Journeys & Arrivals: On Being Gay and Jewish

In Journeys & Arrivals prize-winning author Lev Raphael explores for the first time in non-fiction the gay and Jewish identities that have dominated his highly acclaimed fiction for many years.
Journeys & Arrivals reveals in a collection of autobiographical and critical essays the influence these often conflicting identities of being gay and Jewish have had in his life and his writing.
The child of Holocaust survivors, Raphael came to his positive Jewish identity late in life and his gay identity even later. He describes growing up in a secular family, discovering a Jewish community, early sexual exploration, the turning point that came with writing his first autobiographical story, and life with his partner and his partner's sons. Other pieces report on gay literature, gays and lesbians in Israel, and the legacy of the Holocaust for both Jews and gays. Throughout, Raphael confronts with unflinching honesty the difficulties and rewards of laying claim to both a gay and a Jewish identity.

Raphael's ``greatest hits'': This collection of 13 essays offers remixes and reprises of some of his better-known material. Raphael's struggle to claim both his religious and sexual identities, and the happiness he subsequently found, form the basis of the journeys and arrivals he recounts. Until the author reached his mid-20s, he felt alienated from other Jews, ambivalent about his homosexuality, ``twice strange . . . in each [community], different, lesser, ashamed.'' A son of Holocaust survivors, novelist Raphael (Dancing on Tisha B'Av, 1990; Winter Eyes, 1992) grew up in an unmistakably Jewish but nonreligious home. However, as an adult he initiated his own affiliations with Judaism: He had a bar mitzvah at age 30, went to Israel twice, and fell in love with a Jewish man. It was ``coming out as a Jew,'' he writes, that ``ultimately made it possible for me to come out as a gay man and then work at uniting the two identities.'' Attesting to his journey is the contrast between his confused childhood and the joyful domestic life he now shares with his lover, Gersh, and with Gersh's two sons. Raphael's arrival is marked by such confidently argued essays as ``Dangerous Men'' (on antigay Republicans) and ``Why Are They Bashing Dancer from the Dance?,'' a passionate defense of Andrew Holleran's much-maligned gay novel. Raphael's unique vantage point informs and enriches every essay--from his brief history of homosexuals in the Holocaust and in the literature of the Holocaust to an overview of contemporary gay life in Israel. However, the collection's two finest pieces, ``To Be a Jew'' and ``Okemos, Michigan,'' have already appeared in anthologies that readers interested in Raphael's subject matter are likely to have encountered. Worthwhile if you haven't journeyed with Raphael before. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In his nonfiction, as in the stories of Dancing on Tisha B'Av (1990) and the novel Winter Eyes (1992), the dual identity of being gay and Jewish is Raphael's grand theme. No one excels him at writing the stories and considering the issues of that twin self-realization. This collection reprints his autobiographical contributions to Wrestling with the Angel and Hometowns (1991) and 11 fugitive pieces, including two letters reporting progress and setbacks for gays in Israel, four more autobiographical writings, an extended reply to letters in Raphael's hometown newspaper objecting to comparisons between anti-Semitism and homophobia, and a superb response to criticisms of the classic modern gay novel Dancer from the Dance (1978) by Andrew Holleran. Any of these essays may well become a future anthology piece, for each is that perspicacious and artful, whatever the particular subject. Perhaps, though, the best of them is the last, "Empty Memory? Gays in Holocaust Literature" ; anyone concerned with bringing genuine discernment to discourse about gays and the Holocaust simply must read it. Ray Olson