BOOK REVIEW : For Strangers Born to the Same Parents : BECOMING BROTHERS <i> By Howard Waskow and Arthur Waskow</i> ; Free Press $22.95, 218 pages

“I really may have to kill you some day after all,” said Howard Waskow to his brother, Arthur, on a momentous day back in 1972.

Howard Waskow is a Gestalt therapist in Oregon. His older brother, Arthur, is the author of several influential books on the spiritual renewal of Judaism. And yet, at one terrifying moment, these two highly civilized men recognized in themselves a primitive rage that may be the real bond between brothers.

“Actually,” the brothers Waskow write in “Becoming Brothers,” “we are Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers--we have fear, disdain, and murder in our hearts.”

“Becoming Brothers” is the story of how the Waskow brothers came to rediscover each other, not merely as siblings but as symbols of love and loss, intimacy and estrangement, memory and identity. It’s an unsettling and often uncomfortable encounter that fundamentally challenges our comfortable assumptions about “brotherly love.”

Writing in separate passages and chapters, Arthur and Howard Waskow hark all the way back to their childhood on Cottage Avenue in Baltimore in the ‘40s. “We grew up inside a morality play,” recalls Howard, describing the supercharged moral environment of an immigrant Jewish household during World War II. “We were warned: ‘Be close to your brother above all!’ ”

What they recall, of course, are the assaults, betrayals and insults that are the raw material of sibling rivalry. Arthur--”Otts,” according to Howard’s mangled pronunciation--tricked his baby brother into inhaling a cigarette, tore up a cherished drawing of “Baseball Joe,” and generally terrorized his little brother.

“And once he spit right in my face, I can’t remember why,” writes Howard, still fuming over the ancient misdeed. “I hated him.”

Arthur, too, recalls the ways in which his brother wronged him. Arthur was blamed for the broken perfume bottle that Howard actually broke, and he could not understand why his little brother would not sit still and listen to his lecture on the royal genealogy of England. “I hated the day Howard was born,’ writes Arthur. “And the trouble didn’t stop there. It just got worse.”

Much of the book turns out to be an affectionate and unabashed memoir of school and synagogue, college and graduate school, military service, marriage and divorce, the lives and deaths of their mother and father. But the Waskows are also struggling to break out of the “conspiracy of silence” that has muted and obscured their memories, and--in a real sense--”Becoming Brothers” is their sometimes awkward and inelegant effort to find the answer to a crucial question: What bonds them as brothers, one to the other, besides the mere fact of their shared parentage?

“Two brothers from the same womb,” says Arthur over the grave of their mother, “so different.”

Arthur is pointedly cast in the role of Ishmael, the outcast son of the patriarch Abraham: “So we talked about how Howard had been the ‘good’ son, the one who behaved and who laughed and made sense to the family,” Arthur recalls, “while I had been the angry son.”

Howard, for his part, confesses that he played the role of the good son out of abject fear: “Who wanted storm and stress? Who wanted loneliness? Not me,” Howard explains. “I’d rather court the family, even if that meant not having my own voice. More than anything, I wanted in.”

As a result, Arthur and Howard remained at odds well into their adult lives, and they use “Becoming Brothers” to get through to each other at last. They talk out loud about their misgivings toward each other, about the book itself, about the whole enterprise of rediscovering and redefining themselves as brothers. Sometimes the dialogue is tense and awkward; sometimes it’s urgent and intimate, almost too intimate, as if we are eavesdropping on a therapy session.

“Suddenly, just now, I am remembering,” writes Arthur, addressing his departed mother, Honey. “Once you told me in a voice ashamed and sad that you could not nurse me. . . . I’m not blaming you for failing to feed me; it just didn’t happen. And now you can’t. But Howard can.”

“Becoming Brothers” does not end on a note of revelation or triumph--the brothers are still at odds. Significantly, the last exchange between Howard and Arthur Waskow--a cranky debate over the nature and content of their Jewishness--is yet another example of how they persist in missing the meanings in each other’s words.

“Why do you need to keep asking why?” writes “Otts” to his younger brother.

“You misremember, and misinterpret, too,” replies Arthur.

The final note rings true. The Waskows do not offer any cheerful prescriptions for achieving intimacy between siblings. Rather, they demonstrate the only way two human beings can ever make contact with one another: They keep crying out in the stubborn hope that, one day, they may hear each other.