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Bethlehem Road: Stories of Immigration and Exile
For fans of André Aciman, Omer Friedlander, and Ayelet Tsabari, these twelve stories convey the power, magic, and pain of place—one iconic street in Jerusalem where immigrants young and old struggle to find themselves between the years 1967 and 1999.
Leaving one country for another, even if it is an immigrant’s choice, is never easy. The stories in this collection—often emotional, sometimes funny—examine this truth as they render the experiences of twelve characters, most of whom immigrate to Jerusalem in the three decades following the 1967 Six-Day War. All of them come to create new lives in an old homeland. Some succeed, but for most the present and past collide, confounding and challenging attempts to create stability—like the Dutch Holocaust survivor struggling with her love of a Nazi, or the young American Reform Jew craving an observant Orthodox lifestyle.
Each of the characters in these layered stories, from the pregnant Canadian woman who imagines giving birth to a savior to the American chiropractor who takes his kids to watch the Passover slaughter of a lamb, comes to find that after the initial excitement of falling in love with a new country, difficulties emerge. Being an immigrant is a perpetual mode; you are always aware of loss and difference. In addition to this shared experience, iconic Bethlehem Road, with its ethnic mosaic and vibrant urban setting, is the great connecting thread in these tales—giving readers a chance to peek beyond its stone fences and glimpse the people who live there.
Leaving one country for another, even if it is an immigrant’s choice, is never easy. The stories in this collection—often emotional, sometimes funny—examine this truth as they render the experiences of twelve characters, most of whom immigrate to Jerusalem in the three decades following the 1967 Six-Day War. All of them come to create new lives in an old homeland. Some succeed, but for most the present and past collide, confounding and challenging attempts to create stability—like the Dutch Holocaust survivor struggling with her love of a Nazi, or the young American Reform Jew craving an observant Orthodox lifestyle.
Each of the characters in these layered stories, from the pregnant Canadian woman who imagines giving birth to a savior to the American chiropractor who takes his kids to watch the Passover slaughter of a lamb, comes to find that after the initial excitement of falling in love with a new country, difficulties emerge. Being an immigrant is a perpetual mode; you are always aware of loss and difference. In addition to this shared experience, iconic Bethlehem Road, with its ethnic mosaic and vibrant urban setting, is the great connecting thread in these tales—giving readers a chance to peek beyond its stone fences and glimpse the people who live there.
260 pages, Paperback
Published October 21, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 26, 2025
Judy Lev is a beautiful writer. She takes the reader right into the scene with telling details and personal touches. The world of Bethlehem Road and it's inhabitants is totally new to me, so it was fascinating and eye-opening. This was a joy to read. Highly recommend.
January 11, 2026
I loved this collection of short stories, in which we meet immigrants of every age - young women, brides-to-be, mothers and fathers and their young children, reservists, and retirees - along with the colorful shopkeepers who make up the community of Baka, along Bethlehem Road (a main artery in Jerusalem). It brought me back to the short time I lived in this neighborhood, as well as to the decades before and after. The author writes with a perfect mixture of pathos, levity and heart. Highly recommend, especially for book clubs!
January 17, 2026
This is a “concept album” short story collection. Each of the stories Lev writes is set in (or somehow connected to) a house on Bethlehem Road in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem. They come to us more or less chronologically, illustrating what Lev tells us in her introduction is her own 38-year time there. Amplifying that, we get a handful of one-page biographies of characters who appear in one or another of the stories interpellated between the full stories.
With a concept like that, I can imagine a lot of ways this might go wrong. I can see getting bogged down in the geography of the street. I can see lectures about the history that’s shaped it. (It was an Arab-owned space before 1948.) I can see an over-reliance on recurring characters and themes.
Somehow, Lev avoids all those pitfalls. I’m not sure that every story here works, but every one certainly shows ambition – and many do work very well. This is a remarkable achievement and worth reading for a nuanced look at Israel at a time when that’s increasingly difficult to do.
The most compelling story here, for me at least, is “Law of Return.” The title reflects the Israeli law that states that any Jew in the world can come to Israel and claim citizenship. It’s a powerful legal and emotional response to the trauma of so many stateless Jews, with nowhere they could go for safety, becoming victims of the Holocaust.
Here, though, it’s an Arab man who wants to revisit the house on Bethlehem Road that his father built with his own hands. It seems clear that he knows he cannot take legal custody of it, but he wants some acknowledgement of a history he feels has been erased. Meanwhile, the protagonist, a Jewish-American woman who’s bought the place for what she imagines will be her home is aware of that emotional claim. She wants to honor it, and she invites him in. He’s moved that, after multiple visits, there’s a Jew who finally sees him. She’s touched by his affection for the place, but she’s worried he’ll misread her kindness and want more – more opportunities to come back and maybe enough of an emotional appeal that he will undermine her sense of ownership.
It’s an uncomfortable story but a powerful one.
“Homecoming 1982” tells about a young wife who has to deal with the PTSD of her husband, who’s returned from war. I’ve seen other versions of this – I think, in particular, of Phil Klay’s “Redeployment” – but the Israeli context gives it a fresh power. We American Jews have been fed so steady a picture of the sabra toughness of IDF soldiers that it’s sobering to be reminded of their humanity.
And “Malka’s Holocaust” troubles the stereotype of the Holocaust memoir as it was popularized in the post Schindler’s List moment. Malka is not a ‘perfect victim.’ She spent the war in comparative safety, taken into the cultured home of a German family. When an SS soldier recuperates from war wounds nearby, they fall in love.
She moves on at the end of the war, traumatized by the murders of most of her family, but she’s not sure how to tell her story. She attempts it for the ‘memoir lady’ who goes around recording survivor stories, but she isn’t comfortable telling all of it. She’s not sure she can handle reliving it, and she doesn’t know that she wants anyone to know her story.
In a powerful climax, when a group of survivors are gathered for a concert, she calls out a request for “Ave Maria.” It’s as goyische a song as imaginable. She knows that, and she knows it will offend others. But it’s her way of indirectly reclaiming an experience that she has otherwise denied, an experience that as history-as-convention-tells-it has no place in communal memory.
Those are the standouts, but there are many others with striking power. There’s a quasi-magical realism one where the narrator carries on a conversation with Annie Oakley and Theodore Herzl. There’s one about “Simon,” an American immigrant who wants so badly to become an Orthodox Jewish Israeli that he gets engaged to a woman old enough to be his mother and then departs on a ‘vision quest’ to relive Shimon bar Yochai’s time in the cave. And there’s one about a woman, pregnant with her first child, who – infected by her sense of Jerusalem – develops the pre-post-partum delusion that she will give birth to ‘the savior.’
Some, like the first story about a man nearly overcome as he tries to learn Hebrew or the final story that stands as an allegory about the binding of Isaac, work less well for me. At the same time, though, I recognize them as experiments in form and content – worthwhile experiments in a context where a less brave writer could so easily have colored (boringly) within the lines.
I have corresponded a bit with Lev, but not enough to bias me in favor of her work. This is good and adventurous – maybe even necessary – work. You won’t find it many places, but it’s worth all the attention we can give it.
With a concept like that, I can imagine a lot of ways this might go wrong. I can see getting bogged down in the geography of the street. I can see lectures about the history that’s shaped it. (It was an Arab-owned space before 1948.) I can see an over-reliance on recurring characters and themes.
Somehow, Lev avoids all those pitfalls. I’m not sure that every story here works, but every one certainly shows ambition – and many do work very well. This is a remarkable achievement and worth reading for a nuanced look at Israel at a time when that’s increasingly difficult to do.
The most compelling story here, for me at least, is “Law of Return.” The title reflects the Israeli law that states that any Jew in the world can come to Israel and claim citizenship. It’s a powerful legal and emotional response to the trauma of so many stateless Jews, with nowhere they could go for safety, becoming victims of the Holocaust.
Here, though, it’s an Arab man who wants to revisit the house on Bethlehem Road that his father built with his own hands. It seems clear that he knows he cannot take legal custody of it, but he wants some acknowledgement of a history he feels has been erased. Meanwhile, the protagonist, a Jewish-American woman who’s bought the place for what she imagines will be her home is aware of that emotional claim. She wants to honor it, and she invites him in. He’s moved that, after multiple visits, there’s a Jew who finally sees him. She’s touched by his affection for the place, but she’s worried he’ll misread her kindness and want more – more opportunities to come back and maybe enough of an emotional appeal that he will undermine her sense of ownership.
It’s an uncomfortable story but a powerful one.
“Homecoming 1982” tells about a young wife who has to deal with the PTSD of her husband, who’s returned from war. I’ve seen other versions of this – I think, in particular, of Phil Klay’s “Redeployment” – but the Israeli context gives it a fresh power. We American Jews have been fed so steady a picture of the sabra toughness of IDF soldiers that it’s sobering to be reminded of their humanity.
And “Malka’s Holocaust” troubles the stereotype of the Holocaust memoir as it was popularized in the post Schindler’s List moment. Malka is not a ‘perfect victim.’ She spent the war in comparative safety, taken into the cultured home of a German family. When an SS soldier recuperates from war wounds nearby, they fall in love.
She moves on at the end of the war, traumatized by the murders of most of her family, but she’s not sure how to tell her story. She attempts it for the ‘memoir lady’ who goes around recording survivor stories, but she isn’t comfortable telling all of it. She’s not sure she can handle reliving it, and she doesn’t know that she wants anyone to know her story.
In a powerful climax, when a group of survivors are gathered for a concert, she calls out a request for “Ave Maria.” It’s as goyische a song as imaginable. She knows that, and she knows it will offend others. But it’s her way of indirectly reclaiming an experience that she has otherwise denied, an experience that as history-as-convention-tells-it has no place in communal memory.
Those are the standouts, but there are many others with striking power. There’s a quasi-magical realism one where the narrator carries on a conversation with Annie Oakley and Theodore Herzl. There’s one about “Simon,” an American immigrant who wants so badly to become an Orthodox Jewish Israeli that he gets engaged to a woman old enough to be his mother and then departs on a ‘vision quest’ to relive Shimon bar Yochai’s time in the cave. And there’s one about a woman, pregnant with her first child, who – infected by her sense of Jerusalem – develops the pre-post-partum delusion that she will give birth to ‘the savior.’
Some, like the first story about a man nearly overcome as he tries to learn Hebrew or the final story that stands as an allegory about the binding of Isaac, work less well for me. At the same time, though, I recognize them as experiments in form and content – worthwhile experiments in a context where a less brave writer could so easily have colored (boringly) within the lines.
I have corresponded a bit with Lev, but not enough to bias me in favor of her work. This is good and adventurous – maybe even necessary – work. You won’t find it many places, but it’s worth all the attention we can give it.
January 19, 2026
Gorgeous writing and insightful prose. This collection of stories, where place is the through character, makes you feel and think and wonder. Life is the same everywhere, and it isn't. The history of a place can change the present.
December 29, 2025
I love this amazing collection of stories all set in one small Jerusalem neighborhood. Judy Lev’s writing is beautiful and emphatic!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews