Gary Shteyngart reflects on his botched bris in a new short film

Author Gary Shteyngart holds a cucumber in the short documentary “The Man Who Got Cut Wrong.” Courtesy of The New Yorker on YouTube

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(New York Jewish Week) — “This country broke my penis, but it couldn’t break my spirit.”

So says Jewish writer Gary Shteyngart in “The Guy Who Got Cut Wrong,” a new documentary from The New Yorker about the botched circumcision Shteyngart received as a 7-year-old Russian immigrant to the United States.

Told with humor, sensitivity and pain, the 20-minute film — shot almost entirely in black and white — is directed by Dana Ben-Ari, a documentarian whose previous film was “Breastmilk,” which The Cut describes as a “gloriously graphic breast-feeding documentary.”

“The Guy Who Got Cut Wrong” explores Shteyngart’s early years in the United States, as well as his relationship to his body, which, as a child, is “just something I really hated,” he says in the film. The documentary is inspired by Shteyngart’s 2021 New Yorker essay about the same unfortunate event. The widely discussed essay was embraced in “intactivist” circles opposed to circumcision, and denounced by some Jews who felt Shteyngart had denigrated a Jewish ritual normally performed on infants, not 7-year-olds.

In the film, over a montage of photos depicting his New York City childhood — including one of him at a typewriter — Shteyngart narrates how his botched circumcision came to be. He describes arriving at a primarily Russian neighborhood in Queens, where his father was convinced by a local Chabadnik to circumcise his son in a physical manifestation of Jewish belonging.

“It was not just being accepted by the religion, but it was also being accepted by the new country, which we desperately were trying to do,” Shteyngart says. “If this is what you do in America, it’s what you’re doing in America. I’m not gonna fight it.”

But the surgical removal of his foreskin — a practice which had been banned in the Soviet Union as part of the government’s anti-religion policies — didn’t heal properly. “There were bits of redundant skin all over the place, just pieces of skin hanging off, basically,” Shteyngart describes, adding that the injury fostered a negative relationship with his body, exacerbating the feeling of “otherness” that he already felt as new immigrant to the United States.

Ben-Ari said she was inspired to make the film after reading Shteyngart’s essay. While working on “Breastmilk,” the issue of circumcision came up quite a bit. “I spoke to so many Jewish parents and grandparents who were so conflicted and tortured by this,” she said.

The filmmaker and its subject have “overlapping backgrounds,” Ben-Ari said — she was born in Israel to Russian parents; like Shteyngart she immigrated to New York as a child.

“I’m also interested in processing trauma, and Jews have a long history of using humor to process trauma,” she added. “And I think this film does that pretty well.”

Shteyngart, 53, is the author of a number of critically acclaimed books. His latest novel, “Vera, or Faith,” released in August, centers on a 10-year-old Russian Jewish-Korean girl who is navigating family dynamics in a dystopian near-future United States. In his 2006 novel “Absurdistan,” the main character, a secular Jew, is the son of a Russian oligarch and the victim of a botched circumcision.

Shteyngart’s mangled member mostly healed after a few years. But in the summer of 2020, the injury got aggravated, leading to a long journey to alleviate his pain. In the film, Shteyngart describes how he wore a bandage that resembled an “Elizabethan” dog collar, tried a variety of creams and searched endlessly for pants comfortable enough to make it through each day. The pain made walking unbearable, depriving him of a crucial thinking space for his writing.

“One of the things I was most scared of was that I could walk, at most, 10 minutes,” he recalls. “So for a while I was thinking, ‘I don’t walk, how am I gonna get these ideas?’ There was no one to tell me if this would ever end, and the idea of not being able to do anything — it was very painful to sit down.”

Fortunately, the pain is mostly gone today. As Shteyngart described in his 2021 essay, he described how a “compound cream containing amitriptyline, a tricyclic antidepressant” ultimately lessened his chronic pain.

Shteyngart doesn’t come off as pro- or anti-circumcision in the film, nor does he blame thousands of years of Jewish tradition for his discomfort.

“I don’t see this as a purely Jewish issue — I see this as an American issue,” Shteyngart says in the film. “And I don’t privilege Jewish dicks over non-Jewish dicks. I feel better that nobody is in pain.”

Ben-Ari sees “The Guy Who Got Cut Wrong” as an opportunity to pose questions and have conversations. “I think that that’s traditionally a Jewish thing to do,” she said. “Obviously not only a Jewish thing, but obviously Jews question. And it’s a responsibility.”