by Joan Leegant
Join us on Thursday, August 22 at 7 PM ET, as author Joan Leegant discusses her award-winning collection of short stories, Displaced Persons, with Hadassah Magazine Executive Editor Lisa Hostein. Exquisitely written, with half the stories set in cosmopolitan and multifaceted Israel and the other half among Jewish families in the United States, the collection explores moment of transition and wandering, joy and homecoming. Free and open to all.
Set half in Israel and half in the United States, the stories in this prize-winning collection explore the experience of exile, belonging, and what it means to call a place home. A visiting professor from Boston forms an unlikely bond with an Israeli born in Iraq. Two teenage tourists are startled out of their naiveté in a restaurant in Jerusalem’s Old City. A gifted yeshiva student spiraling into mental illness takes refuge in the poetry of Walt Whitman. An aged widower returns after sixty years to the Bronx neighborhood of his youth to make amends with a first love he abandoned to go to prison. Shimmering with insight and compassion, Displaced Persons is a profound, exquisite collection that illuminates pivotal moments of transition, longing, and hope.