THE PLACE WILL COMFORT YOU

“Ascending” to the state of Israel and “Descending” thence to America suggest the binding themes of this debut story collection by a Boston writer who grew up on an Israeli kibbutz.

Five stories explore tensions between individual freedom and religious and nationalist solidarity, as experienced mostly by girls or young women born in or lately brought by their families to Israel. In a brisk elliptical style enlivened by clipped, often amusingly argumentative dialogue, Goldstein shows us a conservative household mortified by a visiting American cousin’s casual friendliness toward an Arab workman (“A Pillar of a Cloud”), a recent arrival from the US awkwardly adjusting to rigid dietary regulations (“Pickled Sprouts”), and a schoolgirl whose unlikely friendship with a recently orphaned classmate tempts her into unconventional and potentially dangerous behavior (“The Conduct for Consoling”). Deeper notes are struck in the subtly developed account of a rebellious high-school girl’s comeuppance at the hands of an unpopular classmate whose stoical courage reproves her self-indulgent “wildness” (“The Roberto Touch”), and in the story of a determinedly orthodox male teacher whose intolerance for his female students’ “immodesty” leads him to a humbling encounter with an embittered prostitute (“The Verse in the Margins”). Goldstein does less well with three stories set in America, though “Barbary Apes” develops an intriguing character contrast from a legend about indigenous Gibraltar monkeys, and a harsh picture of an industrious matriarch’s rescue of her sons from the carnage of the Lebanon War (“Anatevka Tender”) has a stylized, cryptic intensity reminiscent of Tillie Olsen’s famous story “Tell Me a Riddle.” All the stories are energized by Goldstein’s assured, eloquent narrative voice, but there’s an essential sameness to them that renders the book intermittently monotonous just as often as it’s vivid and engaging.

Flawed but promising work from a writer whose manifest sincerity will in all probability spur her on to greater accomplishment.