The Place Will Comfort You
Stories
-
- £0.99
-
- £0.99
Publisher Description
Intelligent, evocative and darkly comic, Naama Goldstein's collection introduces a remarkable talent. In these sharply focused stories, the line between nation and self is as elusive as the distinction between past and present, fear and desire, the real and the imagined.
Against a backdrop that spans from the Galilean wilderness to midtown Manhattan, and from the 1970s to the present, the inhabitants of these stories struggle to feel at home in foreign and sometimes unwelcoming lands. In "A Pillar of a Cloud," a young American babysitting her Israeli cousins scandalizes the children when she invites an Arab roofer for dinner. "The Worker Rests Under the Hero Trees" features a twenty-something Israeli expatriate vying for romance with a childhood hero turned cranberry expert. "Anatevka Tender" stands on a fault line between ideologies as a mother who blames herself for her elder son's battle shock following the Lebanon War resettles her children in the suburban safety of an East Coast condo.
The brilliantly observed and haunting stories of The Place Will Comfort You illustrate the cultural divide between American and Israeli Jews -- and the difficulties of moving between these two vastly different worlds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in Israel and suburban America, this funny, moving debut collection mines the rich complexities of cultural dislocation in the idiom of in between. "I know I understand with the full feeling of living life that you can be of one place and another, not at all the same," says the bilingual third-grade narrator of "The Conduct for Consoling." Goldstein, an American who grew up in Israel, writes eloquently of the longing for home, evoking the material differences between her two countries with a few telling details: a certain breakfast cereal, a prime-time television program or a tiled floor. America both entices and disturbs the Israeli children in "A Pillar of a Cloud," who glimpse it through a visiting cousin casually offering a Sloppy Joe sandwich to an Arab worker. In scenes like these, Goldstein depicts a loaded situation with unexpected originality through her artfully off-kilter syntax and whimsical characters, both insightful and self-deluded. In "A Verse in the Margins," Goldstein conjures the misguided high school teacher Mr. Durchschlag in a single sentence: "With every unclish wink to every blush of theirs the world revolved more steadily, the proper ratio of this to that restored." Even the most limited characters in these eight stories are likable: Shulee, the rebellious Israeli teen in "The Roberto Touch," remains sympathetic though she behaves badly on a school trip. As generous as it is unsentimental, this resonant collection captivates and provokes.