Free All I Love and Know by Judith Frank

Ilana, having come to Jerusalem to interview and shadow an alumnus who was now a member of the Knesset. At the time, Noam was tiny and Ilana was staying home with him, and Daniel, pulling some of his tastiest recipes out of his hat, cooked for her and Joel and Gal to great applause. It was the best time he’d ever had with his brother. They’d spent much of their lives pulled away from each other in the interest of differentiation, beginning in high school, where being referred to as “one of the Rosen twins” had been a dagger in the heart of teenage boys trying to define themselves. They scoffed at the clichéd schemes people liked to egg them on to do, like switching classes to fool the teacher, or taking each other’s exams, and when they co-won the senior prize for best student in English, having to share the prize ruined it for them both. When Joel started getting good at track, Daniel quit sports altogether and began focusing on music, becoming first violinist in the regional youth orchestra and picking up acoustic guitar. They thought of themselves as anti-twins, and during college, where they split up for the first time—Joel to Princeton and Daniel to Oberlin—they invented the semifacetious idea of twinsism : the act of stereotyping or fetishizing twins, into which fell such things as Doublemint commercials, fantasizing about having sex with twins, Mengele’s experiments on twins, and Diane Arbus photographs.
    They spent their junior year in the same overseas program in Jerusalem, deciding, after many negotiations, that after two years apart they could risk venturing into a program that put them in the same place. They lived in the dormitories up on Mount Scopus that looked out over the pale hills all around, which were attached by bus route to the small neighborhood of Givat Tzarfatit and then to the great apartment buildings of Ramat Eshkol. That was Daniel’s mental map of the area in which he had lived. It was only much later that his reading brought to his attention that this area was surrounded by Arab villages and a large Palestinian refugee camp. They had been utterly invisible to him.
    It was a year of great transformation for them both. They had grown up in a Jewish suburb of Chicago and had spent summers at a Jewish camp they both adored, where they had learned Hebrew and had Israeli counselors, and been steeped in Israeli culture. For Joel, there was a deep feeling of coming home. He lucked out by having a genial and outgoing roommate, and he became friends with his group of friends, thereby winning the unspoken contest in his program for best assimilation into Israeli culture.
    For Daniel, the feeling of living in Israel was harder to describe. He had been struggling to accept that he was gay, and when he looked back on it years later, he realized that going to Israel was an attempt to shore up his manhood, which felt compromised among his sexually active college friends. But instead, aroused by sensory Israel—the heady sunshine and cool mountain air of Jerusalem, warm challah and harsh coffee, beautiful men in sandals or in uniform, the language that brought his teeth, palate, throat, and tongue into a new, more vigorous rapport—he was certain for the first time that he was gay. He was also sure that he was the only gay man in his entire acquaintance, and was terrified that anyone would find out.
    His own roommate was a neuroscience major who spent most of his time in the lab, and to whom Daniel had nothing to say. During those long, lonely days, he’d sit in his crummy dorm room, listening to Israeli music, learning the chords on his guitar, and then poring over the dictionary to learn the words, many of which came in elevated or archaic constructions. It was how he learned Hebrew, and to this day he loved Israeli folk music: it was hardwired in him as surely as Beatles tunes were, so that when he died and they autopsied his brain, they’d find a