Becoming Brothers

     ...familiar to almost everyone who has a sibling. They are heightened and dramatized in the tale of Cain and Abel, which like other stories in the Bible speaks to us of universal themes in human life. Howard and Arthur Waskow grew up as brothers in a quiet Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore during the 1940s. In this unusually honest book they demonstrate that powerful emotions such as these do lie beneath the surface of everyday family life. As with many siblings, behind a superficial layer of civility their relationship was distant, competitive, antagonistic; their conflict extended well into their adult years. Eventually their divorces, their mother's final illness, and their own desire to change brought them toward one another. Wary at first, they set out on a journey of discovery and recovery that was helped to completion by the need to care for their aging father, and by the collaborative writing of this book. Becoming Brothers is uniquely both a record and an instrument of this deliberate and painful

     ...other stories in the Bible speaks to us of universal themes in human life. Howard and Arthur Waskow grew up as brothers in a quiet Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore during the 1940s. In this unusually honest book they demonstrate that powerful emotions such as these do lie beneath the surface of everyday family life. As with many siblings, behind a superficial layer of civility their relationship was distant, competitive, antagonistic; their conflict extended well into their adult years. Eventually their divorces, their mother's final illness, and their own desire to change brought them toward one another. Wary at first, they set out on a journey of discovery and recovery that was helped to completion by the need to care for their aging father, and by the collaborative writing of this book. Becoming Brothers is uniquely both a record and an instrument of this deliberate and painful reconciliation. In alternating chapters, these brothers reconstruct their struggle piece by piece, crossing back through years

     ...their feelings of friendship and brotherhood....