In 'The Tanteh,' a writer is cursed by his great aunt for telling her tale too faithfully. Polyglot, European, a figure of faded glamour, she`s Jewish in a secular, sophisticated way that`s alien to his family`s faith, one steeped in Passover Seders and Zionist politics. He considers his writing an act of love; she reads it as betrayal. Raphael (Writing a Jewish Life: Memoirs, 2005, etc.) is expert at conveying tension; each of these 25 stories is rich in ambivalence, and the lives they chronicle are all-too-human—messy, real and fired with uneasy desire. 'Betrayed by David Bowie' finds a college-kid narrator, comfortable with his homosexuality, drawn to a Franco Nero lookalike who`s ambivalent about his.

Their bond is a shared passion for David Bowie, then at the height of his Ziggy Stardust persona. As the years pass, AIDS and the more prosaic post-`70s zeitgeist intervene, leaving the narrator bereft, reading interviews in which Bowie disowns his gender-bending self. In 'Welcome to Beth Homo,' a Hillel student fantasizes about an all-gay synagogue while dealing with furtive self-loathing. 'A New Light' features a reporter at a Jewish newspaper combating a highbrow senior writer`s contempt for Yiddish. Conflating graphic sex scenes with Holocaust memories and epiphanies of self-discovery, Raphael writes from a highly distinctive perspective: a compassionate celebrant of souls squeezed by mainstream pressures and fighting for pride.

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