
Description
Set 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 naiveté 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 prison. Shimmering with insight and compassion, Displaced Persons is a profound, exquisite collection that illuminates pivotal moments of transition, longing, and hope.
Product Details
Publisher | New American Press |
Publish Date | June 01, 2024 |
Pages | 316 |
Language | English |
Type | |
EAN/UPC | 9781941561324 |
Dimensions | 8.0 X 5.3 X 0.7 inches | 0.8 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
"These stories are somehow both tender and tough: while never sentimental, they have a clear-eyed vision of those who have been displaced, unhoused, and dispossessed. Though often wry and witty, they recognize the cost of anybody's personal history--Israeli, Jewish American, European--and those who must pay when the bill comes due. Joan Leegant writes eloquently about families, and she has a genius for portraying children and young adults. This book is beautiful and wonderfully readable. I loved it."
- CHARLES BAXTER
author of The Sun Collective and The Feast of Love
"With all the wit, wisdom, and sexy humor of Malamud and Paley at their best, Leegant leads us through the cockeyed complexities of contemporary Jewish life in Israel and America. Who is displaced and who at home? What makes a family a family? You will find yourself thinking about these elegant, heartbreakingly true stories for a very long time ... and recommending them to all your friends."
-EILEEN POLLACK
author of Maybe It's Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman and The Professor of Immortality
"Displaced Persons is a stunning collection of literary excellence. Each story tackles the enormous questions of the human experience and is masterfully rendered in beautiful, affecting prose."
- WEIKE WANG
author of Chemistry and Joan Is Okay
"What does it mean to be unsettled, to be neither here nor there? This is the question that animates Joan Leegant's uncannily sharp-eyed story collection Displaced Persons; caught between cultures, generations, geographies, and realities, her protagonists stumble into danger and emerge with desperate insight. The ground underneath this phenomenal book is both unsteady-moving in every sense of the word-and richly fertile."
- DAVID EBENBACH
author of Miss Portland and The Guy We Didn't Invite to the Orgy and Other Stories
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