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

Ann twevl-year-old Benjamin Rotheberg who lives in a marshy suburb of Savannah, Georgia, with 'the most ravishing name in the world,' the Isle of Hope, with his mother Caroline, a classically beautiful Southern WASP and his magnetic father Robby, a smark dark Sephardic-Jewish salemsan, is trying to figure out who he is.Benjamin must change idetities from beign a smart, precocious self-aware kid to masquerading and passing as a regular guy from growing into a sexually curious (and possibly gay) young man to expereince a fragile adolescent innocence and attraction to a pretty girl. Civl rights is catching fire, as another community - of bachelor men - is emerging as one to be despised or acknowelged. 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.1963. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

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