In his memoir-in-essays Place Envy, Michael Lowenthal takes readers around the world, and deep into his psyche, as he tries to find himself. He spends a season on a Pennsylvania farm with an Amish family in a sort of reverse rumspringa, studies jazz with a mystical genius at Dartmouth, sails the Mexican Riviera on a cruise for blind gay men, tests the boundaries of his long-term relationship during a passionate fling in Brazil. An excursion to view ancient megaliths in Scotland gives him a glimpse of gay life in a remote village, while a trip to China forces him to consider the line between physical attraction and racial fetishization. A sensitively rendered piece called “Unmolested” documents him returning to his former summer camp, and confronting the boundaries of what can and cannot transpire between adults and teenagers. The power of Lowenthal’s essays lies in the author’s willingness to foreground his self-doubt and wrestle openly with what he wants, what he needs, and of what he feels worthy.
The most intense journey in the collection is “A Good Place,” a memoir that Lowenthal has split in two, bookending the rest of his essays. In the first part, he tries to piece together his family’s fractured history, including parts that were destroyed before, during, and after the Holocaust — and then forgotten, or at least never discussed. He digs through letters and cassette tapes, interviews relatives, asks questions that few people want to answer, all in hope of understanding his family’s history — and his own place in that history. In the second part, he traces that history on a family trip to Germany, where some questions remain unanswered, and new ones arise. The tenacity with which Lowenthal proceeds is remarkable; relatives start to wonder why he’s so invested in this quest, and eventually he begins to wonder the same thing. He’s trying to fill in spaces on a family tree that have been left blank, sometimes because relatives were killed or disappeared, other times because the survivors deliberately erased them or viewed them as dead ends. Where do gay people fit on a family tree? Intermarried couples? Secular Jews who aren’t passing down religious traditions? Anyone who doesn’t have children? This double essay is Lowenthal’s way of locating his branch, and then claiming that family tree as his own.
Fans of Lowenthal’s 1998 debut novel, The Same Embrace, will remember that it is about an estranged pair of identical twins — one who becomes a gay activist as an adult, while the other becomes Orthodox and rejects him. Several times in Place Envy, the author expounds on the parallel situation in his real-life family: a ruptured relationship between him and a cousin. It’s always interesting to see how much “invented” stories depend on “real” ones, but here, the true story of the author and his cousin goes beyond literary curiosity. It illuminates Lowenthal’s ongoing efforts to reconcile his Jewish and gay identities, his chosen and biological families — and to understand how those efforts hit barriers that cannot be surmounted. Thanks to his willingness to put his own vulnerability on the page, Lowenthal reveals the scars (and psychic wounds that may never actually heal) that many Jewish gay men carry — usually hidden from their friends, their parents, even their partners, but now, in his accessible prose, are visible to all.
Wayne Hoffman is a veteran journalist, published in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Hadassah Magazine, The Forward, Out, The Advocate, and elsewhere; he is managing editor of the Jewish magazine Tablet. The author of The End of Her: Racing Against Alzheimer’s to Solve a Murder, he has also published three novels, including Sweet Like Sugar, which won the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award. He lives in New York City and the Catskills.
