I Got A Nose Job To Escape My Past
As a teen, I thought I wanted a prettier nose. But my idea of “pretty” was burdened by hundreds of years of history.
I always believed that I represented the third generation of women in my family to have a nose job. My mother, I thought, had one, and her mother before her. It’s been a part of my mental mythology for so long that it took me a moment to understand when my mother told me that no, I had it all wrong. I had a nose job. She had a nose job. Her mother, however, never did. My grandmother broke her nose at one point, and she had plastic surgery on her ears. Somehow those two facts had combined in my head to make the Ur-nose-job, the one that had started it all.
Having to slide that bit of false information—“my grandmother had a nose job”—out of my head allowed other things slide in and fit together. My mother and I had nose jobs. My grandmother did not. My grandmother was not ethnically Jewish. My mother and I are.
The Jewish nose job has a long and fraught history. Modern rhinoplasty was fathered by a Prussian Jew named Jacques Joseph. Born Jakob Joseph, the son of a rabbi, in Königsberg, he changed his name to the less nebbishy Jacques at the time he started studying medicine in Berlin and Leipzig. As a visible sign of just how assimilated he was, Joseph bore the cheek scar that signaled his membership in one of the exclusive dueling fraternities. A scar proved one’s worthiness as an opponent. It was a literal mark of equality.
Joseph was trained as an orthopedic surgeon, but lost his job after reshaping the ears of a boy too bullied to attend school. Though the surgery was successful, it was seen as too risky to the reputation of his mentor, Julius Wolff, who had not approved the never-before-attempted procedure. Despite this, in 1898, two years after the dueling fraternities passed a resolution declaring that Jews were “unworthy” of satisfaction, Joseph was reporting to the Berlin Medical Society about his success in surgically changing a man’s nose. Along with this accomplishment, Joseph detailed a radical new theory he’d been developing: that people could suffer as much from their looks as from illness, and that it was not vanity, but a condition he called “anti-dysplasia” that led to this suffering.
Dysplasia refers to a malformation, an abnormal grouping of cells or tissues. Joseph’s “anti-dysplasia” referred to a pathological desire for features that read as well-formed, normal. This claim—that the suffering caused by this desire was on par with the suffering caused by disease and injury—flew in the face of Prussian austerity, which advocated for making do with what one was given. Cosmetic surgery was seen as too frivolous for the talents of serious medical professionals.
I remember a moment in early childhood where I tallied up the beautiful characters in my picture books and realized they were nearly all blonde. Although I was being raised in a television-free household with a soundtrack out of Free to Be…You and Me, I had still imbibed the poisonous belief that beauty was one of the best assets a girl could have. I remember feeling sad that I was obviously not beautiful, since my hair was not blonde. I confided my envy to a towheaded kindergarten classmate, who in turn told me that she envied my thinness.
The First World War combined the horror of mechanized death with a vastly improved body of medical knowledge. The result was a spectacular number of brutally injured soldiers who had survived wounds that would previously have killed them. Suddenly, the talent of reshaping malformed flesh seemed less a product of vanity, more a utilitarian skill. In 1915, Emperor Wilhelm II offered Jacques Joseph the Chair of Plastic Surgery at the Charité hospital, on the condition that Joseph convert to Christianity. Joseph turned the post down, but accepted a similar post a year later when it was offered to him through the Prussian Ministry for Ecclesiastical and Educational Matters without any religious stipulations. For his wartime service, Jacques Joseph was awarded the Iron Cross.
I said I was “ethnically Jewish” because I don’t know what else to call us. My mother’s father was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household, the only child born in America after his parents and older siblings fled the Russian pogroms.
He was raised to be religious, but early on he was already in trouble for skipping classes at the yeshiva, when he found himself unable to feel anything but skepticism about the existence of God. Later, he changed his name from Abraham to Albert to signal his move away from religion and into the secular world.
When he married my grandmother, an Irish-Catholic Kennedy, she converted to Judaism to please his parents, but my grandparents never practiced Judaism as a religion. Their children were raised to see themselves as Jews, but the family celebrated Christmas and they did not observe Shabbos.
My grandfather’s first language was Yiddish, and he peppered his speech with it, but his children did not learn Yiddish except as isolated words. My mother grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in North Hollywood, but she was raised without religion—though it was something she craved and eventually sought. In a reversal of her own mother’s conversion, my mom converted to Catholicism when she married my Irish-Catholic father. My siblings and I were raised Catholic, with Jewish grandparents. We attended Mass on Sundays like good little goyim.
Jacques Joseph was a young adult at a time when educated, secular Jews in Europe were the most assimilated they had ever been. And yet, every step toward being accepted as “normal” was marked with a step away by gentile society. The idea that one might eventually be unable to identify the Jew was a specter of a future mongrel society, in which the blood of good Germans was mingled ingloriously with the blood of Jews—Jews who might somehow mark the children of Germany with the visible difference their ancestors had worked so hard to hide.
The history of anti-Semitism piggybacks on the history of anti-Blackness. Jews were long considered “ugly” or “subhuman” and some of that feeling was deliberately attached to the traits they shared with people of African ancestry: they had dark skin, curly hair, and non-Aryan noses. By the late nineteenth century, when Jews had been in Europe for long enough to shed their Middle Eastern skin tone, the most visible marker of Jewish difference became the Semitic nose. Hatred and fear sought physical traits to reflect the ugliness that was presupposed.
This period also heralded a rise of science, leading to expressions of bigotry couched in the language of the rational man. Nowhere was this more evident than in the “science” of physiognomy—determining people’s inner characteristics based on their outer traits. The Jewish nose became an expression of a different mentality, as warped as a bent beak. The characteristic schnoz was far from universal among Jews—it wasn’t even predominant. But the need to see the Jewish body as marked was powerful.
A prominent, curved nose was also associated with a literal sickness of the body, often syphilis. In a period in which syphilis was a feared and fearsome threat, the marked Jewish nose was a flashpoint for anti-Semitism, simultaneously suggesting Jewish sexual deviance and Jewish disease. Another prominent secular Jewish doctor of the period, Sigmund Freud, made a direct connection between the nose and the penis, and a fetish of the nose as being a fixation on the imaginary penis of the mother.
This is a tortuous ball of neuroses to project onto a utilitarian and ubiquitous organ. All at once, the Jewish nose takes on the role of marking the Jew, making inner corruption and sickness visible, revealing the Jew as the catalyst of disease, as a sexual deviant, and as a person with mother issues. Moreover, the Jewish nose is gendered as masculine, even as it is denigrated as wrongly or insufficiently masculine.
“A little too masculine” is how my doctor would describe my nose when I went for my first appointment.
I grew up as a goy, with auburn hair and a freckled face, but the only member of my family who didn’t have blue or green eyes. My mother says that when people asked me what color my eyes were, I used to answer proudly “dark hazel.” There must have been a moment when pride turned to self-consciousness, perhaps around the time when I noticed that beautiful girls were nearly always portrayed as blondes. Blue and green eyes, I knew, were pretty. My hazel eyes, brown in most lights, swamp green when I cried, were not.
And then there was my nose.
My mother had grown up in a secretive alcoholic home, so she made it a point to answer our questions directly, to be honest about the past, and forthright with anything that might otherwise resemble the hiding of a shameful secret. This meant that I had always known that she had a nose job as a young teen, that her nose had been a source of shame.
My nose had a large bump from the side. This didn’t initially bother me, but again, the change in my feelings was gradual. Maybe it was hearing people talk about how my younger brother had such a nice-looking nose, and noticing that it didn’t look much like mine. Maybe it was a connection I made between my nose and my mother’s. Maybe it was just a matter of becoming more conscious of the narrow standards of beauty and their importance. Maybe it was that time I looked at pictures of German anti-Semitic propaganda posters in my history textbook and recognized my own profile.
When I asked my mom about her own nose job, she was unambiguous about how much she’d hated her nose.
“I can remember seeing my nose change its shape when I was eight or nine years old. To say I was self-conscious about it was an understatement: when I laughed, I’d cover my nose and mouth with my hand! I also would stand in front of a mirror, holding a hand mirror, to see my profile. I would use my finger to cover the bump that I hated so much, and I thought I’d look much better without it.”
I asked how she’d gotten the idea to have a nose job. Had anyone suggested it to her?
“No one suggested it to me. I used to watch a TV show called ‘Doctors at Work’, and I actually watched a rhinoplasty, in living black and white. I was fascinated, and started actively thinking about having mine done. I was no more than ten years old, so it was probably 1962. However, I also knew that my mother had been self-conscious about her ears sticking out, and that she had a procedure at the age of nineteen (1945!) to have them ‘pinned back.’ She suffered a terrible recovery, but never regretted having it done.”
Even though it was an expensive procedure and her parents didn’t have much money, they were extremely supportive, and saved up the money to pay for it. She was three months shy of fourteen when she went in for surgery.
I was fourteen and a half when I had mine.
I suppose you could say that no one suggested my nose job to me, either – but then again, no one had to. It was enough to know that it was an option, to have it always in front of me as a possible solution to a problem of my own making. To be honest, I don’t think anyone ever made fun of my nose. I don’t think there was anyone but me staring at it from the side, wishing it concave instead of convex. And when, in seventh grade, I burst into tears and said that I hated my nose, that I wished it were different, my mom heard her own voice echoing down through the years. It was obvious what needed to be done.
But I was also never as clear as my mom was on whether I actually wanted a nose job. I’d grown up with a lot of rhetoric about being happy as you were, and some part of me was resistant to the idea that I should change my nose. I didn’t like how it looked, but I also didn’t like how tall and gawky I was, or how pale my skin was, or how wide my hips were. However, none of these attributes were seen as fundamentally abnormal, either, when normal is measured as white and thin and tall and curvy and gentile.
When my mother told me she’d saved money for my nose job before I’d even thought to ask for it, I felt confirmed in my abnormality. I said I still wasn’t sure, but knowing that she’d saved money for it took a little of the responsibility off of me. If I felt ambivalent, I could tell myself it hadn’t really been my idea. I could accept the gift and slough off the parts that felt like they revealed something about me that I didn’t want to face.
I said I’d go to an appointment with the plastic surgeon, just to see what it was like. He was a jovial man with a big, outgoing personality and a large nose. I looked at his nose suspiciously, wondering why he hadn’t had a nose job, if they were so great. He took a lot of pictures of my “masculine” nose and said that he could help. And then he gave me the final excuse. He told me my septum was deviated and I’d need to have surgery on it eventually anyway.
The deviated septum has long been the excuse of choice for the nose job. We still need to tell ourselves that there’s a non-cosmetic reason for the changes we want to make to our bodies. It flies in the face of the Protestant Work Ethic to change your face just because you want to. Be grateful for what you have, and don’t long for what you don’t. Don’t alter the Lord’s work, lest you reflect poorly on His generosity.
Even the words “nose job” are revealing. Labor is front and center. There’s the labor done by the doctor, of course, but also the labor of the person changing her face (it’s nearly always a “her”) and presenting a curated appearance to the public. A nose job is a job on a nose, with a nose, for a nose.
The stereotype of the Jewish woman changing her too-masculine, too-Jewish nose is fading. Rhinoplasty doesn’t even make the top five types of plastic surgery American women are getting, and while the total number of nose jobs dropped precipitously during the recession, the drop for Jewish women is even starker. At 14 in 1993, I was part of the last wave for whom the nose job was a normal rite of passage.
My ambivalence about the procedure was unchanged right up until the moment that I was injected with a mess of happy-making drugs on the day of. Then I didn’t care about anything. Right before I went under, I had a sharp moment of clarity when the medicine going into my arm began to hurt, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I tried to tell somebody, but couldn’t speak anymore. And then everything faded out.
When I came to, I was surly and rude, snapping at doctors and nurses. Something had gone slightly awry during the surgery and despite the tube in my throat, I’d swallowed a bellyful of blood. On the ride home from the hospital, I felt increasingly queasy, but I managed to hold it back until we reached our street. Then I asked my mom to pull over and jumped out of the car to vomit a stream of blood into the street in front of our mean neighbor’s house. He stood in his front yard, staring. I remember a small feeling of satisfaction about that, like it was revenge for the time he’d told me that my dog should be put down. Every time I saw the stain, I felt a little bit of deeply-held schadenfreude—as though it wasn’t my own blood there on the ground, as though it wasn’t a part of me that had washed away.
Recovery from a nose job is awful. I’ve had more pain, but never so much discomfort. When your nose is broken in multiple places and put back together, your eyes blacken and your face swells. This is the punishment for vanity, it seems, as your unrecognizable visage stares at you out of the mirror. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was on the air at the time, and I looked just like Odo, my face all smoothed out and formless. If I had thought myself ugly before, I was definitely ugly now. I wore hats like the ones Blossom wore on TV, and hoped that no one would look at me.
In the lead up to World War II, Jacques Joseph kept practicing, kept performing the procedure for which he’d become known, in an attempt to help his fellow Jews. One of his very late rhinoplasties was performed in 1933 on 16-year-old Adolphine Schwarz, after he had operated on her brother’s nose. In his 1991 book, The Jew’s Body, Sander Gilman quotes Schwarz as saying, “Joseph was very charitable, and when he felt that someone suffered from a ‘Jewish nose,’ he would operate for nothing.”
It didn’t change anything. Jewish noses might disappear, but the Jewish body was soon to be plastered with the yellow star, marked again. Joseph died of a heart attack in 1934, unknowingly saved from the worst that was yet to come.
I don’t really like that I had plastic surgery, but I do love my nose. I hated my surgeon—I felt like he was hitting on my mom—but I can’t deny that he had a great eye. He resisted the urge to give me a pert shiksa nose. My nose looks the same straight on as it always did, and it still has a convex bump. It looks like my nose still, but prettier.
At the same time, I wonder about my metric of “pretty.” Would I have grown to love my original nose in the same way? I was only 14, in the beginning of a long, normal stage of hating myself in multiple unoriginal ways. So many parts of my body were soon going to look hideous to me, and it was going to be a long slog back to liking them. My nose was a casualty of the early days of plummeting self-esteem, or it was a victory over that plummeting self-esteem. I may never be sure.
My mom is unequivocal.
“I have never, not once, regretted my decision. I know it was right for me. I honestly rarely think about my nose. I like it just fine, but the best thing is that I have no need to think about it at all.
I think that the best byproduct of the surgery was that I felt more confident and was less shy with people. I was so concerned with how I looked (I truly felt ugly), that it hampered my ability to be myself. With the home drama of my mom’s drinking and my brother’s drug use, it was nice to have my negative physical perception no longer an issue. I was still skinny and flat-chested, but never desired surgeries to change anything else.
That being said, I try never to judge others’ motives for their procedures. Who knows what they may have been told throughout their lives about their looks? I don’t plan to have anything more done, but having that rhinoplasty was the very best thing for me.”
Jacques Joseph believed that one could suffer from one’s looks. This is certainly true. The reasons behind that suffering, however, are bigger than the individual. Noses are not abnormal, whatever their shape. And norms, though they claim to represent a sort of democratic average, are never classless, never raceless, never not gendered. They never represent a truly usual model. You can change the shape of your nose, and you can feel ambivalent about that, or pleased, or displeased, but that bigger thing that pushed you to it in the first place isn’t touched.
Jews of European descent are largely considered white now. The noses of Jewish actresses frequently go untouched, are normalized through visible representation. And yet, in order for there to be a charmed circle, most of us must necessarily fall outside it. Those of us who are unseen by being seen as normal do not often recognize our privilege. We’ve gotten so good at it, it’s invisible even to ourselves.
Cover image by Mykl Roventine
