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My Sweet Boy, My Goy Toy

By on September 3, 2014
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Goy Toy 2
When we weren’t fucking – or trying unsuccessfully to grade together – Chana and I often talked about religion. I’d had modern Orthodox friends in college, but I’d never dated a woman for whom Judaism was so central. Though she didn’t keep Shabbat, or go to synagogue, she lit candles every Friday night and read the Midrash on Saturdays. I was fascinated. I knew so little about my father’s family history, other than that they were Austrian Jews and most had died in the Holocaust. Chana gave me a window into a world both exotic and familiar. My infatuation with her bled into a fascination with my own Jewish heritage. But Chana never failed to remind me — with a scrupulousness that was kind, firm, and disconcertingly consistent — that her future lay with a Jewish husband.

After ten days of sleeping together, she got her period, a fact that she announced with her habitual matter-of-factness when she came over to my apartment one evening. I told her I didn’t mind if she didn’t. She grinned. The blood spattered the sheets and the bedroom walls, got on our faces and in our hair, mixed with come and sweat. I couldn’t have cared less. At least, I didn’t care until Chana told me that when she got married to her “future Jewish husband,” she’d never have sex while menstruating. Lying on the stained bedclothes, she explained Niddah to me. When I snorted derisively at the idea of abstaining for so long because of some false notion of impurity, her voice grew sharp. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Hugo. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s how I will choose to live.” I was utterly confused.

As she sensed that I was falling for her, Chana grew blunter, often to the point of teasing cruelty. She started calling me her “goy toy,” a term I loathed as much as I loved the “sweet boy” she used all too sparingly. “It’s just because you’re my hot younger Christian lover,” Chana said, “it’s really a compliment.” Except that it didn’t feel like one. It felt like an unkind way of reminding me that what we had was not only temporary but insignificant. When I responded with petulant indignation, Chana would turn chilly and distant. The message was clear. She liked me. She certainly liked fucking me. But if I were to think for one instant that I was charming enough to override what she saw as both her identity and her destiny, I would be sent the unmistakable message that I was being a fool.

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Hugo Schwyzer is a professor of history and gender studies. Follow Hugo on Twitter at @hugoschwyzer.
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