King of Angels, a Novel about the Genesis of Identity and Belief

King of Angels is the coming-of-age story of Benjamin Rothberg, a 12-year-old master of "shape-shifting," of changing identities while steadfastly grasping the unique features of his own. The child of a marriage between a handsome Northern Jewish father and a classic-WASP-beauty Southern mother, Benjamin must change identities from Jewish to none-Jewish, from being a smart, precocious self-aware kid to masquerading and "passing" as a "regular guy" boy, from growing into a sexually curious (and possibly gay) young man to experiencing a fragile adolescent innocence, almost in love with a pretty girl. Set in Savannah, Georgia, during the tumultuous Kennedy years, King of Angels explores the role of Southern Jews in the still-segregated South, the explosive race relations and racial consciousness of this era, and the emergence of a genuine gay community with its own honest, outsider viewpoint. It is also a realistic story of the underground world of boys who must fool their parents and each other in order to achieve any form of unguarded closeness. As a "half-Jew" attending Holy Nativity, a Catholic military school in Savannah, Benjy also becomes aware of many forms of seduction and attraction: the seductions of a secret sexual life in the school, the seductions of his own heart taken with a handsome Puerto Rican male student, and the attractions of the Spirit in all of its revealed forms. This is a novel about the genesis of identity and belief itself, in a questioning heart and questioning time, while growing up in the changing South in the early 1960s.