{"id":39715,"date":"2025-11-20T15:26:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T15:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/39715\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T15:26:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T15:26:09","slug":"book-review-the-street-where-they-live","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/39715\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review | The Street Where They Live"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bethlehem Road: Stories of Immigration and Exile<\/a>
By Judy Lev
She Writes Press, 260 pp.<\/p>\n

Since ancient times, Bethlehem Road has spanned the six-mile distance between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. In the Bible, Jacob and Rachel travel along it, Rachel dying in childbirth on the way (Genesis 35). Later, Joseph and Mary follow the same route (Luke 2). Today, you can walk its length in less than half an hour, starting near the southwestern corner of the Old City and ending at a Sonol gas station on Hebron Road, not far from the concrete separation barrier that marks the border between Israel and the occupied West Bank.<\/p>\n

As in Sherwood Anderson\u2019s Winesburg, Ohio<\/a> or James Joyce\u2019s Dubliners<\/a>, the 12 short stories in Judy Lev\u2019s vibrant new collection, Bethlehem Road<\/a>, are linked by a common setting: in this case the one-third-mile stretch of Bethlehem Road in the West Jerusalem neighborhood known as Baka. One of the first developments built outside the Old City walls in the late 1800s, Baka has evolved over the years, going from a wealthy Arab enclave in the 1920s, to a gritty quarter occupied by displaced Jews from the Middle East and Europe in the 1950s, to the upscale \u201cmulticultural city-burb\u201d it is today. Lev\u2019s wise and witty stories trace the lives and struggles of Baka\u2019s denizens over the three decades following the 1967 Six-Day War: their hopes and delusions, love and pain. Whimsical snapshots of minor characters such as Ovadia the falafel shack owner, Uri the Egged Tours guide and Herzl the vegetable guy are interposed between the stories, completing the \u201cneighborhood tour.\u201d<\/p>\n

The young North American immigrants portrayed in Lev\u2019s stories make aliyah out of religious zeal, Zionist idealism and, above all, a yearning to create a meaningful Jewish life. As 21-year-old Chicago native John\/Yonatan declares in the opening story, \u201cIngathering of an Exile\u201d: \u201cI wanted to be a player, an actor on the stage, to take part in the miracle, not just watch from the sidelines\u2026I wanted to build a new life in an old language. I wanted to forfeit the expected trajectory and to dive into the unknown.\u201d Like ordinary people everywhere, Lev\u2019s characters marry, have children, cope with illness and divorce. Yet they do so in ways that are uniquely shaped by this most un-ordinary place.<\/p>\n

Eschewing the rags-to-riches narrative of Jewish-American immigrant fiction, Lev\u2019s stories are not concerned with assimilation or with the generational conflict between the old world and the new. These olim, or immigrants, are not refugees fleeing poverty and persecution.<\/p>\n

Rather, they are idealists struggling toward self-realization, dreamers seeking to write the authentic stories of their lives. Lev dramatizes this yearning in compelling and inventive ways. In \u201cIngathering of an Exile,\u201d for example, John sees an explosion as a black cloud of smoke \u201cin the shape of a samech.\u201d A gate looks like a chet, a birthmark like a yud. He sees \u201cgimmels, vavs, mems, and heys, the letters engraved in [his] skin.\u201d Like a Kabbalist vision, the letters of the Hebrew alphabet spell out his future: the realization that Israel, not America, is the place where he will make his home.<\/p>\n

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Many of Lev\u2019s characters, brought up as Reform Jews in America, are drawn to the Holy City by dreams of leading a religious life. With a wink to Isaac Bashevis Singer\u2019s \u201cGimpel the Fool\u201d and the simpletons of Chelm, Lev pokes gentle fun at pious excess. \u201cSimon, the Tale of an Aspiring Jew,\u201d for example, gives us a young man seeking spiritual enlightenment by studying the Idiot\u2019s Guide to the Talmud, Part I and burying himself in the sand. In \u201cThe First Pregnancy in Jerusalem,\u201d Canadian Helen Mor-Haim has a vision of Mary and Joseph walking with a donkey along Bethlehem Road and decides she is going to give birth to the Messiah. In \u201cEvery Man a Lamb,\u201d chiropractor Dick Coen forces his children to watch the bloody slaughter of a paschal lamb by a Moroccan neighbor who lives across the street. \u201cDispersion: A Tale\u201d offers a funny, modern-day twist on the biblical stories of Joseph and his brothers and the sacrifice of Isaac.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the violent reality of what Israelis call \u201cthe situation\u201d (hamatzav) is woven into the fabric of these stories\u2014mostly in the background, but omnipresent nonetheless. The collection opens with an explosion that signals the moment Israel regains control of the Old City at the end of the 1967 war. The victory, of course, does not bring peace. In the stories that follow, a son serving in the army is killed by a sniper in Ramallah. A woman\u2019s fianc\u00e9 is horrifically injured after the bus he is riding in is blown up by a suicide bomber. A husband returning from the front in Lebanon suffers a breakdown from post-traumatic stress. The older residents of Baka are Holocaust survivors and refugees. As one character says: \u201cEveryone here has a war story.\u201d For Jews in Israel, Lev suggests, there is no escaping the violence of either the present or the past.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most moving story in the collection, \u201cLaw of Return,\u201d is also the most political. In 1970, a young American, Laura, is about to buy a run-down flat at 49 Bethlehem Road. The flat is in an old stone house with two tall date palms in the front, entwined by grapevines, \u201cmeter-and-a-half thick walls\u2026arched entranceways\u2026huge windows and high ceilings.\u201d An hour before she is to close on the purchase, however, an older gentleman knocks at the door.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy name is Abu Yusef,\u201d the man says. \u201cMy father owns this house.\u201d Indeed, his father built it. Lev portrays the heartbreaking situation\u2014Laura\u2019s dreams and helplessness, Abu Yusef\u2019s loss and grief\u2014with empathy. The story\u2019s ending complicates any easy equations of guilt or justice. As Abu Yusef says to Laura, \u201cThere are no victors in war. There is only pain. Everyone loses.\u201d<\/p>\n

The richly layered stories of Bethlehem Road<\/a> offer a necessary counterpoint to the simplistic and often-biased portrayals of Israel since the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza. They offer a glimpse into what life in Israel has been like over the past 50 years, and into what it means to try to build a life.<\/p>\n

Margot Singer is professor of English and director of creative writing at Denison University.<\/p>\n

Moment Magazine participates in the Amazon Associates program and earns money from qualifying purchases.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bethlehem Road: Stories of Immigration and ExileBy Judy LevShe Writes Press, 260 pp. Since ancient times, Bethlehem Road…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39716,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[153,155,154,24109,5061,24110,24111],"class_list":["post-39715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-book-review","tag-israel","tag-judy-lev","tag-short-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}