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By Root 1239 0

life together, Naomi speculated. “He thought it cast a shadow over our relationship. It suggested that maybe something had been wrong or missing. Maybe it was his sense of guilt,” she said. “The way people act outside the bedroom is often the way they act in it, too. And that’s not always such a good thing. He once asked his doctor, a personal friend, ‘Why is she doing this?’ I suppose if they got me on a couch somewhere, I’d say it was a statement of independence, that I could choose what I wanted to do with my life and not have someone dictate it to me.”

Naomi received validation from some unexpected sources, including her longtime rabbi Shmuel Katz, then the rabbi emeritus of Congregation Adas Israel in Passaic, which he led for forty years. After he was retired, she often visited him at his home when she returned to New Jersey. Unfailingly, he asked why she was spending so much time in Florida. To protect the rabbi, she says, she concealed her marital problems and her passion for erotica. She told him she went to Florida because she needed to buy antiques. One day, in 1999, when she was sixty-five, she was again sitting in the rabbi’s study when he asked, “What’s the matter, there aren’t antiques in New Jersey?” Naomi asked Rabbi Katz if he really wanted to know the answer. “Of course, what are you doing in Florida?” he said.

“Rabbi, sit down. I’m doing something a woman doesn’t ordinarily do.”

He looked up, startled.

“I’m doing something an Orthodox woman doesn’t ordinarily do.”

“What are you talking about?” the exasperated rabbi said.

“Rabbi, I have become the country’s authority on erotic art. I’ve written two books. I lecture in colleges. And I’ve got a major collection that people come from all over to see.”

The rabbi looked up and said, “Naomi, you’re a smart woman. I always knew you were going to do something important.”

“That gave me the absolution,” she said, bursting into laughter. “There was no stopping me after that.”

Before long, erotic art began to take over almost every available inch of Naomi’s apartment. “At first, it was just a very exotic way of decorating. I put a statue out here, a painting there. My friends and neighbors couldn’t get over the stuff. Soon people were calling me day and night to ask to bring a friend or a relative over and show them something. After a while, it became a pain in the neck.”

It also sparked an epiphany. The collection had become more than a curiosity. “I suddenly said to myself, This art is really important. It’s unusual, it’s unique, and it’s a genre that’s been passed by and hidden away. Why? I kept asking myself. It’s life as it is. People who were guests in my house would say, ‘How can you sleep here? We were up all night looking at the artwork. Aren’t you turned on by the art?’ And I answered, ‘No. I’m turned on by finding it!’ It was such a challenge to find it hidden away, and so pointless to hide it away from society as if it didn’t exist. People have been doing these things for centuries in every country, in every culture, in every generation, in every lifestyle, and we’re acting like sex didn’t exist. How do you think we all got here? So, I put it simply and realistically, ‘Why have people been stupid for so long?’ ”

Naomi’s collecting may, of course, have resulted from multiple motivations, conscious and otherwise. There has been ample psychoanalytical, behavioral, and cultural speculation about why people collect, from Sigmund Freud’s view of collecting as sublimation of anal eroticism to New York psychoanalyst Werner Muensterberger’s assertion in his book Collecting: An Unruly Passion that collectors use objects to soothe emotional pain experienced in childhood. “Collecting can become an all-consuming passion, not unlike the dedication of a compulsive gambler to the gaming tables—to the point where it can affect a person’s life and become the paramount concern in his or her pursuit, overshadowing all else: work, family, social obligations and responsibilities,” he wrote.

Collecting, however, turns out to be a routine human behavior. Studies