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.