Writing a Jewish Life: Memoirs - Couverture souple

The son of Holocaust survivors, Lev Raphael was one of the first of America's Second Generation writers and started publishing short stories about children of survivors in 1978. Many of these stories were collected in his award-winning book, Dancing on Tisha B'Av.

Raphael is the author of 13 other books including two novels about survivors, Winter Eyes and The German Money, and a collection of Jewish memoirs and essays, Journeys & Arrivals; and nine other books. Raphael's fiction has been widely anthologized in the U.S. and Britain, most recently in the anthology Criminal Kabbalah, which contains Lev's latest story featuring a child of survivors: "Your Papers, Please."

Raphael has published dozens of essays, articles, and stories in a wide range of Jewish publications: Midstream, Hadassah, Psychology and Judaism, The Forward, Reform Judaism, Reconstructionist, Agada, Commentary, The Baltimore Jewish Times, The Detroit Jewish News, Inside, The Jewish Exponent, Jewish Currents, Tikkun, Jerusalem Report, and Shmate.

Widely in demand as a speaker, he has keynoted two international Second Generation conferences where he received standing ovations, as well as appearing at over 125 invited lectures and readings in Israel, North America, and Europe at Jewish Book Fairs, Jewish Community Centers, synagogues and universities. Featured in two documentaries, he has been a panelist at London's Jewish Film festival. His stories and essays are on university syllabi around the U.S. and in Canada; his fiction has been analyzed in books, scholarly journals and at scholarly conferences, including MLA.

Writing a Jewish Life chronicles novelist Lev Raphael's struggle to claim both his religious and sexual identities, and the happiness he subsequently found. Until he reached his mid-20s, the author felt alienated from other Jews, ambivalent about his homosexuality; or as he puts it, "twice strange ... in each [community], different, lesser, ashamed." A son of Holocaust survivors, Raphael 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 their two sons.