ABSTRACT
The first time I saw the Jewish laws concerning the menstruant in print, I was watching the “Mickey Mouse Club” on TV by myself in my grandparents’ living room and eating fish sticks and mashed potatoes on a folding tray. I had never seen the word menstruation in print. My uncles had been cleaning out the attic and had brought down books from their yeshiva days that seemed worth saving. An English translation of the Mishnah survived their triage, and, out of curiosity, I inspected it during a cartoon. The more I read, the more I hoped no one would catch me reading this stuff. I was sure I had discovered my first dirty book. It fascinated me in the same wonderful-horrible way the photographs of rare rashes and disfiguring diseases in medical journals did, a second body of literature I consulted surreptitiously. Why had this religion of ours once been so fixated on secret parts of women? I was sure the menstrual practices, like animal sacrifice, had long been abandoned. Someone was coming 218downstairs. I hid the Mishnah under the National Geographies also rescued from the dump and feigned absorption in Mickey.
