WELCOME TO HEAVENLY HEIGHTS

An Orthodox Jewish family makes aliyah to the Promised Land and braves it out among a hardscrabble survivors’ community—in Miller’s low-simmering, blandly written, but warm-spirited PEN Discovery Award debut.

Tova Zissie (“good and sweet”), who teaches English in Baltimore to Russian immigrants, and her financial project manager husband, Mike, decide it’s time to reverse exile and return “home” to Jerusalem: they will be heroes among their Orthodox community, “spirited keepers of the flame.” In fact, they end up in a sheltered West Bank community called Heavenly Heights among a disparate group of mostly American exiles like themselves. The story tracks the newly arrived family’s first shaky year trying to feel at home on this physically vulnerable site near the Jordanian border and amid a strange conglomeration of fairly impoverished but fiercely religious settlers. Tova, conflicted at first, finds a new friend in the outspoken Kentucky convert Debra, who always brings the conversation among the wives and mothers around from American gadgets to men and sex, which makes them blush violently. Other dramas include a doomed friendship between wayward teenager Yossi and a son of the upstanding Rabbi Altman, whose wife is confined to a wheelchair with MS; the shady family financial dealings back in the States that Mr. Stanetsky, widower and owner of the building, must settle, though he simply wants another wife; and the crowing of Ahouva, the young, pretty mother of five children in six years, about her latest appliance brought with her American parents. The point of view shifts as Miller delves into back stories of some of these characters, and the tale never gets to a climax so much as to a mild-moving denouement that mirrors the tenants’ interminable state of waiting, preparedness—and chauvinism.

Precarious lives and eternal holidays patiently observed among West Bank settlers.