The Place Will Comfort You - by Naama Goldstein (Paperback)

About the Book

For fans of Nathan Englander and Allegra Goodman, this stunning and darkly comic debut collection is a richly detailed, lyrical and at times incendiary vision of the cultural collision between Israel and America.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Alice Munro Naama Goldstein's stories are a real gift-strong, original, unpredictable and captivating.

Anthony Doerr author of "The Shell Collector" and "About Grace" 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.

Grace Paley What fine, funny, serious stories!

Peter Ho Davies author of "The Ugliest House in the World" and "Equal Love" 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.

Alice Munro

Naama Goldstein's stories are a real gift-strong, original, unpredictable and captivating.

Anthony Doerr

author of "The Shell Collector" and "About Grace"

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.

Grace Paley

What fine, funny, serious stories!

Peter Ho Davies

author of "The Ugliest House in the World" and "Equal Love"

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.

Grace Paley

What fine, funny, serious stories!