Gary Shteyngart’s Tragicomedy of the Penis in “The Guy Who Got Cut Wrong”

Gary Shteyngart was just seven years old when his family emigrated from the Soviet Union and settled in Queens. He remembers the transition as one of “leaving black-and-white for pure Technicolor.” Circumcisions weren’t performed in the Soviet Union, and, soon after the family’s arrival in the U.S., his father encountered a man going door to door, persuading newly arrived immigrants to circumcise their kids. And so, as part of the family’s project of fitting into their new country, Shteyngart went under the knife.

He awoke in pain, and with an anatomical change that wasn’t exactly the one that had been planned. In Dana Ben-Ari’s short film, Shteyngart describes the details with humor, pathos, and the help of a cucumber. While his air is mostly comic, his account touches on deeper matters, from the confusion and fear that attended the procedure and its aftermath to the long shadow it cast over his relationships and self-confidence, especially in his youth. “We treat penises as a joke,” he says, but his story is a serious one, about living with physical pain and the loneliness of feeling different. “This country broke my penis,” he says, “but it could not break my spirit.”