Heartburn

As we shuffle into the new millennium, it’s not Y2K that worries me: Instead, it’s recognition that the sexually inhibited but haimish world I grew up in is crumbling all around me. Standards aren’t what they used to be. I can’t, for instance, imagine the rebbe in our Galicianer shul having written a how-to-do-it book titled “Kosher Sex,” as a rabbi in Oxford did recently. Or the exemplar our striving mothers lumbered us with, Bernard Baruch (merely a Jew like us but, listen here, financial advisor to presidents), adding to his income by doing a commercial for Viagra. Or Ben-Gurion, caught with his pants down, being serviced by a nice Jewish girl. I can remember when, in the late 1940s, the bra ads in the New York Times made us horny beyond compare. Sitting out on the stoop, we were amazed they could get away with printing such stuff in a family newspaper. But today sex is here, there and everywhere. Only a few short years after her bat mitzvah, a rent-a-womb college girl can earn $50,000 incubating a baby: a boy, God willing, a kaddish for a sterile shoimer shabus couple. Flick on the TV and there’s a commercial advising how to cure vaginal itch, recommending a nifty new condom or showing a fetching young woman, abled to strut in her jeans because “Tampax was there.” Raised, as I was, in an Orthodox Jewish home, I am, at the age of 68, still shocked. After all, the books by Jewish writers I devoured as a boy, passed on to me by a progressive aunt, never described the sexual act: say, Isador Zangwill, the Sholems Aleichem and Asch, I.B. Singer, Abraham Cahan or Michael Gold.

Sunday afternoons we gathered at my grandfather’s house. When he was a shining morning face, back in the early 1900s, there was no Dr. Ruth but instead “A Bintel Brief” (a bundle of letters) published in Yiddish in the Jewish Daily Forward, and these letters, enriched by innocence, only hinted at sexual conundrums.

“Esteemed Editor: Is it a sin to use face powder? Shouldn’t a girl look beautiful? My father doesn’t want me to use face powder. Is it a sin?”

Or consider a letter from “Sympathetic,” a young man of 21 who wished to marry his 17-year-old cousin. “She’s educated, American-born, not bad-looking.” But there was a drawback: She was very short and he happened to be tall. “So when we walk down the street together, people look at us as a poorly matched couple.” The justifiably Esteemed Editor’s short answer? “Love conquers all. . . . People stare? Let them stare!”

Our parents never told us anything about sex. If I was caught uttering a “dirty word” in my mother’s presence, my mouth was immediately washed out with soap. Jack Rabinovitch, a friend of mine, came home one day and told his mother, “Izzy Tannenbaum says babies are born by coming out between a woman’s legs.”

“You are not to play with Izzy Tannenbaum any more,” said his mother.

Ink blotters on offer from plumbers and mechanics usually portrayed a sexy young woman entangled in her dog’s leash, which lifted her skirt above the knees. Takifman, our corner newsstand agent, also dealt in under-the-counter pornographic comic books of a sort. Twelve-page booklets in black and white were available for 50 cents--gems like “Dick Tracy’s Night Out,” with one frame showing Dick menacing Tess Trueheart with an enormous erection. From such contraband, I graduated to the hot stuff of the times: “Forever Amber,” “Kitty,” anything by Thorne Smith. I took “King’s Row” out of the library, and when I got home I noticed that a previous reader, obviously a considerate fellow, had written in the numbers of the steamy pages. On examination, several of the pages were stained. Terrified that the nice Miss Huberman, the “Y” librarian, would think I was the dirty boy, I returned the novel immediately.

In high school, sex began to drive us crazy. Dashing Gordy Birenbaum, sporting a brilliantined pompadour and a multi-crested sharkskin Windbreaker, claimed to have gone to the limit with Birdy Hoffer, a Jewish girl. Not only that, he boasted, “But, you know, like she admitted to me that she jerks off once a week after Lux Radio Theatre.” Especially if it featured Ronald Colman or Tyrone Power. Me, I wasn’t born yesterday. “How could she?” I protested. “She’s a girl, for Christ’s sake.”

I belong to a generation that sprang to adolescence during World War II. We were, and remain by today’s standards, a rather inhibited bunch. A friend of mine, far too proper to walk into a porn movie house, told me that he once stayed at a hotel in Toronto that offered a decidedly naughty movie beginning at 11 p.m. But in those days, in order to have the movie appear on his TV set, he had to dial the front desk. “I picked up the phone,” he said, “and was about to do it. Then I hung up. I was sure that if I requested the film, it would be my mother on the other end of the line. ‘Hershel, what are you up to?’ ”

Shiksas, we knew, were wild for it. So we pursued them relentlessly. But, according to rumor and report, Jewish girls were determined to save themselves for the wedding night. Meanwhile, they shopped. An uncle of mine, soon to be married and terrified of what was expected of him, acquired a sex manual, which he left open on a dining room table one afternoon, along with his notebook and pencil. I sneaked a quick glance at the open notebook and read:

Foreplay

a. c.

b. d.

What did we know about our all but self-contained Jewish world? Nothing. Bubkes. Why, I can remember when nice Jewish girls knitted diamond socks, played mah-jongg and peddled raffles for the synagogue’s ladies’ auxiliary. Little did I suspect that they were as sex-crazed as the guys. And now, newly liberated, nice Jewish girls are writing what my grandmother would have denounced as shmutz, or filth, a word surprisingly absent from both Leo Rosten’s splendid “Joys of Yiddish” and the companion dictionary, “Hooray for Yiddish.”

*

Consider, for instance, “The Oy of Sex,” an anthology of lubricious encounters experienced by nice Jewish girls, edited by Marcy Sheiner. In her introduction, Sheiner, who is also the editor of the literary journal Herotica, claims she is filling a cultural gap, noting that so far there has been no anthology of Jewish feminist porn. She attributes this to yesterday’s nasty stereotypes: “Hitler labeled Jewish women pigs, and the Nazi regime perpetuated an image of Jews as lecherous porn-mongers.”

Now, in my time, I have seen the Holocaust used to justify many a dubious venture, but Sheiner’s offering must be accounted a breakthrough. I recognized only two names among the contributors to “Oy”: Marge Piercy and Erica Jong. In my limited experience of the genre, Harvest Garfinkel was new to me, as was Susanna J. Herbert, “the pen name of a Nice Jewish Girl (who sometimes writes as Anaiis Juishgrrl).”

The contributors to “Oy” struck me as defiant, explicit but banal. As one might expect, there is a good (and repetitive) deal of licking, sucking, penetrating and so on. Had “Popular Mechanics” ever published a sex edition, this would have been it: technically accurate but ultimately boring.

“Neurotica,” edited by Melvin Jules Bukiet, is far more respectable than “Oy,” and at least part of this is because of its contributors, many of them heavy hitters in the American Jewish literary pantheon. The anthology is enhanced--no, certified--by the presence of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick and Philip Roth. To the editor’s credit, it also includes a number of younger writers, conspicuous among them the gifted Nathan Englander. Alas, the jokey introduction opens with a sentence that enshrines the obvious: “Sex is a universal phenomenon. Birds do it; bees do it; even Cole Porter on his knees do it.”

Bukiet, who has limited his selections to writers from the continental United States, reveals an uncertain grasp of knee-slappers by adding, “it may lose me a grant from the National Endowment for Identity Politics, but I also decided to ban all Alaskans of the Hebrew persuasion.” On far more dubious grounds, he goes on to point out, “Several writers like Stanley Elkin who came of literary age in the same era as the Jewish Literary Trinity were not included because it seemed vital to cede space to youth.” And because Bukiet “wished to hit 100 on both the Jew-o-meter and sex-o-meter,” he also excluded Norman Mailer, “whose fiction was more nominally than theologically Jewish.” Obviously Bukiet is unfamiliar with a fine piece by Mailer, intended as the first chapter of a novel, published in an early edition of Discovery, wherein several couples, increasingly nervous and embarrassed, gather to watch a porn movie in their host’s living room.

I missed not only Mailer and Stanley Elkin, a writer for whom I retain an enormous regard, but also Bruce Jay Friedman, Nora Ephron and Herbert Gold, all inexcusably absent, I think, from “Neurotica.”

To be fair, some of Bukiet’s selections are bulletproof. There is Woody Allen’s nifty “The Whore of Mensa,” the touching tale of the lonely intellectual who forks over for trysts with brainy women, who will discuss Proust or Yeats with him because although his wife is great, “she won’t discuss Pound or Eliot with me.”

Ozick’s justifiably celebrated “The Pagan Rabbi” is included, as well as a little gem by Max Apple, “The Eighth Day,” about a young man whose shiksa girlfriend wants him to relive his circumcision experience, which leads to a comic “recircumcision” of sorts by an obliging Rabbi Berkowitz. There is a beautifully written story, “Murderers,” by Leonard Michaels, and enjoyable appearances by Jong and Francine Prose. Bellow’s playful one-acter, “A Wen,” struck me as much more fun on rereading than it did my first time out. I know that Harold Brodkey has many admirers, but I found his 30-page description of a sex act tiresome. And considering the abundance of first-rate Philip Roth material available, he is not well served by a short excerpt from “The Counterlife.”

Put plainly, you can’t go wrong dipping into “Neurotica.” Were I somebody’s weekend guest, I would be grateful to find it on my bedside table, but I wouldn’t bother to take it home.