite the efforts of settlers in Jamestown to force her to dress as a man. Magistrate Nathaniel Basse ruled that she could dress as a woman, but the settlers took their case to the Virginia governor. Thomasine Hall testified that she was christened as a girl and raised as a girl, that she considered herself a girl in childhood and a woman in adulthood. The governor had something else in mind. He did not rule that Hall must dress as a man, but something far worse.

György Dalos lives in Berlin, but in his books he regularly returns to his homeland, Hungary. He was born in Budapest in 1943.

His novel "The Circumcision," which first appeared in German (Die Beschneidung. Eine Geschichte) in 1997, is about a boy named Robi and his experiences with growing up. Robi's biggest problem is the fact that he missed out on the Jewish ritual of circumcision, which is normally performed on boys when they are eight days old. It never happened because there was no time for it, since Robi was born in an air-raid shelter in Budapest during a period of regular bombings.

From the publisher:
Twelve-year-old Robi Singer and best friend Gabor Blum are the only boys in their class who have yet to be circumcised. Robi is worried.

What if the knife should slip? What will the others think in the showers? Will he find a wife? Is there plastic surgery to fix damage of this sort?

Should he have the circumcision? Everyone has an opinion—from his teachers to his eccentric grandmother and hypochondriac mother—the final decision is Robi’s.

The probationer broke the ensuing silence. She was trying to anticipate, so she opened a circumcision tray and pulled on gloves. The one thing Matron allowed her to do without supervision was to use the foreskin guillotine.

But instead of praising her, Hema pounced on her.

“My goodness, girl, don’t you think these children have had quite enough? They’re preemies! They are not out of danger. Want them to be chip-cock Charlies on top of all this? ... And you? What have you been doing all the time, eh? You should’ve been worrying about their swallowing ends, not their watering cans.”

- (Noida, UP, India: Random House India, 2009) p.107

This morning my nephew's circumcision. A short, bow-legged man, Austerlitz, who already has 2,800 circumcisions behind him, carried the thing out very skillfully. It is an operation made more difficult by the fact that the boy, instead of lying on a table, lies on his grandfather's lap, and by the fact that the person performing the operation, instead of paying close attention, must whisper prayers. First the boy is prevented from moving by wrappings which leave only his member free, then the surface to be operated on is defined precisely by putting on a perforated metal disc, then the operation is performed with what is almost an ordinary knife, a sort of fish knife. One sees blood and raw flesh, the moule [mohel] bustles about briefly with his long-nailed, trembling fingers and pulls skin from some place or other over the wound like the finger of a glove. At once everything is all right, the child has scarcely cried. Now there remains only a short prayer during which the moule drinks some wine and with his fingers, not yet entirely unbloody, carries some wine to the child's lips. Those present pray: “As he has now achieved the covenant, so may he achieve knowledge of the Torah, a happy marriage, and the performance of good deeds.”

Today when I heard the moule's assistant say the grace after meals and those present, aside from the two grandfathers, spent the time in dreams or boredom with a complete lack of understanding of the prayer, I saw Western European Judaism before me in a transition whose end is clearly unpredictable and about which those most closely affected are not concerned, but, like all people truly in transition, bear what is imposed upon them. It is so indisputable that these religious forms which have reached their final end have merely a historical character, even as they are practiced today, that only a short time was needed this very morning to interest the people present in the obsolete custom of circumcision and its half-sung prayers by describing it to them as something out of history.

Julian Treslove, underachieving broadcaster/actor, is obsessed by Jewishness, especially that of his old schoolmate Sam Finkler (He thinks of Jews as Finklers, hence the title). Finkler, a successful philosopher and popular writer, is now quite anti-Zionist, but his late wife, Tyler, was a convert. Treslove had an affair with Tyler. Now he is with Hephzibah, niece of their old teacher, Libor.

Today he didn't want her [Tyler] to go home, back to Sam's bed, back to Sam's penis. Was Sam now ashamed of his penis, too? Treslove wondered.

He had flaunted his circumcision at school. 'Women love it,' he'd told Treslove in the shower room.

'Liar.'

'I'm not. It's true.'

'How do you know?'

'I've read. It gives them greater satisfaction. With one of these beauties you can go for ever.'

Treslove read up about it himself. 'You don't get the pleasure I get,' he told his friend. 'You've lost the most sensitive part.'

'It might be sensitive but it's horrible. No woman will want to touch yours. So what's the sensitivity worth? Unless you want to spend the rest of your life being sensitive with yourself.'

'You 'll never experience what I experience.'

'With that thing you'll never experience anything.'

'We'll see.'

'We'll see.'

And now? Did Finkler's Jewish shame extend to his Jewish dick? Or was his dick the one part of him to enjoy exclusion from the slur? Could an ASHamed Jew go on giving women greater satisfac­lion than an unashamed Gentile, Palestine or no Palestine?

That's if there'd ever been a grain of truth in any of it. You never knew with Jews what was a joke and what wasn't, and Finkler wasn't even a Jew who joked much. Treslove longed for Tyler to tell him, solve the mystery once and for all. Did women have a preference? She was in the best position to make the comparison. Yes or no? Could her Shmuelly go forever? Was her willingness to look at her husband's penis but not her lover's attributable to the foreskin and the foreskin alone? Was Treslove uncut too ugly to look at? Had the Jews got that one right at least?

It would explain, wouldn't it, why she fiddled with him the way she did, behind his back. Was she unconsciously trying to screw off his prepuce?

He didn't ask her. Didn't have the courage. And in all likelihood didn't want to hear the answer. Besides, Tyler wasn't well enough to be questioned.

You take your opportunity when you have it. Treslove was never given another.

pp 122-3

It was more history he wanted. In the history of ideas sense. And the knack of thinking Jewishly. For this Hephzibah recommended Moses Maimonides' The Guide for the Perplexed. She hadn't read it herself, but she knew it to be a highly regarded text of the twelfth century, and since Treslove owned himself to be perplexed and in need of a guide, she didn't see how he could do any better.

'You're sure you don't just want me out of your hair?' he checked, once he'd seen the contents page and the size of the print. It looked like one of those books which you started as a child and finished in an old persons' home lying in a bed next to Libor's Hebrew teacher.

'Look, as far as I'm concerned you're perfect as you are,' she told him.'I love you perplexed. This is what you keep saying you want.'

'You sure you love me perplexed?'

'I adore you perplexed.'

'What about uncircumcised?'

It was a subject to which he frequently returned.

'How often must I tell you,' Hephzibah told him. 'All that's immaterial to me.'

'All that?'

'Immaterial. '

'Well, it isn't exactly immaterial to me, Hep.'

He offered to talk to someone. It was never too late. She wouldn't hear of it.

'It would be barbaric,' she said.

'And if we have a son?'

'We aren't planning to have a son.'

'But if we do?'

'That would be different.'

'Ah, so what would be good for him, would not be good for me. Already, there are competing criteria of maleness in this house.'

'What's maleness got to do with it?'

'That's my question.'

'Will, go and get yourself an answer from some higher authority. Read Moses Maimonides.'

p 195

He stumbled blindly from one chapter to another. 'Of the divine Names composed of Four[, ]Twelve and Forty-two Letters', 'Seven Methods by which the Philosophers sought to Prove the Eternity of the Universe', 'Examination of a passage from Pirke di-Rabbi Eliezer in reference to Creation'.

And then he got on to circumcision and found himself galvanised into thought.

'As regards circumcision,' Maimonides had written, 'I think that one of its objects is to limit sexual intercourse.'

He read it again.

'As regards circumcision, I think that one of its objects is to limit sexual intercourse.'

And then again.

But we don't have to follow him through every reading.

As a matter of course he read every sentence of Maimonides a minimum of three times, but that was to seek clarity. Here was no obfuscation in need of conscientious penetration. Circumcision, Moses Maimonides argued, 'counteracts excesssive lust', 'weakens the power of sexual excitement' and 'sometimes lessens the natural enjoyment'.

Such a claim merited reading and rereading simply for itself. And indeed for himself, if he was ever to get to the bottom of who Finklers were and what they really wanted.

Among the many thoughts that crowded into Treslove's mind was this one: did it mean he'd been having a better time than Finkler - ­Sam Finkler himself - all along? At school Finkler had boasted of his circumcision. 'With one of these beauties you can go for ever,' he had said. And Treslove had countered with what he'd read, and with what made perfect sense to him, that Finkler had lost the most feeling part of himself. A verdict in which Moses Maimonides unequivocally concurred. Not only had Finkler lost the most feeling part of himself, it had been taken from him precisely in order that he should not feel what Treslove felt.

A great sadness, on behalf of Tyler, suddenly welled up in him. He had enjoyed her more than Finkler had. No question of it. He had the wherewithal to enjoy her more with.

But did it follow from that that she had enjoyed him more than she had enjoyed Finkler? He had not thought so at the time. 'No woman will want to touch yours,' Finkler had warned him at school, and Tyler's apparent reluctance to look at him. seemed to bear that out. But was it a reluctance or was it a kind of holy dread? Did she fear to look upon what gave her so much pleasure? Had he been a godhead to her?

For what gave him more pleasure must surely have given her more pleasure too. A man made reluctant by his circumcision would logi­cally communicate that reluctance to his partner. The 'weakened power of sexual excitement' had to work both ways. What counter­acted 'excessive lust' in the one had to counteract 'excessive lust' in the other, else there was no point in it. Why maim the man to limit sexual intercourse if the woman went on demanding it as fervently as ever?

Indeed, Maimonides said as much. 'It is hard for a woman, with whom an uncircumcised had sexual intercourse, to separate from him.' Women had not found it hard to separate from Treslove, but that could have been attributable to other causes. And initially he had always done reasonably well - 'If you think I'm going to let you fuck me on our first date you've got another think coming,' they had said to him, letting him fuck them on their first date - which suggested it was what they later discovered about him as a person that was the problem, not the prepuce.

He felt possessed of a thrilling power he had never known was his. He was the uncircumcised. From whom women found it hard to separate.

Physically hard to separate, did Maimonides mean, in that the uncircumcised somehow knotted inside the woman like a dog? Or emotionally, in that the uncircumcised's untiring lustfulness besotted her?

Both, he decided.

[Yet if Treslove is intact, he must know the first supposition to be nonsense. The usual reading is that he gives her so much pleasure she does not want to leave him.]

He was the uncircumcised, and he had spoken. Both.

In retrospect, he fell in love with Tyler all over again, knowing now that she must have loved him more than she could ever admit. And had been afraid to look upon that which made her wanton.

Poor Tyler. Besotted with him. Or at least besotted with his dick. And poor him for missing out on that exquisite knowledge at the time.

If only he'd known.

If only he'd known, what then? He wasn't sure. Just if only he'd known.

But it wasn't all regret. He was also excited by this discovery of his own erotic power. Lucky Hephzibah at least.

Unless his untiring lustfulness both wearied and disgusted her. And as a matter of ethno-religious principle she would have preferred him snipped.

[Treslove's perception of his own foreskin and its effects is strangely abstract. An intact man can feel his own foreskin, and whenever he thinks about it, he is conscious of what it is feeling. To think about getting circumcised creates an almost physical sensation of pain. Treslove experiences none of this. His references to his own foreskin have an unreal quality, like a 19th century Deaf girls's story about a dream she had had about being able to hear - in which the "sounds" she described were more like wisps of coloured fog. What do they always say? "Write about what you know."]

He rang Finkler.

'You ever read Moses Maimonides?' he asked.

'Is that the purpose of your call?'

'That and to enquire how you are.'

'I've been better, thank you.'

'And Moses Maimonides?'

'I guess he's been better too. But have I read him? Of course, I count him as among my inspirations.'

'I didn't think you found Jewish thought inspiring.'

'Then you think wrong. He teaches how to make abstruse thought available to the intelligent layman. He is all along saying more than he appears to say. We plough the same furrow, he and I.'

Oh yeah, Treslove thought - Guide for the Perplexed and John Duns Scotus and Self-Esteem: a Manual jor the Menstruating.

But what he said was, 'So what do you reckon to what he says about circumcision?'

Finkler laughed. 'Why don't you just come right out with it, Julian? Hephzibah wants you to have it done - yes? Well, I wouldn't stand in her way. But between ourselves - ha! - I think you might be a wee bit old. As I recall, Maimonides warns against it past the eighth day. So that's you out. Just.'

'No, Hephzibah does not want me to have it done. She loves me as I am. Why would she not? Maimonides says circumcision limits sexual intercourse. I impose no limits myself.'

'I am pleased to hear it. But is this about you or Moses Maimonides?'

'It's not about me. I simply wonder what you, as a philosopher who ploughs the same furrow, think about Maimonides' theory.'

'That circumcision is to put a brake on sex? Well, it certainly exists to make us afraid, and making us afraid of sex is part of it.'

'You always told me Jews enjoyed sex inordinately.'

'Did I? That must have been a long time ago. But if you're asking me whether circumcision as a means of inhibiting the sexual impulse is specifically Jewish, I would say not. Anthropologically speaking, it isn't primarily about sex anyway, except in so far as all mitiation ceremonies are about sex. It's about cutting the apron strings. What is Jewish is interpreting the circumcision rite in the way Maimonides does. It's he - the medieval Jewish philosopher - who would wish us to be more restrained and imagines circurnci­sion as the instrument. But I have to tell you it has never worked on me.'

'Never?'

'Not ever that I recall. And I think 1 would recall it. But I do know someone who believes himself to have been cheated of pleasure, and is in the process of having the operation reversed.'

'You can have it reversed?'

'Some people think so. Read Alvin Poliakov's blog. You can find it at something like www.ifnotnowwhen.com. Alternatively I can fix you up with an introduction. He's perfectly affable, wants to talk about nothing else, and might even show you his dick if you ask him nicely. Apparently it's progressing. He's halfway to not being a Jew any more.'

'He's one of your ASHamed Jews, presumably.'

'Sure is. You don't get more ashamed than that.'

'You're not ashamed of yours, then?'

'You think I should be?'

'Just asking. You carried it with pride at school.'

'I was probably trying to rile you. I just carry it, Julian. I am a widower. Being circumcised or not does not figure high among my concerns right now.'

'I'm sorry.'

'Don't be. I'm pleased for you that your life is dickcentric at the moment.'

'I'm only speaking philosophically, Sam.'

'I know you are, Julian. I expect nothing less of you.'

Treslove remembered one more question before he rang off. 'As a matter of interest,' he asked, 'are your boys circumcised?'

'Ask them,' Finkler said, putting down the phone.

He had more conversational joy with Libor.

Libor was now walking with a stick. 'It's come to this,' he said.

'It suits you,' Treslove said. 'It suggests old Bohemia. You should get one with a blade in the handle.'

'To protect myself against the anti Semites? '

'Why you? I'm the one who gets attacked.'

'Then you get a stick with a blade in it.'

'Speaking of which,' Treslove said, 'where do you stand on circurncision?'

'Uncomfortably,' Libor said.

'Has it been a problem to you?'

'It would have been a problem to me had it been a problem to Malkie. But she never said anything. Should she have?'

'It hasn't stopped you enjoying sex?'

'I think what you carry around would have stopped me enjoying sex. Don't get me wrong - on you I'm sure it looks wonderful, but on me it wouldn't have looked so good. Aesthetically I have nothing to complain about. I look the way I'm supposed to look. Or I did. It is aesthetics we're talking?'

'No, not really. I've been reading that circumcision reduces sexual excitation. I'm canvassing opinion.'

'Well, it will certainly reduce yours if you decide to have it done at your age. As for me, I have never known any different. And I've never thought to complain. To be candid with you, I wouldn't have wanted to be any more sexually excited than I've been. It's been plenty, thank you. In fact, more than enough. Does that answer your question?'

'Yes, I suppose it does.'

'You only suppose it does?'

He saw Treslove looking at him narrowly, 'I know what you're thinking,' he said.

'What am I thinking?'

'You're thinking I protest too loudly. Had I not been circumcised, you're thinking, I wouldn't have found it so easy to resist Marlene Dietrich. You're too polite to say so but you're wondering whether it was only God's covenant with Abraham that kept me away from the Hun.'

'Well, you have always claimed you were the most faithful of husbands, despite facing temptations most men can't begin to I comprehend .. .'

'And you're asking if it was having a desensitised penis that kept me faithful?'

'I would never put it so grossly, Libor.'

'Except that you just have.'

pp 198-203

Strange, how well you can come to feel you know a person, Treslove thought, from a name, a word, and a few photographs of his penis.

But then Treslove could afford to be generous: he had what Alvin Poliakov, epispasmist, had wanted all his life - a foreskin.

Epispamos, Treslove learned from Alvin Poliakov's blog, is foreskin restoration. Except, as Alvin Poliakov explains, you cannot restore a foreskin. Once it's gone, it's gone. But it is not beyond the ingenuity of man to conjure up a faux foreskin in its place. This, Alvin Poliakov sits in front of a camera every day to prove.

For interest's sake, and by way of a break from Maimonides, and what with Hephzibah being out often at the moment, attending to problems with the museum, Treslove watches him.

Alvin Poliakov, son of a depressed Hebrew teacher, bachelor, body­builder, one-time radio engineer and inventor, founder member of ASHamed Jews, begins his morning by tugging at the loose skin on his penis, easing a little more skin up the shaft. He does this for two hours, breaks for mid-morning tea and a chocolate digestive biscuit, and then begins again. It is a slow, slow process. In the afternoon he takes measurements, collates the morning's data and writes his blog.

'I speak,' he confides to his readers, 'for the millions of mutilated Jews the world over, who feel what I have felt all my life. But not only for Jews, because there are millions of Gentiles out there who have been circumcised under the erroneous medical assumption that you are better without a foreskin than with.'

He doesn't say, the Jews misleading the world again, but only an uncomplaining fool, happy to be unforeskinned, could miss the implication.

Alvin Poliakov writes the way cinema newsreel announcers of th 1940s spoke, as though mistrustful of the technology and so shouting to be heard.

'Ever since the dawn of civilisation,' he says, 'men have sought to restore what was stolen from them, in violation of their human rights, before they were old enough to have a say in the matter. What has driven them to do this is a sense of incompletion, a consciousness of something as disabling as amputation.'

He cites the anguish of Jews in classical Greek and Roman society, longing to assimilate and strut their stuff but unable to go to the baths and show other men their penises, for fear of encountering mock­ery. (How many Jewish men actually wanted to do this? Treslove wonders.) This has led many desperate Jews to seek a remedy in surgery, often with tragic consequences. (Treslove shudders.) The only proven method of restoring an at best passable simulacrum of a foreskin is the one the blogger himself practises.

Behold.

Do not hope for too much. But do not settle for too little. This is Alvin Poliakov's philosophy:

As for the methodology

Every morning Alvin Poliakov photographs his penis from various angles with a view to posting the photographs on the Web later in the afternoon, along with diagrammatic details of the procedures he has followed in the course of the day - the construction of cardboard collars, the application of tape, the lubrication of sore skin, the hours spent slumped forward on his wooden chair coaxing the skin down­ward, ever downward, and the system of weights he has devised using copper jewellery, keys from a children's xylophone, and a pair of small brass candlesticks, which, he earnestly explains, can be bought cheaply from any good market or shop selling Indian knick-knacks.

[In fact, restoration takes a few minutes every day.]

Like a monk of self-denial he sits, shaven-headed, pumped-up and muscled, with his head between his knees, a snake charmer who knows the snake will not show himself for years, that's if he shows himself at all. There is no lubricity in the procedure. Whatever sex there once was in Alvin Poliakov's head has long since vanished in the service of the tapes, the adhesives, the collars and the weights. It was because he felt cheated of pleasure that Alvin Poliakov embarked on this course, but pleasure is not the issue any longer. Jews are the issue.

As an accompaniment to the photographs and the diagrams, Alvin Poliakov appends a daily portion of tirade against the Jewish religion in whose anti-service, so to speak, he now expends his energies. The crime of sexual mutilation, he argues, is just one more of the count­less offences against humanity to be laid at the gates of the Jews. Every day he publishes the name of another Jewish child, just come into th world, whose integrity has been compromised and whose rights t a full complement of sexual activities have been tragically curtailed.

Where these names come from, Treslove cannot imagine. Have they been lifted from the births and deaths pages of Jewish newspapers? It is impossible to imagine that the guilty parents would have given them to him. In which case isn't Alvin Poliakov himself guilty of stealing from the child what the child is too young to give freely.

Or has he just made them up?

Imperturbable, for he cannot hear Treslove's objections and would not heed them if he could, Alvin Poliakov, breathing like an athlete coaxes the skin of his penis into a foreskin. Every evening he believes he can see one coming, but every morning it is as though he must start again. Except for those nights when he attends meetings ASHamed Jews, he does not leave the house. An elderly sister do the shopping for him. She has recently converted to Catholicism. It not clear whether she is aware of how her brother passes his days, but he is not a man to keep his causes to himself. And she must wonder what he is doing on his wooden chair, tugging at his penis. Though it is possible she misinterprets.

He listens to the radio, noting how rarely the sufferings of mutilated Jews, or Gentiles mutilated as proxy Jews, are referred to. Th the BBC has a pro-Jewish bias he does not have the slightest doubt. Why else is there so little heard from those whose lives have been destroyed by Zionists and circumcision?

He wrote an afternoon play about one such life himself. But the BBC, though it thanked him for it, has not put it on. Censorship.

This barbarous ritual, Alvin Poliakov maintains, is analogous to cutting off young men's hair before enrolling them in the military and serves an identical function. It is to destroy individuality and subjugate every man to the tyranny of the group, whether religious or military. There is irrefutably, therefore, in Alvin Poliakov's view, a direct link between the Jewish ritual of circumcision and Zionist slaughter. The helpless Jewish baby and the unarmed Palestinian become one in the innocent blood that Jews do not scruple to take from both.

While he is sitting with his head between his knees, Alvin Poliakov thinks up dedications to the victims of Zionist brutality. He likes to post a new dedication whenever he can, above the latest photograph of his brutalised penis, thereby hammering home the connection. On the day Treslove decides he won't continue any longer with the blog, the dedication above Alvin Poliakov's penis, from which weights of assorted sizes and materials hang, reads: To the mutilated of Shatila, Nebateya, Sabra, Gaza. Your struggle is my struggle.

'Put it this way,' Treslove said, describing the blog to Hephzibah who had declined his offer to email her the link, 'if you were a Palestinian -'

'Absolutely. With friends like him ...'

'But not just that. It's the appropriation-'

'Absolutely. '

'And in such a trivial cause.'

'Not trivial to him, though, clearly.'

'No, but all other questions aside, aren't Muslims circumcised anyway?'

'As far I know they are,' she said, turning away, not wishing to encourage him in this new interest.

pp 222-3

[This is, of course, a grotesque parody of any foreskin restorer. Like the great majority of circumcised men, the great majority of restoring men are not Jewish. None is on record as making any link between circumcision and Zionism.]

-- It goat so fuckin tight it just went ping! Gally elaborates. -- Up like a fuckin Venetian blind. Ah wis in agony. Ah thoat it wis jist the burst Durex wrapped roond thair at first, bit it wis way too sair. Then ah realised that it wis ma fuckin foreskin! Aye, like a fuckin broken roller blind wrapped roond the bit whair the shaft meets the bell end, cuttin oaf the blood supply ay blood. Ma bell end went blue, then black. The Brook sister phoned the ambulance, they took ays up tae the hoaspital: emergency circumcision job.

(He didn't have to: see paraphimosis.)

In the beginning was the nightmare, and the knife was with Saint Paul, and the circumcision was a Jewish notion and definitely not mine.

I am Timothy, son of Eunice the Jewess and George the Greek. I am fifteen. I am in the kitchen of my family's home in Lystra. I am lying stark naked on a wooden table. I have golden hyacinthine curls and cornflower-blue, forget-me-not eyes and the largest dick in our part of Asia Minor.

The nightmare always begins the way that it did in actual life. I am surrounded by Jews except for my father, George, and Saint, as I called Saul of Tarsus,

...

Little did I realize when I became a Christian and met Saint and his friends, that my body-specifically, my whang-was to be a battleground between two warring fac­tions within the infant Christian Church.

... although the Jerusalem Jews liked the money that Saint kept sending back to head­quarters, they still couldn't, in their heart of hearts, stomach the Gentiles, and so they refused to eat at the same table with us, since our huge uncut cocks were always on their minds. Finally, things came to a head when Saint took a shine to a young convert and stud named Titus and took him down to Jerusalem for a long weekend of fun. After having drunk too much Babylonian beer, Titus took a leak up against the wall of Fort Antonia, where the Roman troops were stationed. As luck would have it, his snakelike foreskin was duly noted with horror by some loitering Jews, who reported to the rabbinate the presence of a Gentile on the premises a stone's throw from the Temple. The central office then leaned on James, an employee of the Temple, and James told Saint that in the future those goyim who became converted to Jesus must be circumcised. That tore it.

... . Finally, Saint suggested to John Mark that he undergo a public circumcision in order to convince Jerusalem that Saint was in no way an apostate or self-hating Jew. John Mark split, leaving an opening not only in Saint's office staff but sack, too. As an all-Greek Greek boy who wanted to see the world, I figured that Saint's fussing around with my bod was a small price to pay, or so I thought when I signed on. It wasn't as if there wasn't plenty of me left over for the girls of Lystra. Also, as secretary and gofer, I was pretty good, if not in John Mark's league. The work was never dull. And what a learning experience! Then came the shock. Saint was denounced by the pillars of the church in Jerusalem: He ate with goyim. He christened goyim. He was having carnal knowledge of a teenage Greek with two centimeters of rose-velvety foreskin, me. This last was only whispered, but it would have been quite enough to get Saint stoned to death by a quorum of Jews anywhere on earth if James were to give the word.

That explains why I am in the nightmare that I can never get out of once it starts.

... The dream's always the same. I am on my back. The room is chilly. I have goose bumps. All around me are Jews, wearing funny hats. Saint stands beside the table, my joint resting lightly in his hand. Needless to say, between the cold and the approaching mutilation, my fabled weenie has shrunk considerably.

"Let it be reported by all who presently bear witness that Timothy, our youthful brother in Christ, has now, of his own free will, undertaken to join the elect of the elect through the act of circumcision."

... I can hear Saint's deep voice as he says, "Mohel, do thy business!"

A rough hand seizes my organ of generation. I feel a sharp pull. Then a burning, the knife ... I scream, and wake up.

... I am as mad as I must have been back then at what had been done to me just so Saint could stay in good with the Jerusalem pillars of salt of the church. Historically, as well as theologically, he should have made a clean break with the Jews then and there, using the preservation of my perfect dong as a perfect pretext.

In that silent smoky hall you could have heard an unweighted pin drop or the loosest foreskin slide back.

- p 32

"The presence," said James, "of non-Jews is very dis­tressing to many members of our congregation, particularly at table where we are entirely kosher, and often dairy. That is why the two tables have been a compromise that the brethren can live with." James was staring with disgust at my hyacinthine golden curls and cornflower-blue eyes, the per­fect Gentile youth so hated by every proper, self-loving Jew. "Barely," he added.

"Timothy has been circumcised," said Saint, intuiting James's revulsion. "Timmy, show Brother James your ..."

"Not in the dining room," said James, looking ill.

- pp 106-7

Saint was very grim. "Am I to be tried by the Sanhedrin, Stephen?"

"No. By us. The Jesists, as they call us at the Temple."

"What is the charge?"

"In general, infidelity to the Torah. Specifically, at Ephesus, you told a Jew that since he followed Jesus he need not circumcise his son."

Saint laughed. "There is no truth in that. To the con­trary, I have even gone so far as to insist that many of the Gentiles close to me undergo circumcision. Timothy, show him your member."

James was appalled. "Please. Not in front of the yentas."

- p 111

[Nero']s eyes focused on my mutilated whang.

"Jew boy?" Nero's eyes narrowed.

"No, a Christian," I squeaked. "I just had this done because it was too tight..."

"Phimosis!" Nero was now all smiles. "It could happen to anyone. Did you know that there is an epidemic of phimosis ... in Britain? Don't you love it?" ..."

- p 160

His penis seemed enormous in comparison and the hood of skin over its tip remained, while mine had been removed at birth, which according to my father had been a horrible mistake.

"Your mother wanted it done. If I'd had my say I would have spared you the pain. Circumcision," he said, "it's mutilation. A conspiracy, Bobby, on the part of the American Medical Association in the name of public hygiene. A crock of shit is what it is. All they care about is making that first quick buck off every little pecker in the world. Ain't no reason in hell for it except simple greed at your expense."

His theory stuck me as eccentric, and yet for the longest time I harbored this absurd vision of doctors, gathered in secrecy for the express purpose of deciding the fate of my precious foreskin and those of our nation's male population. I pictured the scalpel, the blood, and though I couldn't recall the pain I knew how sensitive I was down there and could imagine it intensely enough. My father further contended that my loss, in terms of future sexual pleasure, was of greater consequence than I'd unfortunately ever know.

"The head gets numb without the skin and after a while you can't feel much, like a callus," he said, "on your hand. It gets toughened from use."

I could not, of course, ever make the comparison, and I didn't see how he could, given that he hadn't suffered my fate, but I hoped, regardless of the contradiction, that someday I'd have the opportunity to put his theory to the test.

My father's earlier contention regarding the loss of my foreskin, and how it would have a numbing or deadening effect on my future sexual pleasure, proved highly inaccurate.

Publisher's blurb:

In Berkeley, at his father's shiva, a Jewish doctor experiences a sharp groin pain for which he can find no explanation. So begins a series of events that will find Dr. Sandy Waldman ratling against the one Jewish tradition that's still observed even in the most iconociastic of towns and among the most assimilated of Jews: circumcision,

In her beautifully written debut novel, Lisa Braver Moss interweaves Sandy's story with that of his wife, Ruth — who will lose patience as Sandy lives and breathes the circumcision controversy — and their colege-aged daughter, Amy, feisty yet fragile, who's contacted by her incarcerated birth father just as she's trying to sort out her future.

Sandy—visionary, neurotic, buffoonish, brilliant -- deepens his understanding of Judaism even as he's jeopardizing both marriage and career with his anti-circumcision activism. When he discovers evidence that the tissue lost to circurncision is highly erogenous, it's not a huge ieap for him to join the men worldwide who are engaged in the astonishing process of foreskin "restoration."

Thought provoking, witty and highly original, The Measure of his Grief is the memorable tale of a man wko risks everything to be true to himself — yet refuses to turn his back on his heritage.

"You don't have to be Jewish to be concerned about circumcision, and you don't have to be Jewish to appreciate The Measure of His Grief - a thoughtful, nuanced, and wryly funny portrait of Berkeley and the foibles of its denizens."

- Liza Dalby, Berkeley author

"Finally - an intelligent questioning of Jewish circumcision, in a terrific, entertaining and very original story you won't forget. A must-read!"

- Dr Dean Edell

Hotink Press, to be published late 2010

A ceremony of removing Obama's foreskin is described as having "cleansed Barry of his impure American ideas." Later in the novel a KGB agent uses the evidence of this foreskin to blackmail Obama not to take military action against Iran. (p. 173-7, 308)

Rabbit wonders what his own life would have been like if he had been circumcised. The issue comes up now and then in the newspapers. Some say the foreskin is like an eyelid; without it the constantly exposed glans becomes less sensitive, it gets thick-skinned and dull rubbing against cloth all the time. A letter he once read in a skin magazine was from a guy who got circumcised in midlife and found his sexual pleasure and responsiveness went so far down his circumcised life was hardly worth living. If Harry had been less responsive he might have been a more dependable person, not so crazy to have his eye down there opened. Getting a hard-on you can feel the foreskin sweetly tug back, like freezing cream lifting the paper cap on the old-time milk bottles. From the numb look of his prick Roy will be a solid citizen.

pp. 119-120

"He's desperately clever, really. He's a cobbler, a cook, a confectioner - a man that can turn his hand to anything. But he's got two faults; if he didn't have them he'd be perfect - he's circumcised and he snores. I don't mind him being cross-eyed - so is Venus. That's why he's never quiet and his eyes are hardly ever still. I bought him for twelve hundred sesterces [a low price]."

Howard's normally placid, waspy features contorted with frustration. A vein on his temple pulsed. "Max, the other hosts weren't naked under their bathrobes. It's just - well, there's no excuse - seven-year-old-children and their mothers just should not know that you're uncircumcised."

The Queen of the Witches, Ruta Skadi, is addressing a Witches' Council:

The Subtle Knife, pp. 44-5 Ballantine Pocket Book edition (p. 50 Yearling edition)

[English Paul and German Joachim are washing themselves, naked, in their Cologne hotel room in 1929.]

Joachm turned round, away from the mirror, and said in his American drawl, smiling, but with unusual slowness as he looked Paul up and down: 'Well I guess that you and Ernst have one thing in common.'

Horribly embarrassed, Paul asked: 'What?'

'Well, I'm sure you must realise,' said Joachim, watching him all the time -

Paul could not go on standing there, being looked at. Trembling, he sat down on the edge of his bed. Then he said in a voice that he tried to make sound detached, scientific, indifferent -

'In England, being circumcised doesn't mean being Jewish.'

'What does it mean then?'

'Oh, I suppose it is done for medical reasons.'

Joachim stated: 'Unless it was absolutely essential for medical reasons no German parents would let their son be circumcised.'

'Why not?'

'Because they would not wish his school-mates to think he was a Jew.'

In the same choking, scientifically indifferent voice, Paul provided information -

'In England, boys from upper-middle-class parents tend to be circumcised. Not boys of the lower class.'

Oh. Why is that?' asked Joachim, with his usual wide-eyed amazement at the English.

'I don't know I suppose because the doctors of the poor don't think the parents can afford such luxuries.' He tried to laugh.

He wanted to dress, but he feared that if he did so Joachim would think he was hiding that mutilation which he had in common with Ernst. He resisted an impulse to bury his face, scarlet with embarrassment, in his hands. Suddenly, trembling, he was overwhelmed by the sense of those primitive rites which still divided whole peoples - white skins, black skins - into tribes: cutting across nationhood with connections far more primitive, going back to eras when foreskins were cut off with flints. Under their clothes men concealed the marks which revealed which side they were on in the secret, still haunting wars between the races of the circumcised and the uncircumcised. He thought of the Old Testament.

As this conversation progressed, Deyfu leaned close to me and asked in a whisper why I was so different from them.

Startled by the question, I began to grope for explanations about my relative large size and white skin.Deyfu cut short this tangled speech by pointing between his legs and saying,"No, hia" (Not that, here!).

At once the point of the question became apparent- I was circumcised while they were not. Mustering my finest Pidgin, I expounded "Ol tumbuna bilong mi i save rausim laplap bilong kok bilong pikinini man" which translalates roughly as "My ancestors developed the habit of cutting off the little skirt of skin that grows at the end of their children's willies".

Deyfu looked at me solemnly for a moment or two, then tried to translate this explanation for his eagerly waiting clansmen. After a few words he fell to the ground, choking and writhing.

He was in a paroxysms of laughter!

As he spurted the words out, all our companions fell about helplessly in a similiar manner. For a long time, no-one could look at me without becoming hysterical again, and it was at least twenty minutes before the mirth finally subsided.

While all this was going on I began to reflect upon my attitude towards the Miyanmin and their body decorations; their pierced nasal septums bearing pig's tusks had seemed the height of bizarre, outrageous and primitive fashion. Until this moment, I never considered that they could conceivably view me in the same way.

At the center of 'Witz' is Benjamin Israelian, the sole survivor of a virulent global plague that quickly kills off nearly everyone of Jewish extraction... After the plague, Ben is exploited for financial gain by quasi-governmental forces intent on marketing this new messiah to the masses. As a savior, Ben's only power seems to lie in constantly shedding, then regenerating, his foreskin, but that doesn't stop the goy hordes from slavishly adopting the tenets of Judaism for their own. It seems that there are none more zealous than the converted....

- Time Out New York