Title: The Same Embrace Author: Michael Lowenthal Published by: Dutton, 1998 ISBN: 0-525-94416-8 [hardcover, 289 pages]
Jacob and Jonathan. Twin brothers joined by blood and faith, divided by religious fervor, desire, and sexual identity. The Same Embrace moves from Massachusetts to the Promised Land, to tell the powerful story of two young men struggling against a heritage of intolerance and silence in a transcendent search for the self, and for each other....Once, in sleep, two boys breathed in perfect rhythm. But the once unbreakable bond between identical twins Jacob and Jonathan Rosenbaum has become as tenuous as their futures -- their adult estrangement as seemingly irreversible as the convictions that separate them. Now twenty-four, Jacob is a gay activist living in Boston; Jonathan's wholehearted embrace of Orthodox Judaism has taken him to a yeshiva in far-off Jerusalem. In the shadow of his best friend's death, Jacob travels to Israel in the hope of reconnecting with his brother.
It is a journey that will bring together two lives that are worlds apart and force Jacob to reexamine his sexual and religious identities, as well as his place in his complex and haunted family history. An unexpected arrival proves the catalyst for an ultimate confrontation between Jacob and Jonathan, as it lays bare the shattering secrets of a legacy that began during the Holocaust.
Alternating between the present and Jacob's childhood memories, The Sam Embrace moves gracefully from anger and alienation toward reconciliation and acceptance, from a painful past to a hopeful future. A striking debut novel of family, faith, and the quintessentially American search for belonging, it begins as a story of strangers. By the time it ends, we have recognized ourselves in each of them.
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