The doctors said there were several options this time. We could do nothing and my father would die in a few weeks. He could undergo chemotherapy, and if it worked it would give him another few months. They could give him radiation treatment, but the chances were that that would hurt more than it would help. Or they could operate and remove his tongue and his larynx. It was a complicated surgery that would take more than 10 hours, and, considering my father’s advanced age, the doctors didn’t think it was a viable option. But my dad liked the idea. “At my age, I don’t need a tongue anymore, just eyes in my head and a heart that beats,” he told the young oncologist. “The worst that can happen is that instead of telling you how pretty you are, I’ll write it down.”

The doctor blushed. “It’s not just the speech, it’s the trauma of the operation,” she said. “It’s the suffering and the rehabilitation if you survive it. We’re talking here about an enormous blow to your quality of life.”

“I love life,” my dad gave her his obstinate smile. “If the quality is good, then great. If not, then not. I’m not picky.”

In the taxi on our way back from the hospital my dad held my hand as if I were 5 years old again and we were about to cross a busy street. He was talking excitedly about the various treatment options, like an entrepreneur discussing new business opportunities. My dad is a businessman. Not a tycoon in a three-piece suit, just a regular guy who likes to buy and sell, and, if he can’t buy or sell, he’s ready to lease or rent. For him business is a way to meet people, to communicate, to get a little action going. Just let him buy a pack of cigarettes at some kiosk, and within 10 minutes he’s talking to the guy behind the counter about a possible partnership. “We’re really in an ideal situation here,” he said, totally seriously, as he stroked my hand. “I love making decisions when things are at rock bottom. And the situation is such dreck now that I can only come out ahead: With the chemo, I’ll die in no time at all; with the radiation, I’ll get gangrene of the jaw; and everyone’s sure I won’t survive the operation because I’m 84. You know how many plots of land I bought like that? When the owner doesn’t want to sell, and I don’t have a penny in my pocket?”

“I know,” I said. And I really do.

When I was 7, we moved. Our old apartment had been on the same street, and we’d all loved it, but my dad insisted that we move to a larger place. During World War II, my dad, his parents, and some other people hid in a hole in the ground in a Polish town for almost 600 days. The hole was so small that they couldn’t stand or lie down in it, only sit. When the Russians liberated the area, they had to carry my father and my grandparents out, because they couldn’t move on their own. Their muscles had atrophied. That time he spent in the hole had made him sensitive about privacy. The fact that my brother, sister, and I were growing up in the same room drove him crazy. He wanted us to move to an apartment where we would all have our own rooms. We kids actually liked sharing a bedroom, but when my dad makes up his mind, there’s no changing it.

One Saturday a few weeks before we were supposed to leave our old apartment, which he’d already sold, my dad took us to see our new place. We all showered and put on our nicest clothes, even though we knew we weren’t going to see anyone there. But still, it isn’t every day that you move to a new apartment.

Though the building was finished, no one lived in it yet. After dad made sure we were all in the elevator, he pressed the button for the fifth floor. That building was one of the only ones in the neighborhood that had an elevator, and the short ride itself thrilled us. Dad opened the reinforced steel door to the new apartment and began to show us the rooms. First the kids’ rooms, then the master bedroom, and finally the living room and the huge balcony. The view was amazing and all of us, especially my dad, were enchanted by the magical palace that would be our new home.

“Have you ever seen such a view?” he hugged my mom and pointed to the green hill visible from the living room window.

“No,” my mom replied unenthusiastically.

“Then why the sour look?” my dad asked.

“Because there’s no floor,” my mom whispered and looked down at the dirt and exposed metal pipes under our feet. Only then did I look down and see, along with my brother and sister, what my mother saw. I mean, we’d all seen earlier that there was no floor, but somehow, with all my dad’s excitement and enthusiasm, we hadn’t paid much attention to that fact. My dad looked down now too.

“Sorry,” he said. “There was no money left.”

“After we move, I’ll have to wash the floor,” my mom said in her most ordinary voice. “I know how to wash tiles, not sand.”

“You’re right,” my dad said and tried to hug her.

“The fact that I’m right won’t help me clean the house,” she said.

“OK, OK,” my dad said. “If you stop talking about it and give me a minute’s quiet, I’ll think of something. You know that, right?” My mother nodded unconvincingly. The elevator ride down was less happy.

When we moved into the new apartment a few weeks later, the floors were completely covered in ceramic tiles, a different color in each room. In the socialist Israel of the early 1970s, there was only one kind of tile—the color of sesame—and the colored floors in our apartment—reds, blacks, and browns—was different from anything we’d ever seen.

“You see?” my dad kissed my mother on the forehead proudly. “I told you I’d think of something.”

Only a month later did we discover exactly what he’d thought of. I was alone at home taking a shower that day when a gray-haired man wearing a white button-down shirt came into the bathroom with a young couple. “These are our Volcano Red tiles. Direct from Italy,” he said, pointing to the floor. The woman was the first to notice me, naked and soaped up, staring at them. The three of them quickly apologized and left the bathroom.

That evening at dinner, when I told everyone what had happened, my dad revealed his secret. Since he hadn’t had the money to pay for floor tiles, he’d made a deal with the ceramics company: They would give us the tiles for free, and my dad would let them use our place as a model apartment.

The taxi had already reached my parents’ building, and when we got out, my dad was still holding my hand. “This is exactly how I like to make decisions, when there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain,” he repeated. When we opened the apartment door, we were greeted by a pleasant, familiar smell, hundreds of colored floor tiles, and a single powerful hope. Who knows? Maybe this time, too, life and my father will surprise us with another unexpected deal.

Translated by Sondra Silverston

The Hebrew phrase seudat-hodayah—“thanksgiving feast”—has inserted itself into the lexicon of both cancer doctors and patients here over the past seven or eight years. A seudat-hodayah is a cancer survivor’s celebration of having beaten the disease. I am invited to participate in them not only in November but throughout the year.

My first invitation was hand-delivered by a hulking disciple of a 66-year-old grand master of a Hasidic dynasty. Only a week earlier, I had finished treating the sage with cranial-radiation therapy for an aggressive brain tumor. Although I make very few house calls, I quickly resolved to adopt a new rule of thumb: When summoned by the consigliere of a rabbinical godfather, best not to refuse.

Alighting from the limousine sent to fetch me, I was surprised to discover that we had arrived not at the rabbi’s home but rather at a nearby synagogue. I was escorted to a podium, looking out over a sea of black. Nearly 500 admiring followers dressed in formal topcoats and fedoras had gathered in a cavernous sanctuary in the city of Bnai Brak to count their blessings and salute “the man who had saved their spiritual leader.” That was presumed to be me. I don’t remember precisely what I said during my impromptu remarks, but I do recall that I did not emphasize that the rabbi was unlikely to survive for more than one year. Instead, I elected to take part in their joy and to revel in my brief tenure as a rock star.

My second invitation to a thanksgiving feast arrived 10 months later. On this occasion, the patient himself requested that I join in celebrating the one-year anniversary of his completion of thoracic irradiation for lung cancer. This patient, a self-described flower child, boasted that he’d first had to survive Woodstock before he could survive lung cancer. Once again, the seudat-hodayah emphasized a sincere appreciation for both the care provided and the patient’s benefits in quantity and quality of life. The featured activity at that particular thanksgiving feast involved smoking expensive blends of marijuana (the nonmedical variety) and sharing an array of decorative bongs. I took a less active role at this celebration.

Nowadays, I am invited to a seudat-hodayah roughly every six weeks. The actual number is irrelevant, but what is reassuring is that I attend more thanksgiving celebrations for my patients than funerals. Festivities often include singing folk songs or a poetry reading along with the consumption of abundant quantities of ethnocentric comfort food: noodle kugel in homes that trace their ancestry to obscure Ashkenazic hamlets of Eastern Europe, couscous among families with a Sephardic or Mizrahi heritage. The overriding theme at all these affairs is gratitude.

Clearly, the seudat-hodayah is hip in Israel. The question most frequently asked by caregivers who wish to organize such a party is not whether to do it but when to do it. Indeed, a large number of family members want me to countenance, or even bless the propriety of embarking on such festivities at the desired juncture. In order to better answer these inquiries, I set out to identify the source of the seudat-hodayah in Jewish tradition.

If consensus exists, the origin of the custom may be found in Genesis: “And Abraham held a great feast on the day Isaac was weaned.” But there is controversy embedded in the scriptural passage. Was Abraham celebrating a specific developmental milestone (that is, the literal end of Sara breastfeeding Isaac), or was something more conceptual going on? In the ancient world, infant mortality was presumably sky high. So, could it be that weaning was actually a surrogate for Isaac’s authenticated survival of the only other major event that he experienced (that is, circumcision)? Applied to oncology patients, this question becomes: Is it proper to celebrate immediately after attaining a milestone (e.g., completion of treatment), or must one wait for a period of time to be certain that there is cause for celebration (e.g., the classical five-year-survival endpoint)?

Having considered that question on multiple occasions, for me the answer is now clear. Feasts of thanksgiving—little “t” or upper case—can be either an outgrowth of gratitude, as in emerging Israeli custom, or can inculcate gratitude, as with the American holiday. It is unfortunate that gratitude is in such short supply in modern societies, given its status as a prerequisite toward the attainment of happiness. For me, the correct time for patients to celebrate in thanksgiving has nothing to do with reaching conventional watermarks for oncologic cure but everything to do with feeling the need to express that sublime state of appreciation that we call gratitude.

To this day, even my closest friends struggle to understand why I would select a profession that orients itself around people diagnosed with malignant disease. But without these heroic patients, I would be nothing less than an ingrate. Repeatedly, cancer patients have taught me to value the intangibles that I tend to take for granted, especially good friends and good health. On this year’s Thanksgiving—the American one, with a capital T—between the football games, the jokes about Uncle Harvey, and the fight over the last piece of pie, may we remind ourselves of the wealth of things that we have to be thankful for in our lives.

Aesthetically speaking, of course, they’re hideous, by far the ugliest and most ungainly of all body parts, and that’s a collection that includes crinkly elbows, pinched anuses, dank armpits. It’s a low, low bar, to be sure, but no other part on us humans, male or female, comes close to testicles. I assure you Apple would never design them that way; iPackages would be sleek, aerodynamic, integrated into the main body case, and made from gleaming titanium; sure, they’d have lousy battery life, but you wouldn’t have to cover them up in shame your whole life.

Practically speaking, testicles are a hassle, and that’s not even taking into consideration the testosterone they produce, which seems to cause so much trouble in the world. I suppose it’s fitting that the part of our body most directly responsible for war and superhero movies and Ashton Kutcher should be so ludicrous in appearance.

So, why mention this now? Because although I’ve tolerated them well enough until this point, I turned 41 a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been considering, ever since, just cutting them off.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate them. They’ve given me two beautiful sons, and though I don’t for a moment think my wife married me only for my testicles, it’s not inconceivable that a lack of them might have negatively affected her decision to spend her life with me. But that, as they say, was then; we’re not going to have more children, and so, as I stood in the shower the morning of my 41st birthday—the race of my life half-run, less no doubt ahead of me than behind, one foot in the grave and the other on a slippery patch of ice—I looked down and thought, Why? Why keep them? All they’re good for now is cancer, which, I’m sure, they’re busy at already. At best they’ll continue to drop lower and lower each year, becoming ever uglier, ever more laughable until they’re slapping around my knees and cease operating at all—dead, useless, like the old Underwood typewriter I keep in my office, keys jammed, ribbon missing. And that’s the best-case scenario.

The best offense is a good defense, and I can’t figure out the slightest reason to schlep these preposterous things around for another 30 years, waiting for them to kill me. I feel like I’m carrying around a pair of terrorists in my pants. I glance back at every dog that passes me on the street, reminded by every un-neutered beast of the ridiculousness of our own similar genitalia and jealous of every one that’s been castrated. Well, poochie, I think to myself as he prances by, that’s one less thing to worry about. Two, actually.

The friends I share this idea with react as you might expect—they think I’m being extreme. But I feel I’m being practical—frankly, what could be riskier than leaving the damn things on?

My wife suggests it’s just a fear of aging, and there’s something to be said for that. I drink my Liquid Greens every morning, I ride my bicycle, I take raw vitamins and if I have bacon on Monday, that’s it for the next seven days. I’ll have a cigarette or two at a party, that’s all, and I limit my alcohol intake as best I can. But none of this is done in the desperate pursuit of youth; the truth is, I don’t have a fear of aging. I have a fear of dying. There’s a difference.

My shrink suggests this has to do with my finishing my novel; that 41 is still young, and that my obsessing about death is simply a manifestation of guilt—guilt over successfully finishing the book, of selling it to my publisher, of being (ugh) happy. And so, says the good doctor, I’m torturing myself with thoughts of death. “Besides,” he adds as the session draws to a close, “I’m 65. Go cry to someone else about dying.”

He might have a point. Anxious to get to work on something new, I’ve taken out an old story of mine, about a man who does just that—physically tortures himself. His family and friends beg him off it, tell him he’s going to get seriously hurt, that they love him and don’t want to see him permanently injured or worse. But what can the poor man do? It’s the only thing that gives him any relief from the troublesome joy that he finds, to his surprise and dismay, filling his middle-aged heart.

Shalom Auslander‘s novel Hope: A Tragedy will be published next year by Riverhead Books.

In telling the story of the decade he spent living in Paris, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Zweig offers an original take on a classic American myth—the myth of Paris, that sensual, liberated city where good Americans are said to go when they die. At the same time, Zweig probes behind the romance of Paris to examine the dark motives that led him—the solitary child of a Brooklyn Jewish family, raised in the shadow of the Holocaust—to reinvent himself so thoroughly as a Parisian. From the ages of 20 to 30, Paris was his “visible identity,” but his “bones,” Zweig suggests, were always Brighton Beach: “As a foreigner [in France], I felt my connections to others were flimsy, unserious. I could choose to set aside this labored character who spoke French, and lapse into my secret otherness as a boy from Brooklyn, living near that other beach, Brighton Beach, where the language that escaped me wasn’t Italian or French but Yiddish.”

Lambert Strether, the hero of Henry James’ The Ambassadors and the archetypal American in Paris, summed up the city’s lesson in a famous phrase: “Live all you can! It’s a mistake not to.” From the very first pages of Departures, it is clear that Zweig has taken this advice to heart—and that for him, as for so many American before and since, “live” is really a euphemism for another four-letter word. “I don’t remember how I met Claire for the second time,” the book begins, but Zweig does remember how “for weeks after that, we made love almost anywhere we could get our clothes off. … When we made love, Claire would seem to bend into a depth, holding her breath and reaching, and then, with a helpless gulp, find what she had been reaching for, and expand.” Years earlier, Claire’s older sister Arlette had been his first lover in Paris; in between he was married to Michele, a Communist painter. And then there is Anna, a new widow, who comes to Zweig for sexual solace: “We were castaways adrift on a raft of coarse white sheets. We hadn’t chosen each other, but our ship had gone down, and here we were trying to salvage ourselves. Anna buoyed me up with her pure, nervous will. ‘I’m already dead, Paul,’ she would say. ‘I’m not here, not alive.’ ”

It’s no good denying that this way of writing about sex, which dominates the first third of Departures, now feels rather embarrassing—at once mannered and awkward, prurient and religiose. In his foreword, Gopnik aptly compares Zweig with John Updike, another writer born in the 1930s who made a cold poetry out of sex. Both grew up in a culture still vestigially Victorian, only to find that the wide-open sexual regime of the bohemian 1950s and 1960s was a new, perpetually intoxicating world.

Today, when sex has no secrets even to most teenagers, we have much less patience for Zweig’s kind of sublime swooning: “She lived for that grateful gulp at the bottom of her flesh; and I adored her.” What is more striking is the way Zweig’s fascination with sex seems to grant him no access at all to the inwardness of his partners. Arlette, Claire, and Michele have no real life on the page; they are stylish, seductive abstractions, more like figures in an Antonioni movie than like characters in a novel, or people one might know in real life. “You were there, Arlette, in all your forbidding deliberation, like a nun,” he writes, with the kind of rhetorical flourish that seems more natural in French than in English. “I could see you clearly unbuttoning your plaid dress and folding it on the chair in my room; I could see you unhook your brassiere, like Jeanne d’Arc preparing for the flames.”

The first section of Departures focuses on Zweig’s final weeks in Europe as he prepares to end his 10-year sojourn and return to America (where he would become a professor at Columbia and then Queens College). The man we meet in these pages is Zweig’s evolved persona, the product of a decade of self-invention—a libertine intellectual, an expatriate who has no roots and casts no shadow. It is telling, then, that the main drama of this section is Zweig’s struggle with a sudden, unprecedented bout of impotence, which destroys his relationship with the gulping Claire. “I was … a sexual fool, a partial man. My personality had become unraveled.”

Clearly, the impending end of Zweig’s exile is connected to the disappearance of his freewheeling potency. It is as though the self he created in Paris has burst like a bubble, revealing how insubstantial it was in the first place. “I myself had become strange: a Gallic ghost walking the streets of Paris, with my fraudulent but accurate French,” Zweig writes. Indeed, he comes to feel that the very ease with which he mastered French is suspicious, the sign of an essential rootlessness. “You speak French so well, it is uncanny, even unhealthy,” says his friend Witold Gombrowicz, the great Polish novelist. “It seems to me that you are a modern-day wandering Jew, someone who doesn’t have a home, and doesn’t want one.”

In the second section of Departures, Zweig begins his story again, hoping to understand the origins of his own ghostliness. “I was brought up as a child of silence,” he writes, a silence intimately connected to Jewishness and to the Holocaust, which was taking place across the ocean while he grew up on Coney Island. “The enormous killing of the war seemed to have no content in my neighborhood of brick tenements and aging three-family houses,” Zweig remembers:

they never talked about the Holocaust. In my house, it was present as a silent bewilderment, and a struggle to be cheerful. I remember it, I suppose, as a lack of light in the various apartments we lived in, or as a sagging in my grandmother’s face. To be a Jew, when I was a boy, was to be unhappy, unspeaking; it was to live within an invisible limit.

Is it any wonder that such a childhood should produce a man impatient of all limits, who taught himself to speak freely in another language? What matters is less the factual accuracy of Zweig’s recollections—he notes that he remembers nothing about large swaths of his childhood, including the birth of his younger sister—than the psychological truth his memories are trying to tell him. (Departures is a book written under the sign of Freud, and Zweig is clearly a veteran analysand: When impotence strikes, he turns not to a doctor but to a therapist, who blames his Oedipus complex.)

One of his strongest early memories, from the age of 3 of 4, is of wandering off on the beach by himself and feeling no fear: “Was I lost? I didn’t think so. I was happy, alone.” His life in Paris, Zweig suggests, was another way of being happy and alone, unencumbered by possessions or relationships: “The deeper I slipped into French … the more certainly I knew, in some chamber of my heart, that my bags were packed.” It is as though Zweig were compelling himself to prepare for, or atone for, the refugee’s life of uncertainty and expulsion that was led by so many Jews in the 20th century.

Indeed, the contrast between his own idyllic life as an American Jew in Paris and the deaths of so many Jews in the same city just a decade earlier, is a constant, largely unspoken theme in Zweig’s French memories. It helps to explain the adventure that dominates the later part of Departures: Zweig’s reckless, uninformed embrace of Communism, which led him to become an underground supporter of the FLN, the terrorist group then seeking Algeria’s independence from France. When Zweig opens his apartment to Daniel, an FLN agent on the run from the police, he is clearly trying to reenact the not-so-distant days of the Occupation, when Jews and resistance fighters hid from the Nazis. It is a way of casting off the safety of his American identity and passport, of reclaiming the danger and ephemerality that Zweig associates with Jewishness: “I thought of Trotsky, the Russian Jew, who had made a silence of his past. … I too was abstract, although I lived only on the edge of action, a voyeur.” Nor was he the only one engaged in such psychic role-playing. There were seven people in his cell of FLN sympathizers, Zweig writes, and “the odd thing is that we were all Jews, all seven of us.”

In the end, Zweig did return to America, and to a conventional career as a writer and teacher. None of that experience figures in Departures, however. Instead, the book concludes with a brief, shocking postscript, in which Zweig recounts the diagnosis of cancer that he received in his early forties, and the struggle with sickness and dread that dominated his last years. Working under a maddeningly indeterminate death sentence, Zweig comes to feel that the writer’s dream of posterity is just that, a dream. “I saw that a writer’s immortality exists in the moment of conception, in which language has seized hold of him. … A work is not a life, but writing is living, and now especially I wanted to live with all my might.” In the pages of Departures, he still does.

• The Arab world’s opinion of President Obama has decreased sharply in the past year, according to a new Saban Center poll. [Laura Rozen]

• Why Israel was not behind the attempt on Ahmadinejad’s life: An argument for the Iranian president’s dialectical utility. [JPost]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Christopher Hitchens writes about his cancer and chemotherapy. [VF]

• The tastefully named Marc Jacobs is designing a new plus-size line, leading Margarita Korol to hope that “zaftig is the new black.” [Jewcy]

• James Besser reads the tea leaves and predicts that the American Jewish Congress truly is on its way out. [Political Insider]

Looking to lower your blood pressure? Onion News Network has the answer:

Overcome Stress By Visualizing It As A Greedy, Hook-Nosed Race Of Creatures

• As House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) readies a book tour, a colleague predicts, “He’ll be the first Jewish Republican something.” Please don’t hesitate to suggest various somethings in the comments. [Politico]

• Hamas scion turned Christian turned Israeli spy turned California resident Mosab Hassan Yousef was granted asylum in America. [JPost]

• This American Life calls it quits after running out of vestiges of upper-middle-class American life to chronicle. Note the source, please. [The Onion]

• Eli Valley’s Stuart the Turtle flies to Israel. Chaos and anti-Semitism ensue. [Forward]

• Lower East Side Torah store Zelig Blumenthal appears to have closed. See some amazing pictures of this relic of another world. [The Lo-Down]

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-New York) makes an awesome play at Nationals Park during the annual Congressional Baseball Game, landing him on SportsCenter.

• An overview of Tel Aviv’s eclectic, advanced dining scene. [WP]

• In New York City tomorrow night? Tablet Magazine columnist Josh Lambert is moderating a pre-Shabbat discussion with novelists Gary Shteyngart and Amy Sohn at the 92nd Street Y’s Tribeca branch. [92Y Tribeca]

• A good profile of T. Alan Hurwitz, who is the first Jewish president of Gallaudet University, the school for deaf and hard-of-hearing students in Washington, D.C. [Forward]

• Holocaust survivors who subsequently moved to Israel have a cancer rate 17 percent higher than that of European-born Jews who left before or during World War II. [Reuters/The Province]

• In Belgrade, Serbia, there is a campaign afoot to make a monument out of a Modernist 1930s fairground turned Nazi concentration camp (where over 7,000 Serbian Jews were murdered) turned seedy nightlife district. [NYT T Magazine]

Tiger Woods returned to golf today. As of this writing, he completed the front nine of the Masters’s opening round at -3, a five-way tie for third place. After all that has happened, it’s at least worth remembering why so many people care about him in the first place.

But now, as a regular visitor to Israel, I see a different country, especially in Tel Aviv, a city that has pioneered a free-flowing hedonistic lifestyle that promotes free expression in art and fashion. The campus of Tel Aviv University offers a parade of inked bodies. Which is partly why, though I’m not an Israeli, I decided to join Israel’s tattooed ranks during a visit this summer. But, unlike the bulk of Tel Aviv’s inked masses, I’d recently survived a harrowing ordeal, and a tattoo seemed as good a way as any to mark it.

The Jewish taboo against tattooing is culled from a verse in Leviticus: “You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves: I am the Lord.” There is a great deal of additional rabbinical commentary supporting this prohibition, including the notion that the human body is created in the image of God and, thus, to tamper with it is a kind of blasphemy. In recent times, the taboo has become more rooted in contemporary history than in biblical injunction—linked as it is to memory of the Holocaust. The sight of survivors’ tattoos traumatized a nation and a people, as it should have. A friend of mine whose grandparents perished in Auschwitz nearly threw his oldest son out of the house on their kibbutz when the son came home with a tattoo.

After making an appointment at Kipod on King George and Allenby Streets, I had to choose a design. Until I entered the tattoo studio, I had little sense of the final marking. But I knew where I wanted it to be (my upper right shoulder), and I knew that I wanted something that had a somewhat generic elegance to it, since it and I would grow old together.

I came equipped with pictures of lotuses and roses, different shapes and colors, but it wasn’t until I sat down in the studio and looked through the picture books that I decided on a final design: a rose with a sense of movement that makes it look like it is budding right on my back. And I chose the color black; Tel Aviv women may not dress in black from head to toe, but me and my fellow New Yorkers are persistently robed in it, and so it seemed to make sense to me to have my tattoo match the rest of my wardrobe.

The operative word in the previous sentence, though, is “chose.” As it turns out, my new rose is the third tattoo on my body—but the only one I asked for. Sixteen years ago, I was diagnosed with treatable breast cancer, and I had to go through a six-month radiation treatment. Prior to this treatment, the doctors outlined the area to be radiated with two tiny tattoos. Some women get these removed after their treatment, though it’s advisable to keep them in case you have a recurrence so that a doctor will see these telltale signs when considering further treatment.

Sometimes, I stare in the mirror and try to smudge away the unsmudgeable—these navy blue dots that appear intermixed with my natural body markings. These tattoos were not by choice; they mark an attack on my body and on my life by a deadly disease. As fixtures on my chest, they are reminders of the disease and of my triumph over it; but either way, they are reminders of a time in my life when I was out of control.

My new tattoo is something I did for me. It has no political or religious significance for me, nor does it show disrespect for my body, as the Leviticus passage implies. Rather it is a sign of respect for my body—and for me—to create a unique design on my skin that is not harmful. It doesn’t connote something dark or destructive. It’s about my own personal choice, making a decision for which I was fully in control. It’s playful and distinctive, like the city where I had it done, born from the past but not wedded to it, influenced by its own people’s history but not fated to relive it.

Jo-Ann Mort writes frequently about Israel for a variety of publications.

Funny People opens this Friday. You can watch the full-length trailer here.

Busting a Kishka [The Front Row]
What Makes Funny People Tick [Jewish Journal]