RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksKoestenbaum takes advantage of the linguistic slippages between filial devotion and romantic devotion, finding pleasure in the salvific language that so often surfaces during the sexual act ... In My Lover, the Rabbi, the quest to understand the loved object’s inner life (and, as it were, inner organs) takes on a Talmudic quality in and of itself. The anal gives way to the annal: that is, the rabbi’s sexual sojourns become an archive through which the narrator can inspect, pontificate, interpret, conjecture, and discourse, echoing the very foundations of Jewish thought itself.
