CAJL Author Series and Hadassah Boston present Joan Leegant, Author of “Displaced Persons: Stories"

Join us onsite on November 21st at 7:00 p.m. for a talk with Joan Leegant, author of “Displaced Persons: Stories."

Set half in Israel and half in the United States, the stories in this prize-winning collection explore the experience of exile, belonging, and what it means to call a place home. A visiting professor from Boston forms an unlikely bond with an Israeli born in Iraq. Two teenage tourists are startled out of their naiveté in a restaurant in Jerusalem's Old City. A gifted yeshiva student spiraling into mental illness takes refuge in the poetry of Walt Whitman. An aged widower returns after sixty years to the Bronx neighborhood of his youth to make amends with a first love he abandoned to go to prison. Shimmering with insight and compassion, Displaced Persons is a profound, exquisite collection that illuminates pivotal moments of transition, longing, and hope.

Register to join us. Contact cajl@tisrael.org with questions. You can order the book at bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores, Amazon, Barnes & Noble.

About Joan Leegant

Joan Leegant's story collection, Displaced Persons, won the New American Fiction Prize. The judge was Weike Wang. Joan's first collection, An Hour in Paradise, won the PEN/New England Book Award and the Wallant Award, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. She is also the author of a novel, Wherever You Go, named a "Significant Jewish Book" by the Union of Reform Judaism.

Formerly a lawyer, from 2007 to 2013 Joan was the visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv where she also gave talks on American literature and culture under the auspices of the U.S. Embassy and was a volunteer ESL teacher for African refugees and asylum seekers. She has taught at Harvard, Oklahoma State, and Cornish College in Seattle where she was the writer-in-residence at Hugo House. She is a graduate of Harvard and Boston University Law School and for many years played keyboard in a klezmer band. She lives outside Boston.

This event is cosponsored by Hadassah.