Last week, People highlighted Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart in its “31 Books That Made TIME’s 100 Best Books of the Year” list, underscoring how the novel’s timely themes of identity and belonging are resonating broadly.
Set in a near-future New York, the novel follows ten-year-old Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, a half-Korean, half-Jewish fifth-grader with an overactive conscience and never-ending mental to-do list, as she tries to hold together her imploding family and make sense of a country sliding into fascism. Vera lives with her depressed, self-styled intellectual father, her image-conscious liberal stepmother, and her wild younger half-brother, while longing for the absent Korean birth mother she calls “Mom Mom.”
At her fancy Manhattan private school, Vera is obligated to debate a racially rigged “Five-Three” constitutional amendment that will soon be put to a real Congressional vote. The amendment proposes to give certain “exceptional” white Americans five-thirds of a vote, while everyone else gets just one.
Vera’s younger half-brother would qualify for Five-Three because of his mother’s lineage, a kind of “matrilineal descent.” Vera and her immigrant father would not. A child’s-eye view of these policies—filtered through her diary, her AI chessboard, and a self-driving car—turns the novel into a darkly funny, unsettling story of family, identity, and who gets to count in a shrinking democracy.
Shteyngart has been on my radar ever since his October 2021 New Yorker essay titled “A Botched Circumcision and Its Aftermath”—a piece that landed, by sheer coincidence, at the exact moment the nonprofit I helped co-found was launching. It felt uncanny: as Bruchim was stepping forward to support a growing number of non-circumcising Jews, Shteyngart was publicly naming the physical and emotional fallout he’d spent decades carrying in silence.
Soon after Shteyngart’s family immigrated to the United States and settled in Queens in the late 1970s, a door-to-door Chabad emissary persuaded his parents to circumcise him. He was seven. The complications left him with downstream chronic pain, and he later wrote that he felt “diminished” in ways he could not articulate until adulthood.
Recently he revisited the experience in a documentary short released by New Yorker—making this once-private wound unmistakably public, yet again.
The Body Politic
In the world of Vera, the body becomes political. So too with circumcision. We mark children because the powerful choose it for them.
Which brings me to one of the novel’s strangest recurring moments. Throughout Vera, the protagonist’s younger half-brother bursts into scenes blurting out: “Look at my penis!” It’s jarring. Comic. Surreal.
It’s easy to interpret this as a classic Shteyngart gag, or more profoundly, a symbol of early entitlement: unlike Vera, the boy is white, male and already convinced his body and voice will always matter. But lest we forget, Shteyngart has figuratively screamed about his own penis—and not for laughs.
With that in mind, the little boy’s crude, repeated line isn’t merely a joke or a metaphor—it’s a demand. An accusation. A cry from the past. Look at my penis!
This child, storming into Shteyngart’s narrative again and again, drags the reader back to the site of the author’s injury—to the part of the body altered without consent. To the wound that can’t be joked away.
In this sense, Vera can be read as a deeply personal meditation on the body, on trauma, and on the systems—national, cultural, religious—that claim ownership over it.
Vera asks readers to confront what we’ve been taught to ignore. Whether that’s structural inequality, or normalized violence done to children in the name of privilege and tradition. The irreversibly altered body becomes central to the narrative—not silent or sacred, but loud, ridiculous, and undeniable.
