Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex [Paperback]

Melvin Jules Bukiet (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 5, 2000

Whoever it was who claimed that sex was the most fun you can have without laughing hadn't encountered Neurotica--an anthology of Jewish short stories, most of which uncover the hilarity inherent in carnality. It is a stellar collection of twenty-seven tales of sexual longing and consummation and frustration--of straight and gay sex, married, unmarried, and adulterous sex, filthy, platonic, and pathetic sex, great sex, awful sex, and solo sex--by many of the masters and the freshest new voices of the Jewish-American literary tradition. Some of the stories are graphic, some ethereal, some wildly comic, some deeply tragic, but all offer a distinctively Jewish point of view on a universal pastime and preoccupation. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll--well, only you know what you'll do.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex is a first-rate collection of writings about "the people of the book, in bed," as editor Melvin Jules Bukiet observes in the book's terrifically funny introduction. ("Not only is sex unshunned by the Jewish tradition; it's often considered a positive mitzvah to have sex on Sabbath. Besides, if work is prohibited and you can't go to the movies, how else can you spend your holy time?") Neurotica includes short stories and excerpts from novels by big names such as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Jerzy Kosinski, and Woody Allen, and by promising newcomers such as Nathan Englander and Michael Lowenthal. Some familiar selections (such as an excerpt from Erica Jong's once-scandalous Fear of Flying) now appear remarkably tame. But the sexual proclivities depicted in many of these selections are quite intense and sometimes disturbing--not fit for summary on a family Web site. So keep this one away from the kids, but curl up with it under the covers. It will give you veddy interesting dreams. --Michael Joseph Gross --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Editor Bukiet (Signs and Wonders) serves up this alphabetically organized, stellar collection of Jewish writings focusing on sexual themes. Twenty-seven stories by accomplished writers delve into a range of erotic, disturbing and poignant narratives including classic coming-of-age tales, unconventional fantasies and painful stories of erotic substitutions. An ethnic flavor is intense in some pieces, marginal in others. Jewish customs, typologies and situations peculiar to the Diaspora define pieces by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Max Apple, but Bernard Malamud's story of the seduction and redemption of a Parisian artist doesn't hinge on its religious reference points. The two longest entries will be known to most readers: Harold Brodkey's "Innocence" is a spellbinding story of two Harvard students in love, valiantly striving for the young woman's first orgasm, and Cynthia Ozick's "The Pagan Rabbi" offers a complicated psychological study of a Talmudic scholar's suicide. Other standouts include Leonard Michael's "Murderers," brimming with robust and poetic sentences: "We sat on the roof like angels, derealized in brilliance. Our sneakers sucked hot slanted metal. Palms and fingers pressed to bone on nailheads." These "angels," a quartet of Brooklyn Jewish boys, climb onto a roof to watch their rabbi and his wife copulate, till one boy falls to his death. Central is the tension between Jewish identity and sexual expression, between ethics and desires, with Nathan Englander and Binnie Kirshenbaum weighing in with worthy reflections on these themes. Other contributors include Saul Bellow, Francine Prose and Woody Allen; Philip Roth is represented by a section from The Counterlife, and Erica Jong by the classic first chapter from Fear of Flying. The range of subjects and voices is impressive, and many aspects of sexuality, be they disturbing, ruthless or shocking, or loving, mournful and comical, are probed, sometimes graphically and always unapologetically. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 380 pages
• Publisher: Broadway; 1 edition (September 5, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767906500
• ISBN-13: 978-0767906500
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,659,025 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The people of the book, in bed, September 5, 2005

By 

Diane Schirf - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex (Paperback)

"Witness the people of the book, in bed." Thus editor Melvin Jules Bukiet invites the reader into the intimacies of Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex. In this collection, everyone from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer to Woody Allen and Erica Jong gets into the act of exploring sex in its many varieties-heterosexual, homosexual, incestuous, paid, humorous, poignant, intellectual, sadistic, masochistic, costumed-always from a distinctive, wry Jewish perspective. Note, though, that you don't have to be interested in erotica to appreciate Neurotica-just in good stories.

The anthology begins with a memorable story by Woody Allen, "The Whores of Mensa," an over-the-top private eye tale that cleverly and humorously reveals what many of us know but some have yet to discover-that sex is less a function of the nether regions and more one of the mind. This theme is continued and expanded in "The Courtship" from The Mind-Body Problem" by Rebecca Goldstein, in which the narrator says, "And I remember too the intensity of my pleasure, which wasn't at all physical . . . my head sang the triumphant thought: I am making love to this man . . . to Noam Himmel, the genius." Unfortunately, "The Courtship" is marred somewhat by this ending and the tone throughout, which makes it resemble less of a literary work and more of the author's personal fantasy, or what is known in fan fiction as a "Mary Sue" story.

Philip Roth adds imagination to the mix in an excerpt from The Counterlife in which a dentist suggest to his new assistant that they play dentist and assistant. She says, "Why is it so exciting when all we're pretending to be is what we are?" When his physical deficiencies win over his imagination, he plummets to the world that is, no what could be, which he cannot long survive.

No matter the theme, any anthology focused on Jewish writers is bound to include references to Germans, World War II, and the Holocaust. In "Jews Have No Business Being Enamored of Germans," Binnie Kirshenbaum's narrator confronts the Jewish self-hatred that could make a Jewish man with a "short and convenient view of history" prefer and seek out Germans and "Aryan intellectualism." Even the narrator's parents have succumbed to postmodern sense of tolerance or denial. "'Oh, none of that concerned us,' my mother waved off the Holocaust and a world war."

Michael Lowenthal takes a psychologically richer approach in "Infinity of Angles," in which a Jewish homosexual connects with a German, only to find his would-be lover identifies too closely with the persecuted and demands an unusual punishment.

While there's some humour in Neurotica, there is also mental illness. The two are combined in "Elvis, Axl, and Me" by Janice Eidus, who proves that Elvis isn't dead; he lives in The Bronx disguised as a Hasidic Jew. Mental illness appears again in "The Quality of Being a Ruby" by Cheryl Pearl Sucher, a thoroughly modern tale of a bipolar girl experiencing anxiety neurosis who picks up lovers, drops lithium, experiments with cocaine, and resists the advice of her protective father. "For Ruby, the distillation of the illness was 'Rubessence,' the perfect calm of inspired originality, the longed-for union of the desired and the real."

One of the best stories is "Taibele and Her Demon" by Isaac Bashevis Singer, who brings a fairy-tale simplicity to this complex tale of deception and love. As with any collection, there are several stories I didn't like, such as "Romancing the Yohrzeit Light" by Thane Rosenbaum, who tries too self-consciously to combine the sacred, the profane, and the silly. My favourite story was by Nathan Englander, titled "Peep Show." The troubled protagonist asks, "What is a boy raised in a world of absolutes to do when he is faced with contradictions?" The answer is, "You question. That's what you do," according to the nude rabbi his imagination has conjured. Despite the humorous and ludicrous situations in which the protagonist finds himself at the peep show, the tone of the story is strangely eerie in its reference to peep show nostalgia-a little like the tone of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Although a few stories are set in places such as France, Germany, Italy, and Israel, most take place in the United States and are by Jewish-American authors. All are from the 20th century, which is disappointing since surely erotica by Jewish writers has been around at least as long as erotica by writers from other traditions. I would like to have seen more representation from other countries and time periods.

The location and time period, however, give Neurotica a couple of themes meant to appeal to a broad audience, including assimilation and secularization. In many of these stories, the faith, traditions, and rituals of Judaism are a mystery to the characters, primarily the younger ones. Noam Himmel, the genius, is an atheist ignorant of his cultural past. At one point, his seducer says, "You have heard of the Talmud?" He says later, "Sometimes, especially on insomniac nights, I start worrying that there may be a God, and worse, that he may be Jewish." In "Romancing the Yohrzeit Light," Adam doesn't "really care to go" to that part of the world, and he allows his Swedish lover to extinguish his mother's yohrzeit light. Like Adam, many of the characters actively seek goyim as lovers. Some of the older people speak Yiddish, but the young people do not. Yet, while religious, cultural, and even social bonds may seem to be disintegrating with assimilation after World War II, Neurotica shows that there is still a literary voice that has not been silenced and that remains uniquely Jewish.

Diane L. Schirf, 5 September 2005.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A very good friendship between sex and mind, March 28, 2002

By 

Tamara (Rio de Janeiro) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex (Hardcover)

I knew it before receiving this book from my boyfriend: almost every story would deal not only with sex, but also with books and other intelectual issues. Could we expect anything different from Woody Allen? Besides of oral sex, homosexual sex and this sort of things, Neurotica contains philosophy, psiconalisis, art, literature etc. It couldn't be different. Jews are totally connected with studies and culture, and they show it always, because this aspect of their personality is much stronger than almost everything else on them.
The most interesting story was written by Thane Rosenbaum, about the Yortzeit of the main character's mother. (I don't know the original name, because I read it in portuguese.) The story is very well written and complete, revealing the talent and facility that the author has with words.
About Woody Allen's narrative, I just can say that it is SO Woody Allen, you understand? It's very easy to feel his personality on it, specially for those who have seen Deconstructing Harry.
I haven't read the whole book yet, but I'm almost finishing it. I recommend Neurotica to everyone who likes to conciliate sex and mind.

The last observation: the book should be called Jewish AMERICAN writers on sex. Everyone is american or lives in the USA; however, there are many other jewish writers around the world that could have given their rich contribution.

11 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars neurotica ? this book will keep you out of trouble., December 15, 1999

By 

israel aaroni (petach tikva, israel) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex (Hardcover)

I am not sorry to say that I liked the book and start reading it again from page 1. I am a Jewish from Israel. so neurotica is in my blood, so to speak, however I gave the book to my non-Jewish girl friend and she was smiling page upon page. after the reading, she didn't put it down by the way, she went to Amazon web site to buy one for herself. Did she like the neurotica book? quiet right - she loved it very much. and later she ask me to forgive her for turn me off in the past. i told you, this is neurotica,,, You have to read the book in order to understand me, well, do it. this book will keep you out of trouble.