Goyhood by Reuven Fenton (Central Avenue Publishing)

Poor Mayer (formerly Marty) Belkin. The Brooklyn-based Talmud scholar has received a call that his estranged mother, Ida Mae, has killed herself with a combination of pills and liquor. Now, almost 30 years after leaving his secular home for yeshiva, he must return to his birthplace in small-town Georgia to make funeral arrangements and deal with the shenanigans of his freewheeling twin brother, David.

But that’s not all. Mayer soon learns a whopper of a long-held lie: In her suicide note, Ida Mae confesses that she was not Jewish through matrilineal descent, as she had always told her boys. Rather, her own mother, the twins’ grandmother, was an antisemite and her great-grandfather a “Nazi of some kind.”

What’s a yeshiva prodigy to do? After studying Jewish texts faithfully for decades, marrying into a rabbinic family and leading a pious, ultra-Orthodox life, Mayer believes himself trapped in a “goyhood”—a fraud, a poseur and someone who has desecrated all that had been sacred to him by following Jewish laws that were not rightfully his. He will have to undergo a traditional Orthodox conversion to Judaism before he goes back to his wife and family, to become what he had always, on the most visceral level, believed himself to be.

Before that happens, though, writer Fenton takes the brothers on a riotous, tongue-in-cheek romp of a road trip through the American South. Along the way, they re-engage as siblings, explore the contours of grief, consider the meaning of genuine reverence and, perhaps most importantly for Mayer—whose childhood obsession was the Field Guide to the Birds of North America—immerse themselves in the majesty of the natural environment.

Fenton, a longtime reporter for the New York Post, has a journalist’s knack for detail. In Goyhood, his debut novel, he puts that asset to good use, particularly when describing Mayer’s delight in reacquainting himself with birdwatching. The author also does something clever and counterintuitive. Think how often Jewish characters in literature have hidden their identities, pretending to be Christian or trying to blend in with the scenery. Fenton turns this plot device on its head, creating a Christian character who wants more than anything to be seen and known as Jewish.

Mayer and David’s road trip is fascinating, funny and soulful. Readers will want to join them for the entire journey.

Robert Nagler Miller writes frequently about the arts, literature and Jewish themes from his home near New York City.