The same embrace /

In this gay-oriented novel of fraternal estrangement, Jonathan Rosenbaum (straight) severs relations with his gay twin, Jacob, after interrupting him in the act. So Jacob's role as family emissary to persuade Jonathan to leave an Israeli yeshiva ends in a fiasco. Back in Boston, Jacob resumes wrestling with his life's dilemmas of coming out to relatives and finding a lover. Debut novelist Lowenthal expresses 24-year-old Jacob's world through flashbacks to his adolescence and family events of Jewish religious ritual and personal sexual awakening, then switches to Jacob's 1990s activities as a gay activist. This telling fills space until the necessary plot resolution: the reappearance of Jonathan. Their grandmother's stroke provides the pretext, and together they reach a deeper recognition of her past as a Holocaust survivor, inducing a greater understanding, though not a reconciliation, between the twins and their opposed lifestyles. A predictable work that realizes the standard issues of being gay without offering much appeal beyond its core readership. --Gilbert Taylor

The shadow of the Holocaust looms over this affecting first novel, a tale of identical twins who must come to terms with their peculiar bond and its limits. Jacob Rosenbaum, openly gay and mourning the recent death of his best friend, travels from Boston to Israel in order to persuade his brother Jonathan, newly and fervently orthodox, to leave the yeshiva where he is studying and return to the U.S. More than religious and sexual differences keep the brothers apart. Both need to overcome the legacy of their stern rabbi grandfather, who pitted them against each other in wrestling contests when they were boys (matches that Jacob always won). Jacob's struggle to reconcile with his brother is as much an account of a family history of estrangement and secrets as it is about the contradictions of being twins: two people, physically alike, so close they dream the same dreams, who simultaneously long to assert their individuality and return to their comforting singular identity. Lowenthal has a keen eye for details: a warm office has a scent "like the custardy smell of cotton towels removed from a spinning dryer." A beautiful boy has a "peach pit of muscle" at the corner of his jaw. He avoids the clichés of a coming-out novel, and his assured dialogue, smooth weaving of the narrative back and forth in time, and layering of cultural, sexual and religious themes coalesce into an impressively crafted, moving debut. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A closely observed study of the corrosive effect of a familyŽs long-held secrets and, more particularly, of the struggle of siblings to defuse their anger and find some common ground. Jacob, the 25-year-old protagonist, is bright, Jewish, and gay. His parents are at best unhappy with their son's homosexuality; his twin brother Jonathan, studying at an Orthodox Yeshiva in Israel, is angry and withdrawn. Jacob, urged on by his parents, leaves his job in Boston and goes to Israel to try to talk his brother into returning home. Instead, though he has had little interest in his faith, Jacob finds himself increasingly impressed by the innocent high spirits of the students, and by some of their teachers. Things go disastrously wrong, though, when Jonathan finds Jacob in a fervent embrace with another Yeshiva student. Back home, matters turn grim when the boysŽ beloved grandmother is felled by a massive stroke. Jacob gets to meet his aunt Isabel, long in exile from the family, and through her to learn about the existence of a figure whose memory they has long suppressed: Josef, his uncle, left behind as a teenager when the family fled from Nazi Germany, was abandoned by Jacob's grandfather, it turns out, because he was gay. Lowenthal's rendering of the hesitant attempts at communication in a family scarred by bitterness and regret are precise and deeply moving. Jacob's increasingly focused efforts to reconcile his heritage and his homosexuality allow Lowenthal to introduce some pointed meditations on sexuality and religion. And a tentative détente with Jonathan, summoned home in the wake of his grandmother's stroke, is adroitly rendered. Jacob, however, sometimes seems too good to be true, and the romantic relationship that emerges late in the story too sketchy and curious to be entirely convincing. Nevertheless, as an examination of the deforming effect of a familyŽs secrets, and as a portrait of a young man attempting to rediscover his faith without jettisoning his identity, a fresh and provocative first novel.