#Dawn of war text too small skin
#Dawn of war text too small full

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. 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. I mention luck because lucky is exactly how I felt in the preceding weeks and months and years.

#Dawn of war text too small skin

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 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. вЂњEighteen is too old for cutting the dick,вЂќ Misha begs the Chabadniks who have driven him to a Brooklyn hospital, but he is told by one of them that вЂњAbraham was ninety-nine when he performed the bris with his own hands!вЂќ In my novel вЂњ Absurdistan,вЂќ 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.

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 texture and appearance, the bridge reminded me of the Polly-O mozzarella string cheese that got packed in the lunchboxes of my generation. A small gap could be seen between this skin bridge and the penis proper. 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. 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). Most poorly performed circumcisions stem from two misjudgments on the part of the circumciser: either too much or too little foreskin is removed. 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. Seven years later, soon after our arrival in the United States, my father fell under the influence of some вЂњChabadniks,вЂќ 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.

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. My father, born in a small village outside Leningrad in 1938, had been circumcised. My penis was shaped by the Cold War and GodвЂ™s covenant with Abraham.

#Dawn of war text too small full

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. A tiny hair had formed a tourniquet around a skin bridge on the genital. On August 24, 2020, as I attempted the first pee of the morning, I felt a tightness on the underside of my penis.