THE PLACE WILL COMFORT YOU Scribner/May 2004 From the book cover: "Naama Goldstein's stories are a real gift. Strong, original, unpredictable, captivating." -- Alice Munro, author of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage "What fine, funny, serious stories!" -- Grace Paley, author of The Collected Stories "Naama Goldstein's characters inch along tightropes stretched over middle grounds--between cultures, between menace and safety, obedience and defiance -- and those symmetries are further charged by the gravity of a distant but relentless political context. This book is unnerving, arresting, and, ultimately, very relevant." -- Anthony Doerr, author of The Shell Collector "In these slyly poignant stories of the restless and rootless -- immigrants who act like expatriates, emigrants who feel like exiles -- Naama Goldstein forges an art of alienation." -- Peter Ho Davies, author of Equal Love
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 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. The brilliantly observed and haunting stories of The Place Will Comfort You illuminate the cultural divide between American and Israeli Jews -- and the difficulties of moving between these two vastly different worlds. The Place Will Comfort You has been honored as a finalist in the 2004 Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction.
Story Excerpt: The Conduct For Consoling New material will be added now and again.
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