Minkowitz - Growing up Golem: how I survived my mother, Brooklyn and some really bad dates

Praise for Donna Minkowitzs Ferocious Romance

"Utterly entrancing Donna Minkowitz introspects herself bare, and then with a breathtakingly fluent language of alternating waggery and sincerity, tells how she incorporated her doubts and certainties into that rarest thing: an authentic self. In this brilliantly funny, wise, joyful book, she achieves the compassion and depth that both the gay and right-wing movements profess to want, and fail to achieve: and she does so with a gentle lightness and forthright courage by which even a die-hard partisan would have to be swayed."

Andrew Solomon, author, Far from the Tree

"An original, energetic and witty book. Reveal[s] something meaty about real people with grace, humor, and intelligence."

Mary Gaitskill, the New York Observer

"Donna Minkowitz's writing is a tonic."

Naomi Wolf

"Original and provocative."

Susan Faludi

"Infuriating, insightful, hilarious. Deserves a wide readership among activists and right-wingers alike.

Patrick Califia, author, Public Sex

Growing Up Golem

How I Survived My Mother, Brooklyn, and Some Really Bad Dates

Copyright 2013 by Donna Minkowitz

Magnus Books, an Imprint of Riverdale Avenue Books

5676 Riverdale Avenue, Suite 101

Bronx, NY 10471

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

Cover by: Paul Chamberlain/Cerebral Itch Creative

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Print ISBN: 978-1-936833-60-3

Digital ISBN: 978-1-936833-74-0

www.riverdaleavebooks.com

For Steven Fetherhuff, who taught me literally how to stand up straight,

and Irving Kizner, who taught me how to do it figuratively

Everything in this book is true, except the parts concerning magic and time travel.

Most names and some identifying details have been changed.

I may know a very little about Gnosticism, but I am no scholar of it. And alas, I am most certainly no expert on the Kabbalah, alchemy, or Jewish religion. I apologize for any inadvertent errors.

"The Human-stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness."

J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories

Chapter One

My mother loved to make things. One day, when I was thirty-two, my mother created a giant, half-life-size doll that looked just like me. (This is absolutely true.) It had yarn hair the same color and kink as mine, and real corduroy pants just like the ones I wear. My mother called it the Dyke Donna doll. (Mom was very pro-gay and lesbian, so she always felt very happy using words like "dyke.") The doll wore a stripey red shirt like a circus performer, along with real, removable, bright red booties made of felt, and extravagantly long curling eyelashes that my mother drew in by hand, quite lovingly. It had big red apple blush-marks on its cheeks, like Pinocchio as I have always seen him drawn. It stood a discomfiting three feet tall (I myself am only five feet two). My mother gave it to me as her gift, to keep in my tiny apartment. I had to keep it under my bed because I couldnt bear to see it sitting in my chair. But I felt like I was hiding a child away there, without food or anyone to talk to.

Starting in her early 20s, my mother had made a whole series of dolls and wooden soldiers and little straw figurines and puppets, and I believe that one of them was me. A few years after the Dyke Donna doll appeared, my arms broke. (This, also, is true.) I dont mean that my arm bones brokeIve never had a broken bonebut that my arms capacity as limbs, their functionality and coherence, suddenly ended.

It was as though my hands had simply stopped being hands. They began to hurt so badly that I didn't want to do anything with them, because that only made them hurt more.

I was a writer. I am a writer. And it hurt to write, just like anything else people do with their hands, which basically destroyed me. But forget about me" and my twee artiness and ridiculous ego please just forget, reader!because what Im really afraid of telling you about, really, really afraid, is the pain. The pain from that time, when it began, thirteen years ago, still seems magical to me, as though it could happen again at any moment. Just by thinking about it.

As I writewith voice dictation software, the only way I can from now onits almost happening again. I couldnt lie about how scared I am of this, it would make me vomit. My hands start to feel as though theyre rolling in rocks

A mysterious tension in my arms, like a salt battery beginning to work.

It hurt, that March it started, in my upper back, shoulders, forearms, wrists, hands and neck. Sometimes even my head, by means of a process I couldnt begin to comprehend. Sometimes it burned, as though hot metal were in my shoulders. The hands were the worst, with knives sticking in the palms. I had a sensation of spears through the wrists. Had I suddenly become a Christian martyr? But the pain wasnt even agreeably sexual, as it might have been if Id turned into Saint Sebastian. It was impossible to aestheticize it withoutbegging your pardon throwing up. The backs of my hands felt as though they were being repeatedly forced to move through a basin full of tiny, crushed metal balls, like in some Star Trek punishment from a newly-contacted planet.

This happened suddenly. I was having sex with a married womanwell, a woman married to another woman, and occupied as well with two small childrenwhen my attack occurred.

All right, I wasnt in the very act of having sex with her when it happenedGod does not work in such linear-narrative ways. And, if youre wondering why my attack occurred, why God caused it, they werent precisely, absolutely marriedin point of fact, they had an open relationship. But almostI was almost in the very moment of having sex with her, and they were very nearly married, except that they had sex with other people. I dont even believe in a punitive God. I dont even believe that things happen for a reason!

But it happened. And I couldnt tell why. It was around Purim, and everything in my life had stopped making sense. I went to a lecture at Makor, a conventional yet profound and funky Jewish centerI live in New York City, where we have such thingscalled Stop Making SensePurims Radical Message.

It turned out to be a sort of class, led by a strangely left-leaning Orthodox rabbi. I remember that I couldnt raise my hands in the class because it hurt. The pain had begun just that week. I was trying not to worry about it too much, although I had a peculiar presentiment that my life had changed. I asked the young guy sitting next me to raise his hand for me when I wanted to talk. I flirted with a nice woman in the next row who turned out to be from my neighborhood, beautiful Park Slope, Brooklyn. The rabbi was talking about how every Jew was required to get so drunk on Purim that they couldnt tell Mordecai, the one who saved us all in this story, from Haman, the one who tried to exterminate us.

Now, Purim has always been my favorite Jewish holiday because it is a holiday about catastropheonly the Jews would be crazy and brave enough to have a holiday about catastrophe, tragedy, trauma itself. On Purim you were supposed to dress in costume, get drunk off your assthe Orthodox guy was only stating basic Jewish law to usand act psychotic, because you were so freaked out that some people had long ago tried to kill you.