Journeys & Arrivals: On Being Gay and Jewish - Hardcover

Raphael, Lev

3.73

15 ratings by Goodreads

9780571198825: Journeys & Arrivals: On Being Gay and Jewish

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571198821 ISBN 13: 9780571198825

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1996

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The author recounts his experiences growing up as a Jewish homosexual.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

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.

From Booklist:

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

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