A Good Place for the Night: Stories

Savyon Liebrecht is known for her hypnotic, emotionally complex stories about friendship, love and family and the subtle impact history and politics have on them. Her new collection focuses on place, on men and women physically or emotionally distant from home. Six stories are named for places - Munich, America, Tel Avid, Hiroshima, Jerusalem, the kibbutz - and the title story, "A Good Place for the Night," is named for a non-place, an inn in a post-apocalyptic world where place has no meaning because everything that we are familiar with has been destroyed.
A young Israeli architect has lived comfortably in Hiroshima for nine years, but events involving her American lover and Japanese friends prove with chilling finality that she can never be at home in the city of the Japanese holocaust. The tables turn on an Israeli journalist in Munich covering the trial of a Nazi war criminal when he becomes a witness to anti-Arab violence and to the murder of a beautiful Muslim woman he has secretly desired. An Israeli woman runs off to America with a lover and his daughter, devastating her own young daughter who believes her mother has abandoned her for a life of romantic luxury. Years later, the two daughters, now grown women, meet, and a shocking truth is revealed.