THE GIRLS OF JERUSALEM AND OTHER STORIES

Jewish families pull apart under the strain of war, persecution, and longing in Berkman’s story collection.

This set of stories explores the Jewish experience in a wide variety of historical settings. “Passion” paints a plangent yet exuberant portrait of 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whose rationalist questioning of Scripture gets him banished from Amsterdam’s synagogue. Several stories follow Eastern European Jews enmeshed in early-20th-century disasters. In the harrowing “Vilna,” two brothers in World War II–era Lithuania separate; one escapes to America while the other weathers the Nazi occupation as it destroys the local Jewish population. “In the Time of Dreams” follows a woman living in the Soviet Union’s Jewish colony in Siberia in the 1930s as it devolves from socialist idealism to a Stalinist nightmare; and in Miracles: A Novella, a family of Ukrainian Jews flees a pogrom to New York City—a strange new world that makes them seem like strangers to one another. A suite of stories are set in postwar California among middle-class Jewish suburbanites; for them, the Holocaust is a distant memory that barely shadows their comfortable but discontented lives. In “Ghosts,” a woman who fled Nazi Germany in childhood is estranged from her adopted daughter and mentally ill son; in “Grisha,” a son reconnects with his cantankerous mother after she moves to Jerusalem, where she finds her roots and a soul mate; and in the title story, a young mother’s affair with her rabbi upends two families but enables her to discover her true self. Berkman’s characters are wanderers—often physically, as they migrate to escape poverty and violence (“we said good-bye as though we would never see each other again,” is a typical refrain), but also spiritually, as they pursue desires that run up against social expectations or fraying relationships. Her stories are grounded in a realism made poetic, but they also have an aching sense of evanescent mystery, as in “Ghosts”: “There was a shadow family and shadow cousins and aunts and uncles, and a shadow place with a strange name where her mother had grown up.” The result is an engrossing fictional world with real literary depth.

Luminous tales of exile and loss that bequeath new life.