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Shmutz: A Novel - Hardcover

Berliner, Felicia

 
9781982177621: Shmutz: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1982177624 ISBN 13: 9781982177621
Verlag: Atria Books, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

“Hilarious and endearing...Shmutz is a dirty book with a pure heart.” —The New York Times

In this witty, provocative, and “compulsively readable coming-of-age story” (Cosmopolitan), a young Hasidic woman on a quest to get married fears she will never find a groom because of her secret addiction to porn.

Like the other women in her ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn community, Raizl expects to find a husband through an arranged marriage. Unlike the other women, Raizl has a secret.

With a hidden computer to help her complete her college degree, she falls down the slippery slope of online pornography. As Raizl dives deeper into the world of porn at night, her daytime life begins to unravel. Between combative visits with her shrink to complicated arranged dates, Raizl must balance her growing understanding of her sexuality with the expectations of the family she loves.

“Clever, subversive, juicy, and surprising” (Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies), Shmutz explores what it means to be a fully realized sexual and spiritual being caught between the traditional and modern worlds.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Felicia Berliner has an MFA from Columbia University. Shmutz is her first novel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1. Daughter of Israel Daughter of Israel
The doctor’s nails are shiny, glittering around the pen she points at Raizl. “You don’t want to get married?” Dr. Podhoretz asks.

Raizl shakes her head. “I want,” she corrects. “But I can’t. Mami sent me to you because I told her and the matchmaker, no meetings. No b’show.” She’s told her mother she’s scared of sex, which is true. Scared she won’t ever find a husband. Also true! Just not everything that is true.

“You can’t?” The doctor’s forehead wrinkles. “Why not?”

Raizl’s thighs clench, her thick tights pressed so close they may as well be stitched together under her long wool skirt, guarding against the feeling that even under all this fabric, a part of her will be exposed. For the sake of finding a husband, though, she will say it.

“Too much watching,” Raizl answers, but the doctor doesn’t react.

“On the computer,” Raizl adds, blushing. The heat of saying it rises from her temples, from the tops of her ears.

“Wait, you mean pornography?”

Raizl nods slightly, a hint of yes. Porn, that’s what she watches. Shmutz.

“All right.” Dr. Podhoretz is nodding her head, too, as if this isn’t unusual. “Let’s talk about it. What do you like to watch?”

Like to watch? Why is the doctor asking this? Raizl looks at the ceiling, where perhaps an answer swirls overhead, and mumbles to herself, “Ich veiss nisht.” I don’t know. She’s not sure what happens to her during the nights of porn. Raizl thought Dr. Podhoretz would tell her what’s going on, and how to make it stop. So far not.

Instead, the doctor’s question reminds Raizl of a video she saw the night before, College Girls Play Games. Three girls lay on a bed on their bellies, wearing shirts but nothing below. Their bare tushes sticking up. Two of them played a silly video game, chatting and laughing, while a man shtupped the one in the middle. Weren’t they too old to be playing these games? And didn’t they see what was happening between them—didn’t they notice the shtupping? She wasn’t talking, the girl in the middle, but sometimes she reached her hand around, behind her back, and held her tush. Raizl remembers the girl’s nice manicure, her bright pink nails.

Raizl squeezes her legs together even tighter, aware that the video memory has stirred sensation down there. She smiles weakly, wondering if Dr. Podhoretz can tell.

But the doctor just tilts her head to one side and asks, “Can you say a bit more? Preferably in English. I’m sorry, my Yiddish is rather limited.”

The doctor doesn’t sound sorry, but Raizl breathes in, getting ready. It seems an impossible task. To say what she knows.

Never mind that her knowledge is entirely virtual. The only hands that have touched her body are her own. But the videos imprinted in her memory will not be erased or sealed shut. No angel will come to wipe away her knowledge, like the angel who teaches the Talmud to every infant in utero, then pinches the baby’s lips shut at birth, leaving the small hollow between nose and lip as a reminder: the child must relearn the Talmud with a new consciousness, with a free will. If only Raizl could come to the marriage bed like this—fully innocent, newborn and unknowing, as eager to learn sexual pleasure as if she had not a shred of digital experience.

It’s too late, though, for this kind of purity. Raizl sinks lower in the armchair, and the wine-colored leather creaks without mercy each time she moves. Raizl fears she cannot be reconciled with the sex that awaits her: post-ritual bath, Friday-night sex. Will she take off her special bride’s nightgown and be naked? Will she ever persuade her chussen, the husband of her future, to put his tongue down there? Based on the women Raizl’s seen in videos, she doesn’t think she can live without this, and she fears her chussen will think she’s prost, a coarse girl, with ugly wishes. Sometimes she dares to hope: if she takes her chussen’s cock-dick into her mouth just once, he won’t be able to live without it either. Of this, porn has her convinced.

If she can just stop watching porn now, perhaps it’s not too late to find a chussen. To get married.

“You can help me quit watching?” Raizl asks.

“Do you want to quit?” The doctor lowers her chin and observes Raizl over the top of her glasses, asking this question in the same even tone she uses to gather all the facts. So far, the doctor has collected the meaning of Raizl’s name (Yiddish for “rose”), age (eighteen and a half), and birth order (third of five brothers and sisters).

“Only five children? Why so few?” the doctor had asked. It pained Raizl to speak of Mami’s miscarriages, as if she were giving away family secrets. But according to Mami, even though the doctor is not from the community, she has worked with other Chasidish families. Presumably she has dealt with the rumored heartaches and tzuris: the schnapps-loving mother, the plate-smashing father, the bedwetting bar mitzvah boy. On occasion, a bride who does not bleed on her wedding night and has never been near a horse.

And now Raizl, daughter of Israel, porn addict.

“I can’t quit,” Raizl says. “Every night I’m looking at it.” The fluttering movement of Dr. Podhoretz’s pen makes Raizl forget what she’s saying.

“Every night?” prompts the doctor. “You have internet at home?”

“Yes,” Raizl says, and her toes curl inside her flat black shoes. Another secret, out now.

“Tati is a manager at the electronics store, and since he hurt his back they let him work from home sometimes. He got internet for his email. He doesn’t know I have the password, that I open the internet on my laptop, which I’m only supposed to use to study accounting. I’m in the Cohen College honors program. I have a scholarship.”

These details come out in a rush, so much easier to talk about than the videos. “Also, I work a few hours a week for a business on Forty-Seventh Street,” Raizl continues. “As soon as I finish my degree, it’s already arranged, I’ll work full-time.”

“Arranged?” asks Dr. Podhoretz. “Like a marriage?”

“I have a laptop,” Raizl says impatiently. The doctor is missing the point. “For me it’s permitted because it’s for parnussa, for livelihood. I give the money to Mami, and she saves it to pay for my wedding. And in the meantime, before I get married, the money helps pay for my brothers—in a few years they’ll work, like Tati, to earn a living, but for now they learn Torah all day.

“I have my computer where I want. School. Home. Bed.” Raizl’s cheeks flush yet again, but the doctor’s face is perfectly smooth, undisturbed. “Nobody else is allowed to have a computer at home, not my brothers, my sister, my friends,” Raizl says. “For them it’s forbidden.”

“That’s very unusual, isn’t it?” the doctor asks. “A young woman like you, going to college before getting married?”

Raizl nods. Tati almost...

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Verlag
Atria Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1982177624
ISBN 13 
9781982177621
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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gpsr@libri.de

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