One twin is a gay activist,
the other an Orthodox Jew
by Ricco Villanueva Siasoco
The first novel by gay author Michael Lowenthal, The Same Embrace, tells the story of identical twin brothers who have chosen radically different paths in their twentysomething lives. Jacob Rosenbaum is a gay activist in Boston, while his brother Jonathan is an Orthodox Jew living in Israel. The two men struggle against the backdrop of a painful family history-to determine what they still may have in common.
Weaving together themes of sibling rivalry, assimilation, the Holocaust and AIDS, The Same Embrace is a stunning debut novel which depicts a quintessential American search for belonging.
Lowenthal was born in 1969 in Washington, D.C. in a Conservative Jewish household. On a recent sunny afternoon, Lowenthal sat down to discuss his first novel.
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But on a more serious level, I really do hope some Orthodox people read the book. I doubt they will, but if they do, I hope they can see that I tried to treat Orthodoxy with respect. And that's what any fiction writer has to do, I think. You don't have to be the MEDORAHERBERT
Michael Lowenthal
Ricco Villanueva Siasoco: The Same Embrace is about two very different twins one a devout Jew, the other a gay man. How did this idea emerge, and what is it that interests you àbout twins?
Michael Lowenthal: I've always been obsessed with twins-partly because I always longed to have a brother myself, but mostly because of the questions twins raise about the human condition.
I think we all wrestle with questions like "Who are we?" "What defines us?" "How much of our lives is about the choices we make, or does everything come from our genes and our parents and our background?" Twins just crystallize all those questions. Did you have the idea of twins before you actually started writing the book?
I started out thinking more generally about the larger themes-about Jewishness, and gayness, and things that are more directly autobiographical to my life. At first I was having trouble figuring out a way to get all that into a story that would be compelling. When I hit upon the twins thing, it just finally made sense.
Do you relate more to the character of Jonathan, a devout Jew, or Jacob, a gay man?
I would like to think that part of me is in each of them, and that there's a part of each of them that's not at all in me. The more obvious connections, of course, are with Jacob, the gay character, but he's actually much more interested in his gayness, more connected to it, than I am. But we share a certain feeling of dorky outsider-ness and a wish to overcome that.
is a lot
I think Jonathan, the religious one, of what I wish I could be. I've always fantasized about being able to really throw myself into something wholeheartedly the way he does with his Jewishness. I always wish that I had some set of patterns and beliefs and group that I could join. Although I know that if I did, I would rebel, which is why I never have.
What kind of research did you do before you began writing this book?
I had to do a lot of research into all of the arcane aspects of Judaism. I knew enough from my own growing up to know where I needed to look. But then I had to do a lot of looking, and reading. For example, I've never been in a yeshiva [the religious academy where the character Jonathan studies], so I had to do a lot of research about that. And I totally got off on that-it's really fun. Those are the kind of details that I think really can spur creativity.
Do you fear any criticism for writing about subjects like Orthodox Judaism, that are not completely your own experience?
I have this megalomanaical fantasy that some Orthodox rabbi will pronounce a fatwah [call for his death] on me. Think of the publicity!
THE SAMLEMBRACE
characters you
are writing about, or to have lived lives exactly like theirs, but you have to imagine being them, really walk in their shoes for a while. If you do this, then even if you goof up some facts, you still end up I hopewith authentic characters.
It seemed to me that the male characters-Jacob, Jonathan, Papa Isaac, Jacob's lovers sometimes overwhelmed the female characters, almost as if the women family members and friends were in the shadows. Do you have any feelings about this?
It's interesting that this was your reaction, because most of the other people who've read the book have consistently picked out the female characters as the strong ones. I guess I was working with some inherent tensions in Judaism.
On one hand, it's a very male-dominated religion, with famously domineering patriarchal figures. On the other hand, Judaism is technically matriarchal: Whether or not you're Jewish depends on your mother's status. So the way I see it, men and women have a different kind of power.
At the beginning, the novel focuses primarily on male relationships: father to son, grandfather to grandson, brother to brother. But the characters consistently hit dead ends. So by the end there's a transition to a more female focus, with the aunt character and the grandmother, and they offer a different view of family and tradition that might lead to peaceful coexistence and compromise.
What are your hopes for The Same Embrace? Who do you hope will read it?
I've heard a lot of people talk about how they read novels to "see themselves." That's fine, but my hope is that readers will read my novel and be able to see other people. In other words, non-gay Jews might read it and learn about gay people; non-Jewish people might read it and learn about Jews; fathers could read it and imagine what their sons' lives are like, and vice versa. I tried to write the book in a way that would be accessible to anybody.
My foolish hope is that twelve months from now, after The Same Embrace has been read and reviewed and everything, I'll be able to keep a straight face when I'm called a "novelist." But I don't know. At this point, it still seems like such a daydream.
Ricco Villanueva Siasoco is a Boston writer and editor.
SEPTEMBER 18, 1998
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