Bethlehem Road: Stories of Immigration and Exile opens with a hard-hitting preface: "I went up to Jerusalem in 1967 and stayed thirty-eight years."

 

Bethlehem Road's vivid historical fiction stories are a product of these years and experiences through the eyes of twelve characters, most of whom wind up immigrating to Jerusalem in the three decades following the 1967 Six-Day War.

 

The contrasts in their lives, expectations, perceptions, and worlds is impeccably done and proves so immersive that the book is hard to put down. Take the story opening the collection, "Ingathering of an Exile."

 

The tale opens with a loving father's letter to his nomadic son, who has chosen to travel to New Zealand, progressing through his memories of the '67 war and its lasting impact as generations of experience are traversed and embraced. Judy Lev excels at illustrating cross-cultural connections in a manner that brings Jews, Arabs, and all manner of immigrant experiences to life: "...he's lucky because after the War of Independence, the state put him and his wife into an apartment on Bethlehem Road with some other family, and he tells me how Baka was Arab, but after the war the state filled it with Jews from all over, and how the state gave him a falafel shack as compensation for the eye and how he raised three kids on falafel balls, tahini, and pickles. The pickles his wife made."

 

Under her hand, Bethlehem Road's diversity and peoples blend their lives, perspectives, experiences, and hopes and dreams in a manner both reflective and enlightening, yet powerfully commanding and challenging. These individual lives draw together the identity crisis and adaptation processes facing immigrants of all ilk and color, layering their experiences with loss, diversity, and change. The manner employed to do so illustrates ways they grow both apart and together, united by hopes, dreams, the impact of violence, and the knowledge of being different. From neighborhood personalities to military and social clashes, an explosion heard by the narrator broadens its impact to fuel the lives and stories of those who have lived with explosions, both emotional and physical, most all of their lives.

 

Atmospheric revelations bring these people and the narrator to life. More importantly, they each address some of the diverse reasons why an individual would want to be an immigrant and enter a new world, as captured in the very first story: "As I walked down Rehov Yehuda to Ulpan Etzion on Gad I kept thinking of the stories those people told me in the waiting room, about their explosions and my own. I thought about the people on Bethlehem Road. They were like so many actors on a stage, playing their parts every day. I was an observer, walking by, applauding this, struck by that. As I approached the ulpan, I looked down at my hands. No shaking. They smelled like sweet cheese. The idea crystalized. Everyone saw it but me, maybe because I was only twenty-one or maybe because of the tensions of the war, I don't know. At that moment I wanted to come home, to Israel. I wanted to be a player, an actor on the stage, to take part in the miracle, not just watch from the sidelines. I knew Jerusalem, not Chicago, would be home. I knew my parents and my grandparents would be devastated, but my gut told me I wanted to stay in Israel. I wanted to join the victims struggling to be heroes. I wanted to build a new life in an old language. I wanted to forfeit the expected trajectory and to dive into the unknown."

 

Rich in its comparisons of diverse lives and astute in its portrait of peoples under siege in many different ways, Bethlehem Road is a top recommendation for all kinds of libraries and readers, from those interested in building collections of Jewish experience, literature, and history to others looking for literary blends of memoir and cultural insights into immigrant experiences. It also goes without saying that book clubs will consider Bethlehem Road a terrific kick starter for discussions about Israel, Jewish lives, immigrant choices, experiences, and observations, and more.  

 

D. Donovan, Sr. Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

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