REVIEWS & INTERVIEWS: MY GERMANY "There is an easy grace to this profoundly intense memoir about Raphael’s life of reconciliation. Born to survivors of the Holocaust, he shied away from their past, and for years loathed anything German—even a coffeemaker. Born to eastern European Jews, he shied away from the German Jews of his New York boyhood neighborhood—and for years suppressed his religious heritage. Born to be gay, he also shied away from his sexuality—in his late teens and early twenties, he slept with girls and defined himself for a spell as bisexual. With age came wisdom, introspection, and, most importantly the love of another man, a fellow Jew—a process that saw the author peel away the prisons of his past and emerge as a proud gay man, a proud Jew and, equally as liberating, a comfortable traveler to the country that decades earlier enslaved his parents and exterminated many of his relatives. Part genealogical study, part book tour travelogue and part coming-out account, Raphael’s stark portrayal of his religious, sexual and literary evolution is a compassionate record of one man’s several liberations." —Book Marks review by Richard Labonté     More books by Lev