Cancelling My Grandfather’s Nose
"Sometimes a cancel-worthy depiction can be hurtful enough to make you want to cancel yourself."
When I was in grad school, I enrolled in a World Story class, taught by a famous author and NPR literary guru. He was a lovely man with a crown of sweeping gray laurels for hair.
Also, the syllabus looked pretty cool.
Except that we started with an entire month of Chekhov’s short stories because apparently he’s the father of the modern short story.
I like Chekhov, ok. I just got sick of his depictions of Jews. Particularly, Jewish women.
Every other story had a ‘Jewess’: an ugly, undesirable Jewish woman on the fringes, someone no one wanted around, someone with a hooked nose and a space in her teeth and a hag-like quality. The opposite of beautiful. Inarticulate, repellent, undesirable.
The Jewess.
It just so happens that my dad is Jewish. My maiden name was Jewish.
I have a space in my teeth and a long, curved nose that I inherited from my father’s father.
It’s common knowledge that Nazi propaganda had a small obsession with noses. Jewish noses take the shape of a six according to Goebbels. They don’t have the lovely Swiss-Alp slope of the Anglo-Saxon nose. They are foreign and twisted.
The first time I read a characterization like Chekhov’s, I sort of chuckled, because it’s of its time, it’s provincial in its own right, and kind of silly. It’s hardly Goebbels. But then I read it over and over again and it gets tired. Then other people in the class start noticing my Jewish name and they start looking at my nose and my hair and I just feel a bit like, “FUCK OFF CHEKHOV! This is now awkward!”
The thing with anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic depictions in literature is that they can be found everywhere. Not just in American literature, or European literature, but around the world.
Everywhere.
Really, it’s like looking for a Toyota Corolla in a mall parking lot. Once you start, you can’t stop seeing them.
We went from Chekhov’s Jewess to Maupassant to Hemingway and so on. The patterns were always there: Jewish men are shady, scheming, social climbers; Jewish women are ugly and they smell.
The archetype was nothing new to me.
Nor was it new when I was the one who had to teach works with these badly represented Jewish characters. Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby is the sketchy, grotesque bootlegger. He’s the only Jew in the book.
It never occurred to me to want to cancel Gatsby because Wolfsheim is an offensive character. I guess I was too busy enjoying the novel as a whole – its’ wild, unprecedented thematic reach into American identity, its’ sweeping, evocative prose, its’ auditory landscape.
I was teaching it back before all this cancellation stuff was popular, so maybe I’d feel different now. I don’t know.
But I do understand why some people want to cancel certain books or authors.
Cancelling is a way of un-endorsing. It’s a way of saying ‘we don’t think you should get to represent us this way’ or ‘this particular message about these particular people is destructive.’
Representation matters because, well, people read books. They watch movies. They intuit ideas about themselves and others as a result.
In a weird twist, sometimes a cancel-worthy depiction can be hurtful enough to make you want to cancel yourself.
Or, some part of yourself.
I was thirteen when I wanted to cancel my nose.
It’s strange when I think about it. We’ve got one relative on the Italian side with light hair and blue eyes. One relative. But somehow, all of my siblings ended up with light hair and blue eyes, even though neither of my parents have those features.
But not me. I have thick, dark, curly hair. And I have my grandfather’s nose.
When he was a prisoner of war during World War II, all identification in the US Army said ‘Protestant’ for religion in order to protect Jewish soldiers. But my grandpa’s surname was a common Jewish name in Germany and Austria. He worried daily about being found out and shot.
Of course, there was also the matter of my grandfather’s nose. A propaganda-trained Nazi wouldn’t have much difficulty spotting it. It could give him away.
Thankfully, that didn’t happen. He got to go home to New York.
That’s where I grew up, on Long Island, where almost everyone is Italian, Jewish, Irish, or some combination. I hit two out of the three: Jewish dad, Italian mom. On Long Island, Jewish names, Jewish features, and Jewish foods are all very common. You’d think that would make it less likely to be teased for your appearance.
Not so.
I was early to puberty, but my body didn’t really understand which parts were supposed to grow and in what order. My nose and my hair grew first. When I was twelve, the kids at school started to tease me.
When I was thirteen, it was my math teacher. If you’re reading this, Mr Chero, you’re still an asshole. I was the one that wrote that on your car in the snow.
He went through the roll on the first day. When he got to my surname, Schreck, he laughed. Then he looked at me. In front of a classroom of 25 kids, half of which were boys, and half of those, boys I wanted to ask me to a school dance, he said:
‘Hey Schreck, nice Jewish schnozz.’
As far as I was concerned, he had marked me. I was the ugly girl in the class for the rest of the year.
I was mortified. He’d confirmed all of my fears.
That evening when my father came home from work and sat down in his armchair with his tray-table dinner, I parked beside him on the sofa and announced that I had a question.
He grunted, which meant go ahead but the answer is probably “no.”
“Dad,” I said. “I don’t need braces. I’m the only one that doesn’t. Can I have a nose job instead? I hate my nose. It’s ugly.”
Fathers and future fathers out there, a little word of advice. If your teenage child asks for plastic surgery citing ‘ugliness’ as the reason, you should probably say no.
My father did not look up from his meal nor did he look away from Jeopardy.
‘If you want, you can have a nose job. I was already wondering if you needed one.’
I should have been relieved. I should have been ecstatic, like he’d just said I could pierce my ears again.
But his response made it worse. A nose job became even more necessary. If my father thought I needed one, if my father thought my face needed fixing, well. Then it did.
My parents did some research. They found a nice Jewish plastic surgeon that had been de-Jewing noses for years. My mom scheduled an appointment. I remember I was so scared, nervous, and excited. We waited in the office for a good while and then the surgeon called me in.
I examined his face: symmetrical, round eyes, a reasonably neutral nose, a moustache. If he’d done surgery on himself, he did a good job.
We rushed through small talk that I don’t remember and then he had me walk over to a scanner by his desk. He took some photos of my face. I tried to stand up tall so that my nose looked less droopy and more like an easier assignment for him. He didn’t seem to notice. He sat down and clicked a mouse and squinted very hard at the screen for a few moments.
Here, he said. Come over here.
I walked behind his desk and I saw a photograph of my profile on the computer. Only it wasn’t my face. He’d altered the shape of my nose so that it was petite and rounded at the tip.
It looked terrible. I looked like a pug. I looked like Joan Rivers. I looked like a completely different person. An alien.
What do you think? he asked.
I started laughing hysterically. But it was not at the Joan Rivers version of myself.
You see, when the plastic surgeon asked me to step behind his desk, I had a full view of a wall I hadn’t noticed before. Including the artwork.
It turned out that hanging on the wall was an enormous, and I mean, ENORMOUS, pair of plaster breasts. Faceless, headless, GIGANTIC breasts. Several feet tall.
I was laughing at the huge breasts. So my mother elbowed me in the ribs.
You’re happy, the doctor said. You like the nose?
I couldn’t stop laughing. If I looked up in one direction there was the Grand Tetons and if I looked in another, there was a terrifying gollum version of myself on the computer.
My mother pulled me into the hallway to ask what had gotten into me.
Breasts, I said. Those breasts!
My mother sighed. Can’t you just grow up? This is serious.
No, I said.
In a flash of rare, preta-natural wisdom, I shook my head.
No, it is not serious, I said. It’s a joke. This whole thing.
We left the office fast.
The fact is I wasn’t going to let that creepy doctor anywhere near my face. And if this was the kind of person that performed plastic surgery on young girls, I didn’t want plastic surgery either.
I made up my mind: I was keeping my Jewish nose.
My parents thought I might change my mind. I think they hoped I would. But I didn’t. As the weeks passed, I felt a hint of agency. Power, even.
Before, this was a nose I hadn’t chosen, it was a bad stroke of luck.
But now that I had said yes to my nose, it felt like I had said yes to the challenge of a feature I wasn’t sure what to do with. I had said yes to the idea that perhaps there was another way - maybe killing it off wasn’t the only option.
On some deeper level, I said yes to myself for the first time as an insecure teenager.
It’s a decision I am proud of to this day. I’m so pleased I didn’t cancel my Jewish nose, a feature I’ve grown quite fond of as I age.
During my twenties, I visited Italy with a group of friends. One May evening, we wandered our way down the dazzling alleys of Rome to the Trevi Fountain. The sun was setting. Italian police leaned over their parked motorcycles to shout over a game of cards, cat-calling women as they passed.
When we were finally in view of the famous attraction, we could barely see it. It was surrounded by a group of tourists.
At first, I couldn’t tell where they were from. As we approached I saw that some of the men were wearing yarmulkes. Then I heard a woman rattling off to her daughter in Yiddish and then in Hebrew something about needing to toss a coin in.
They were Israelis.
There were several dozen of them, standing in the spray of the fountain and soaking up the sunlight. I watched them for a moment and then I could not tear my eyes away. They were beautiful. Their voices, their accents, the way they gesticulated when they were deciding which photograph was best, their fingers combing lines through their wavy, dark hair.
And, their noses. Maybe even especially their noses. They were stunning: bold, suggestive, lovely. Like the curved blue forms in a Matisse print.
I saw my own nose in that group on several faces.
I couldn’t believe I’d ever considered changing it. The idea seemed absolutely criminal.
Altering oneself because of a cruel cultural lie robs everyone a little bit.
Which is why I think knowing what to ‘cancel’ and what not to ‘cancel’ is important. In the West, universities, politicians, and activists are only beginning to explore these questions.
It will probably be a little bit tricky for a long time. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
Maybe it won’t always involve syllabi surgery. Perhaps Chekhov will remain the father of the modern short story. But he’s still got a Jewish problem and that’s just the truth.
Maybe we’ll make a new art of interrogating the relationship between an author’s genius and an author’s various hatreds. I don’t know. Maybe we will just cancel them.
I just hope that in the process we make a new art of embracing what not to cancel.
In my mind, this is the true triumph. To find new ways to savour and appreciate the beauty of nuanced, careful depictions of all sorts of people.
I hope we discover ways to love each other and ourselves better as a result.
Especially our Jewish noses.