The Promise of ReinventionIf you've ever wished you could step into a new, magical world, shedding your past, taking on a new name, dressing differently, living by an entirely new set of rules, and discovering that simply arriving means being welcomed, celebrated, and given a proud new identity, then you understand the promise of reinvention. When I was fifteen, in the mid-1970s, I left my secular, suburban home to enter the profoundly cloistered society of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. It was as though I had stepped through a magical wardrobe into a kind of Narnia or Oz. It was a place I could recreate myself, reinvent my history, and start from zero. I carried with me a secret I was terrified to confront: my growing awareness that I was attracted to other boys. I believed that perhaps, in this new world, I could leave that part of myself behind. I dedicate my story to any young person who has ever been mesmerized by a tale told around a campfire and left behind all that was familiar, believing they could become someone new. In 2020, I wrote an essay about my journey into and out of Hasidic/Yeshivish Orthodoxy. It appeared in Tablet Magazine during Pride Month. After reading it, literary agent Eric Myers encouraged me to tell the full story. What began as a memoir eventually became a novel. Seven years after I first began writing it, the manuscript won the 2025 Orison Fiction Prize. In the Dark, All Cats Are Gray will be published by Orison Books on February 2, 2027. All these years later, the people who know me; friends, neighbors, and colleagues from my years in corporate America, find it hard to believe that I was ever that person who wore a beard, payos, and black hat, associated with the most stringent of Orthodox communities. Looking back, I sometimes think of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz: arriving in a strange and astonishing world, discovering that it contained both beauty and peril, and eventually realizing that she wanted to go home. The lesson, for me, was much the same: Sometimes you have to leave home to find it. Told through the lens of an unreliable narrator named Herschel, my novel follows his journey into Orthodoxy and explores its mystical and messianic teachings, the profound kindness of those who guide him from a closeted adolescence into adulthood, and the increasingly complicated double life he leads. Throughout the novel, he struggles to reconcile his queerness with his longing for spiritual transcendence and confronts the price of belonging. It is a story about what happens when the life that was supposed to save you asks you to disappear. I'm excited to finally begin sharing this journey with you. In future newsletters, I'll share more of what I discovered about faith, identity, reinvention, and the price of belonging.
|
