Stories of Immigration with Leegant, Bukai, and Lev

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ABOUT THE BOOKS

Displaced PersonsSet half in Israel and half in the United States, the stories in this prize-winning collection explore the experience of exile, belonging, and what it means to call a place home. A visiting professor from Boston forms an unlikely bond with an Israeli born in Iraq. Two teenage tourists are startled out of their naivet in a restaurant in Jerusalem's Old City. A gifted yeshiva student spiraling into mental illness takes refuge in the poetry of Walt Whitman. An aged widower returns after sixty years to the Bronx neighborhood of his youth to make amends with a first love he abandoned to go to Pr*son. Shimmering with insight and compassion, Displaced Persons is a profound, exquisite collection that illuminates pivotal moments of transition, longing, and hope.

The Anatomy of ExileThe Abadi Family saga begins when a modern-day Romeo and Juliet story between a Palestinian and a Jew ends in predictable tragedy. The family flees to America to mend, but encounters only more turmoil that threatens to tear the family apart.

In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, Tamar Abadi's world collapses when her sister-in-law is killed in what appears to be a terror attack but what is really the result of a secret relationship with a Palestinian poet. Tamar's husband, Salim, is an Arab and a Jew. Torn between the two identities, and mourning his sister's death, he uproots the family and moves them to the US. As Tamar struggles to maintain the integrity of the family's Jewish Israeli identity against the backdrop of the American "melting pot" culture, a Palestinian family moves into the apartment upstairs and she is forced to reckon with her narrow thinking as her daughter falls in love with the Palestinian son. Fearing history will repeat itself, Tamar's determination to separate the two sets into motion a series of events that have the power to destroy her relationship with her daughter, her marriage, and the family she has worked so hard to protect.

This powerful debut novel explores Tamar's struggle to keep her family intact, to accept love that is taboo, and grapples with how exile forces us to reshape our identity in ways we could not imagine.

Bethlehem Road: Stories of Immigration and ExileFor fans of André Aciman, Omer Friedlander, and Ayelet Tsabari, these twelve stories convey the power, magic, and pain of place—one iconic street in Jerusalem where immigrants young and old struggle to find themselves.

Leaving one country for another, even if it is an immigrant’s choice, is never easy. The stories—often emotionally intense, sometimes funny—examine this truth as they render the experiences of twelve characters, most of whom immigrate to Jerusalem after the 1967 Six-Day War. All of them come to create new lives in an old homeland. Some succeed, but for most, the present and past collide, confounding and challenging attempts to create stability—like the young Reform Jew from Cincinnati craving an observant Orthodox lifestyle, or the woman from London who buys a home on Bethlehem Road, unaware of the political baggage it contains.

Each of the characters in these remarkable stories, from the pregnant Toronto woman who imagines giving birth to a savior, to the chiropractor from Newton, who takes his kids to watch the Passover slaughter of a lamb, comes to find that, after the initial excitement of falling in love with Israel, difficulties emerge. Being an immigrant is perpetual; you are always aware of loss and difference. Bethlehem Road, with its history, ethnic mosaic and vibrant urban setting, is the connecting thread in these tales—giving readers a chance to peek beyond its stone fences and glimpse the inner lives of the people who live there.

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