Jewish author Michael Lowenthal sits with complexity in new book ‘Place Envy’

It’s not every day that a writer coins a new phrase, but Michael Lowenthal does just that with “Place Envy.” Lowenthal spent his early life in Lima, Peru, then Princeton, New Jersey, and then most of his teen years outside of Washington, D.C., but he and his family never truly “settled” anywhere.

“I was so envious of people who were, like, eighth-generation farmers, or let’s say someone who has a strong Yinzer accent, or Scottish people who had clan tartans, or even people who had summered at the same cottage in Maine every year,” Lowenthal said. He termed this feeling of jealousy toward the tethered “place envy,” and it’s the subject of a new collection of essays Lowenthal compiled about his years traveling in search of his Jewish identity, his sexuality and his deeper sense of self.

The author will host a free launch event for the book on Thursday, June 11, at 7 p.m. at the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall.

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Lowenthal’s grandparents were Holocaust refugees from Germany but rarely spoke about their experiences. When Lowenthal visited Germany, he expected to have a profound experience, but didn’t expect to find something that would trigger inspiration to write a book. In a Jewish cemetery, he saw the grave site of two young men who died within a couple of days of each other, with long poems written on their headstones.

“I was trying to figure out who they were and what these were about, and the translator seemed reluctant to say anything,” he recalled. “I asked him what the poems were about, and he was like ‘well … friendship. They were really close friends.’ All my Spidey senses and gaydar went off.”

That moment allowed Lowenthal to begin working through a question he’d had since his adolescence: “If I’m gay, does that mean I’m betraying my Jewish identity?”

Around the same time that Lowenthal came out, a cousin he was close to became baal teshuva and moved from more secular Conservative Judaism to Orthodoxy. “He and I are in our own personal way played out this conflict — or seeming conflict — between religiosity and queerness,” Lowenthal said. The thought that Jews of the past may also have had same-sex relationships moved him, and he delved into research about the two young men’s lives, which make up one essay in “Place Envy.”

“As a writer, I have some worries about memoir, that at its worst, it can be an exercise in navel-gazing. I really wanted parts of this book to be outward looking as well, looking at other people’s stories and other people’s lives,” Lowenthal said.

For people whose stories are culturally, nationally, or religiously multifaceted, it can be tempting to simplify parts of the story. “Place Envy” embraces complexity and rejects a single identity or single narrative.

The book also doesn’t wrap up Lowenthal’s feelings of placelessness with a neat bow. Writing “Place Envy” forced Lowenthal to reflect on his years of traveling and ask himself what he was searching for. He lived in Amish country and played jazz with Sun Ra, but none of those experiences provided him the rooted sense of place he was searching for. In the end, it’s a void that no amount of introspection can truly fill, and Lowenthal has tried to be honest about that in his work. Rather than fight it, he embraces sitting at the intersection of multiples.

He calls “Place Envy” a book about “orientation” in reference to the parlance of referring to sexuality as “sexual orientation.” When he taught orienteering in the woods, he would ask his students to triangulate and orient themselves, and he’s now done the same with his identity, starting at one place and orienting himself around it.

Though he’s explored many of the same questions in the five novels he’s published, “Place Envy” is his first work of nonfiction.

“I really loved the challenge of writing a memoir. In a way, it was a relief after writing fiction,” Lowenthal said. “One of the hardest parts about fiction to me is making choices that have no definitive right answer. If you’re imagining the character and the character has to decide to quit their job, get married, those choices can be paralyzing. Writing memoir, what happened is what happened.”

It’s also easier to write about the past because it’s in the rearview mirror.

“I have a great life, I have a great relationship with my family, I’ve been happily openly queer for 40 years. They’re not raw wounds anymore. The interesting thing for me was relaxing into enjoying my various experiences. I still love traveling, I love meeting different people and cultures, but I don’t feel like I have that franticness I did then,” he said.

After all of this traveling, Lowenthal ended up in Pittsburgh for love — as many people do —after meeting a ceramic artist living and working in the city. He’s still a relatively new Pittsburgher, but Pittsburgh has a chance to get to know his work, when he debuts “Place Envy” at the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall event.

“I would hope that readers are challenged and inspired to go through the ‘orientation’ process in their own life and really examine who they are and how they acted,” Lowenthal said.

“My own orientation to the world is that I like to seek out different places, different people and different experiences, and that’s how I make sense of my own identity and my own story. I’m never going to arrive at a place and say that’s it. Storytelling itself is where I really belong.” PJC

Emma Riva is a freelance writer living in Pittsburgh.