News from the New American Diaspora, Literary Modernism

“[W]andering Jews stray far from their geographical, cultural and spiritual homes . . . [in] an evocative collection from a confident storyteller” (Publishers Weekly).

Prize-winning novelist Jay Neugeboren’s third collection of short stories focuses on Jews in various states of exile and expatriation—strangers in strange lands, far from home. These dozen tales, by an author whose stories have been selected for more than fifty anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories, span the twentieth century and vividly capture brief moments in the lives of their characters: a rabbi in a small town in New England struggling to tend to his congregation and himself, retirees who live in Florida but dream of Brooklyn, a boy at a summer camp in upstate New York learning about the Holocaust for the first time, Russians living in Massachusetts with the family who helped them immigrate, an American soldier as he grieves for members of his family murdered in a Nazi death camp.

These are just a sampling of the lives illuminated in this moving collection. Set in various times and places, these poignant stories are all tales of personal exile that also illuminate that greater diaspora—geographical, emotional, or spiritual—in which many of us, whether Jews or non-Jews, live.

“[A] brilliant collection.” ―The Jewish Advocate

“From the opening pages, the stories never cease to startle us, and they force us to rethink who we are in this strange new century of ours when all of us are adrift.” —Jerome Charyn, award-winning author of Big Red