Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex
edited by Melvin Jules BukietNorton, 352 pp., $26.95
Writing about sex is never about the act of sex itself — it’s about the politics and rituals of relationships, the awkwardness of blushing, or, some would argue, the loss and creation of the almighty self. It’s still sex, though, which is nice, but it’s all that comes with the sex that makes a book like Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex such an opportunity for pleasure, academic and otherwise. Editor Melvin Jules Bukiet assembles his collection with the engaging premise that different groups “perceive the desirable in images of their own construction”; therefore, there must be one unifying trait of desire that the Jews can call their own.
Sadly, Bukiet never adequately articulates what this Jewish sex trait might be, but he does offer 28 stories and novel excerpts by A-list writers such as Erica Jong, Nathan Englander, and Philip Roth that present, for the most part, compelling works of literature that would be a pleasure to read even if they were not about sex at all. The highlight of the book is undoubtedly Isaac Bashevis Singer’s timeless and charming “Taibele and Her Demon,” which tells of a shtetl widow’s affair with an evil spirit.
Also to Bukiet’s credit is the range of sexual experience and voice that he covers in the collection. Take, for instance, Michael Lowenthal’s “Infinity of Angles,” in which a German man seduces the male protagonist in a gay discotheque only to have him play very rough in atonement for his nation’s sins: “You must be full of hate. After all the things we did to you.” An excerpt from Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind Body Problem chronicles her brainy seduction of an eccentric genius at Princeton University. Even Woody Allen does his part to further the cause with his hilarious “The Whore of Mensa” in which female “prostitutes” charge high prices for lengthy discussions of literary topics in sleazy motel rooms: “Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, reading Penguin Classics provocatively.”
This juicy collection is not without flaws; Bukiet might have tried harder to include stories that explore the psychological aspect of desire as opposed to the physical or the humorous. And though it is well-intentioned and snappy, his introduction offers no exegetic discourse or historical analysis, and it does very little to shed light on the theme of sex throughout the Jewish literary tradition and its distinction from other traditions. But the talented authors offer pleasurable and highly worthy stories, even if the theoretical aims of the book remain mostly unfulfilled.
This article appears in January 28 • 2000.