The Place Will Comfort You: Stories

By Naama Goldstein

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1416578676
• ISBN13: 9781416578673
• Release Date: September 2007
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.53 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Beautiful, evocative, witty short stories...

Naama Goldstein's The Place Will Comfort You is full of humorous, mesmerizing stories centered on the cultural differences between Israel and America. Each story is strong and stands on its own. I finished this collection last night, yet am still thinking about these stories. In most cases, I find a short story is an instance of excellent writing that somehow lacks the power and force of a novel, but in Goldstein's case, all of these stories have tremendous power, even more than your average 400-page long novel. My favorite stories are "A Pillar of a Cloud," "A Verse in the Margins," and "The Conduct of Consoling." Each story has a touch of earnest humor coupled with deceptively simple prose. The combination was irresistible and I couldn't put this book down. This is an impressive debut effort from a promising author. I highly recommend this collection, even if you tend to shy away from short stories. I for one love short stories and these are as good as they get. They are not to be missed.

San Francisco Chronicle, Sun. 5/30/04

Books in Brief/ Amy WesterveltWhat usually comes of writerly attempts to mix fiction and nonfiction is a hybrid that's not much good on either count -- too dry to make for good fiction, too fluffy to work as nonfiction. All of which makes Naama Goldstein's first collection of short stories, "The Place Will Comfort You," a real accomplishment. Not only does she do an admirable job of blending engaging narrative with political commentary, she does it over and over again in eight charming stories. An Israeli American writer, Goldstein's stories follow American Jews to Israel and back again, chronicles the Israeli relationship with American Jews and vice versa, and tells the universal story of the foreigner looking for comfort in a strange land. Goldstein writes vividly, showing the insanity of war through little things like an Israeli child's fear of an Arabic food vendor or a detailed description of the new, iron-clad, blast-resistant doors that are all the rage in Tel Aviv. The stories get progressively less linear and culminate in the transcription of a conversation between two acquaintances, a man and a woman who had been neighbors in Israel and are now both living near Boston. The conversation happens in disjointed spurts, but it's the overall feeling of it, not the content, that's important here. Neither seems exactly sane, but they get each other in some way, which leaves us with a sort of sad hope -- these people with no home can at least find a sense of comfort in each other.