Guard your penis. Guard it carefully.

As my students dutifully read through the book Jacob’s Rescue, they’ll inevitably reach a section about the younger brother, David, a Jewish boy in WWII hiding with an adoptive family, in a situation where he’s afraid to undress in front of a group of other boys because he’s afraid they’ll notice his circumcision.

A few students walked up to me today and pointed out the word in the book.

“Does that say circumcision?” one asked.

Yup.

“Oh, ok. Just wanted to make sure.”

And that was enough for me. I guess the opportune lesson here would be to talk with the students about the requirement of circumcision according to the tenets of Judaism. We could talk about the ceremony, and that all Jewish males are required to be circumcised, according to Jewish Law. Even more opportune, here, would be to talk about why david is so frightened — that his counterparts would not be circumcised, and therefore they would notice this difference between themselves and their friend, whom they thought was Polish, but not a Polish Jew. We could talk about how this scene heightens the tension, and how simply it heightens the tension. But, the truth is that this conversation won’t ever happen, and I explained that to a student who walked up, pointing at the odd word in the book and said:

“What’s that say?”

Circumcision.

“What?”

Circumcision.

“What’s that mean?”

Uhhhh….hmmm. Well, I’d really like to tell you, but I think that some students’ parents might get upset if their kids came home and said, “My teacher taught us about circumcision today!”

He looked absolutely confused, and so he asked:

“Huh?”

How’s about you go look that word up in the dictionary. They’re right over there.

“All right.”

And he said ‘All right’ with that sigh of disbelief that really says, ‘Now I just don’t care anymore. I can’t believe he’s making me do this, this is so stupid.’ But I couldn’t have been happier that he actually did go look up the word because the dictionary definition was simple. It said: “To circumcise.”

“It doesn’t tell me anything. It says: ‘To circumcise.’”

Ok, did you look up ‘circumcise?’

“Not yet.”

Do it.

And as he did, I saw him drag his finger back and forth across the definition. He mouthed out the words, and then when he came to that last part, that important part: “To cut off the foreskin of the PENIS.” And it must have been blinking there in the dictionary, the ways his eyes opened up. It must have made a cartoonish car horn honk in his brain when he read it, the way his eyes opened up, the way his jaw opened. Then he looked at me with a worried look.

“The skin?”

Yup.

He drew his hand down the length of his arm as he said:

“The skin?”

I realized he thought/thinks the term ‘foreskin’ means all the skin. And still wanting to stay away from the conversation, and just leave it up to him to either figure out what “foreskin” means or to have a discussion with his parents or with his friends or with the health teacher, I simply said:

Yup.

In all, I think this discussion will just lead him to think to himself: ‘I hope that never happens to me,’ or that I just made this book all the more interesting, in that ‘We’re reading a book that’s totally messed up in English class’ sort of way.