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.

What fine, funny, serious stories!

author of The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love

In these slyly poignant stories of the restless and rootless — immigrants who act like expatriates, emigrants who feel like exiles — Naama Goldstein forges an art of alienation.

author of The Shell Collector and About Grace

Naama Goldstein's characters inch along tightropes stretched over middle grounds — between cultures, between menace and safety, obedience and defiance — and those symmetries are further charged by the gravity of a distant but relentless political context. This book is unnerving, arresting and, ultimately, very relevant.

Naama Goldstein's stories are a real gift-strong, original, unpredictable and captivating.

The Conduct for Consoling

The Verse in the Margins

Pickled Sprouts

A Pillar of a Cloud

The Roberto Touch

Anatevka Tender

Barbary Apes

The Worker Rests Under the Hero Trees