For the char­ac­ters in Beth­le­hem Road, the ques­tion Where Are You From? is sec­ondary to the ques­tion Why are you here? The need for an answer is what dri­ves them. They are com­plex and pas­sion­ate, at times firm­ly plant­ed in the soil of Beth­le­hem Road, and at oth­er times hov­er­ing over­head seek­ing close­ness to a divine pres­ence they intu­it exists. 

The twelve sto­ries in this col­lec­tion intro­duce twelve dis­tinc­tive pro­tag­o­nists who togeth­er com­prise the entire­ty of Israel’s twelve tribes who embarked on their own jour­ney of free­dom after cen­turies of slav­ery in Egypt. Lev’s char­ac­ters arrive in Israel with an inchoate idea of the coun­try and Israeli iden­ti­ty. They bear a near­ly rev­er­en­tial sense of pur­pose and resolve that they will thrive in the Jew­ish home­land. The process of migrat­ing and absorb­ing the Israeli zeit­geist is far grit­ti­er than they expect — at times deeply trag­ic, at oth­er times robust­ly comical. 

In a senior res­i­dence in Israel pop­u­lat­ed by Holo­caust sur­vivors, a debate breaks out on Holo­caust Remem­brance Day about who had a bet­ter Holo­caust or endured a real Holo­caust. A sui­cide bomber upends a wed­ding. A preg­nant woman is cer­tain that she is birthing the Mes­si­ah. And why wouldn’t she be, liv­ing on Beth­le­hem Road a few kilo­me­ters away from the birth­place of a Mes­si­ah in Bethlehem? . 

Beth­le­hem lit­er­al­ly means the ​“home of bread,” a place of spir­i­tu­al and phys­i­cal sus­te­nance. King David, prog­en­i­tor of the future Mes­si­ah, was con­sid­ered to be from Beth­le­hem. The tomb of the beloved matri­arch Rachel is a pil­grim­age site on the road to Beth­le­hem. Lev’s char­ac­ters inhab­it spe­cif­ic phys­i­cal spaces but they are also the inher­i­tors of an unseen yet keen­ly felt spir­i­tu­al lega­cy. Each of these spec­tac­u­lar­ly drawn char­ac­ters is search­ing for their peo­ple, their tribe. Like those first Israelites who entered after cross­ing the desert for forty years, they have entered the land fueled by the bib­li­cal legal and eth­i­cal code they inher­it­ed. Lev grants us the priv­i­lege of bear­ing wit­ness to their chal­lenges, their grace, and their full human­i­ty as first-gen­er­a­tion immigrants.