Homeland Security?

By CAROLINE LEAVITT

The Place Will Comfort You
By Naama Goldstein
224 pages. Scribner. $22.

A mother who sees her son go insane in the Lebanon War and retreats to an American condo. An American expatriate trying to find love with an Israeli cranberry expert who might have rescued her as a child. A little girl helping out in a foreign kitchen, terrified she might be forced to eat a food she doesn't know and may not like. Young, wandering Jews adrift in Israel or lost in America, all struggling with changing mores and cultural conflicts. Welcome to the world of Naama Goldstein, and what a world it is: lyrical, darkly funny, and alive.

Goldstein writes radiant stories about just what it means to embrace or struggle with your culture. They ask, Can you be as Jewish in an Israeli kibbutz as you are in suburban America? Or is the American dream of a two-car garage and gated home just a way-station for your true destiny in Israel? Where, indeed, can Jewish people feel most and forever at home, or is the idea of a true Jewish state simply more of an elusive state of mind?

In one of the stories, “A Pillar of A Cloud,” Goldstein gives us a young woman visiting her Israeli cousins, but neither she nor her relatives seem able to fit into the others’ world—especially when she insists on giving a Sloppy Joe sandwich to a young Arab construction worker. The most brilliant of the stories, “The Verse In The Margins,” turns this idea on its head. Mr. Durchschlag is a European Jew teaching at a religious Israeli high school, who prides himself on his propriety and piety. Unsettled by the changing mores of his charges, what he calls the “compromised Jews,” he focuses on one particular good girl, a brand-new student who has, to his eagle eyes, “becomes a displayer.” Arriving modest and unadorned, she soon becomes tainted by the permissive Israeli culture, turning up in class spangled with... earrings! Durchschlag grows so increasingly incensed by her that he humiliates her and sends her out of his class. But when she goes missing, he sets off on a desperate search to bring her back, and instead, to his astonishment, finds an arrogant prostitute. She’s the epitome of his worst nightmare, the new world trussed up in flimsy clothes and provocative perfume, and she’s determined to give him some “new ideas.” Instead, though, she steals his wallet—and his certainty about his own self worth.

Goldstein writes in sparkling, funny, and syncopated prose. Images pop. Words bristle with meaning. “The descent” means going to live in America, a disappointing downward journey, but Jews “ascend” to Israel, as if to Heaven. And Goldstein, a Boston writer who grew up in an Israeli community, knows and understands firsthand what this all truly means.  “We thought we were ascenders for life. We were never sufficiently absorbed. We left and now we’re here and not there,” says one character in “The Worker Rests Under The Hero Tree.”

There’s a long tradition of short story collections which involve variations of the same theme, and Goldstein’s debut is particularly noteworthy. There’s no denying the brilliance of her writing, like the bright splash of pennies, or her command of character. Like a fugue, the stories all revolve around dislocation, most featuring conflicted girls on the cusp of womanhood or Jews wandering back and forth through their heritage and modern life.  It’s a great starting place for a first-time author, but because many of the characters are so intriguing, and so beautifully rendered, I wanted to know more about them. I wanted to experience more of their lives and conflicts than a short story could provide. Perhaps it’s my own preference for the breadth and scope and depth of the novel form, but I somehow can’t help hoping the supremely talented Ms. Goldstein will next turn her prodigious gifts towards the genre of Dickens and Tolstoy.