The Meaning of Home 

Is home a place, a feeling, a family? In her insightful new story collection Displaced Persons (New American Press, $18), Joan Leegant explores displacement from every angle, with emphasis on the contemporary Jewish experience in Israel and the United States. The book is divided into two halves—East (Israel) and West (the United States)—and Leegant brings personal experience to both. An American who has traveled the U.S. to teach at Harvard, Oklahoma State, and Cornish College in Seattle, she also spent five years as visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv. Leegant is a skilled short story writer and novelist whose first collection, An Hour in Paradise, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, one of America’s most prestigious Jewish literary honors. Displaced Persons won the New American Fiction Prize. 

The first half of the book, East, comprises seven stories set in Israel; many of the protagonists are Americans. In “Beautiful Souls,” two vacationing teen girls find themselves accidentally alone in Jerusalem’s Arab shuk, the street market. In “The Baghdadi,” an American expat professor is befriended by a man who’s been in Israel for 50 years yet is still referred to by where he came from. The displaced persons of these stories include Russian cleaning women, Philippine caregivers, African refugees. 

But they also include seemingly displaced Israeli natives: a woman treading carefully through step-motherhood (in “Wonder Women”), a previously secular young man seeking post-army healing in the ultra-religious Haredi community (in “The Eleventh Happiest Country”). 

The Holocaust hovers over these stories. After World War II, more than a quarter of a million Jews lived in displaced persons camps in Europe, many awaiting emigration to the soon-to-be established State of Israel. In the title story the Israeli Segalit begs her neighbor, a visiting American, to explain to her mother, a Holocaust survivor, that her son wants to move to Germany. “Can you picture me telling this to my mother?” Segalit bemoans in this tragically timely piece. She fears it will be impossible for her mother to comprehend that her son thinks Germany, now offering passports for Jews stripped of citizenship during World War II, is suddenly “a place to go if Israel is wiped off the map by Hamas or Hezbollah or Iran… a safe haven for Jews.” 

The characters of the seven stories set in the West, in America, are displaced in less obvious ways. In “The Natural World,” a woman wonders if her marriage will survive a cross-country family trip for her husband’s sabbatical. In “The Innocent,” an old man returns to the Bronx after sixty years to search for the woman he didn’t marry. 

These Americans are not religious— they eat bread on Passover—yet they contemplate Judaism and sometimes feel out of place as Jews. In “Roots,” eighty-two-year-old Hirschman, “a lifelong agnostic,” surprisingly reconnects with his grown daughter over Hanukkah candles. Several of these Americans struggle with mental illness—their own (Frannie, the narrator of “After”) or their children’s (Gina, of “Hunters and Gatherers,” whose troubled son lives in her basement, eating “only what people ate ten thousand years ago”). Here, the unsteady ground of internal landscapes is its own form of displacement. 

Many of the women in these stories— both East and West—have been abandoned by philandering husbands (the Americans transplanted to Israel in both “The Baghdadi” and “Displaced Persons”) or by husbands who have simply gone missing (the iron-willed grandmother at a Connecticut family dinner in “Wild Animals”). These characters are displaced not just geographically, but emotionally. As the Baghdadi says, “There are many kinds of exile.” 

One memorable story in the book, “Remittances,” features a young American eager for Israeli citizenship, yet fearful to reveal the tragic crime back home that sent her fleeing overseas. When her Israeli boyfriend’s pals scoff at her as a soft American, he defends her by saying: “It takes guts to go where you can’t speak the language or get a job or find your way if you get lost.” 

All the characters in this remarkably varied yet stunningly cohesive collection are lost, learning a new language, finding their way. 

Elizabeth Edelglass is a fiction writer, poet, book reviewer and retired Director of the Jewish Community Library of Greater New Haven.