NOT FROM HERE

Lax presents a narrative tapestry of American immigrant stories.

At the beginning of this book, the author, a librettist, relates a bit of her own personal history, describing how she discovered the world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism as a teenager and stayed in that world as a closeted gay woman for 30 years before coming out and losing her entire community. “I became an immigrant in my own country,” she writes, “blindsided with the acute desire of an outsider.” The themes of community and exile run throughout the immigrant stories she shares in these pages, in which she interviews people coming to America under all kinds of circumstances. She talks with a former Soviet Jewish refugee named Manya and experiences a sense of homecoming when entering Manya’s Jewish world: “Each of those homes had the same Hebrew books lined on the shelves, the same religious art, and always a photograph of the Rebbe on the wall,” she recalls. “Inside that home, the contentions of the secular world with its godlessness, its violence, and pessimism, its foreignness, fell away.” Some of the stories she gathers are rougher than others—none of them are more brutal than that of El Salvadoran refugee Luisa, who was sexually assaulted and trafficked by “coyotes” in her quest to reach a new home (according to the author, “El Salvador was the war we in the U.S. weren’t told we lost”). “There could not have been a clearer illustration of Luisa’s desperation to get to work, shelter, and safety,” Lax writes; “that was her definition of American freedom.”

The author is a remarkably empathetic interviewer, investing each chapter’s conversations with immediacy and heart. She allows her various subjects full dramatic range when telling their own stories, but she herself is nevertheless always present; when a Russian immigrant’s daughter is taught about Martin Luther King Jr. in public school, the woman is dismissive, asking how relevant such a figure could possibly be. “What did Martin Luther King have to do with us?” Lax asks. “What did he have to do with us, as Jews, or as Americans? Only everything.” Luisa’s story is the most powerfully written piece in the book, bringing forward overtly political elements of the immigration experience that Lax handles with non-confrontational sensitivity. The sheer crushing amount of bureaucracy these migrants face is depicted (and deplored) but never cheaply demonized. Lax employs prose that’s vivid (including plenty of reconstructed dialogue throughout) but not sensationalistic; immigrants who too often get lumped into the day’s news headlines as a monolithic entity are brought colorfully and individually to life as readers learn their histories, their hopes, and the many ways their new home strikes them. Despite the weightiness of the subject, Lax almost always finds a note of hope in the stories she tells. “This is a city of immigrants,” a transplanted Brahmin Indian tells her. “Everywhere I look, I see someone from somewhere else. That, I think, is what makes this country great.” In a time of political polarization on the subject of immigration, this book makes space for a much-needed deep breath.

A heartfelt and fascinating collection of stories about people making their way to the United States.