Wherever You Go is Joan Leegant’s first full-length novel and follows her acclaimed short story collection One Hour in Paradise. That collection garnered positive critical attention and also won the prestigious Winship/PEN New England Book Award as well as the Edward Lewis Wallant Book Award. Wherever You Go deserves comparable recognition.

The Jerusalem of Wherever You Go has complicated boundaries exposed by the blinding light of the city’s stone.  The book’s three major narratives initially run parallel, then intersect, and finally come together. The novel’s power is derived, in part, from Leegant’s unflinching examination of particular groups of American Jews and their emotionally needy relationship with Israel.

Yona, an American Jew, comes to Israel to reconcile with her older sister Dena. The two sisters haven’t spoken in a decade. During that time Dena has married and relocated to the West Bank. She and her husband are active in a right-wing extremist group called Adamah. One peripheral character unflatteringly likens these fanatics to the Zealots – the ancient Jews of Masada who committed suicide en masse rather than surrender to the Romans – with unblinking clarity:

…they need black and white. They don’t like the gray. I’m not saying they’re simple. No. They’re very smart. Some of the religious memorize the Talmud inside out. But they like absolutes. And drama. They don’t want to be ordinary people thinking about car payments and bank overdraft. They want a big life. Historical and theatrical.

Adamah specializes in recruiting disaffected young American Jews. Among them is the naïve Aaron Blinder. Blinder is the son of a famous Jewish American writer who pens saccharine stories with Holocaust backdrops. The elder Blinder – whose first name we never learn – is a one-man industry who never experienced the Holocaust directly.  He’s a writer-cum-fraud who has made millions manipulating readers’ raw emotions.

Another is Mark Greenglass, a young ba’al t’shuva living in Jerusalem who has embraced traditional Judaism after drug rehab and turns out to be a gifted teacher of Talmud. At the outset of the novel he is in New York to teach a two-week seminar in a yeshiva specializing in ushering a new wave of vulnerable, remorseful young men into religious life. But Greenglass’s faith is eroding. The trappings of religious dress and observance are a masquerade.  Greenglass’s dilemma dwells at the core of his soul, particularly when he tries to save his crack-addicted ex-girlfriend. Leegant writes:

He was a fake. An imposter. It was all falling apart and he couldn’t stop it. He ought to pull off the yarmulke, the tzitzit fringes, throw them into the trash. Everything was unraveling and he didn’t know why, only that it was slipping away from him like so much water from his fingertips. One day it’s the organizing principle of your life, and the next it’s nothing. Gone, evaporated. Thirty-six years old, and suddenly you can’t remember what it once meant to you, or why.

 Leegant is a master at wedding metaphor to larger, significant meaning. When Yona tells an immigration official at the airport that she’s in Israel to visit her sister Dena, his off-hand chitchat reveals that the name Dena comes from the Hebrew, din, meaning judgment. Yona’s name means dove, evoking the image of “an olive branch in her mouth, a peace offering like an illustration from a children’s Bible.” She tellingly answers the man “I know, but it can be, you understand, a burden.”

A character (not named here so as not to give away the ending) is in Hadassah Hospital’s trauma unit after he’s severely injured in a bombing. When the patient fears bursting into tears during his arduous recovery, a kind doctor tells him, “Cardiac surgery patients had it all the time. Suddenly inexplicable tears. The heart recalibrating itself after a shock.” A recalibrating heart is an overarching metaphor for the sturdy, yet shell-shocked state of Israel. How many times can Jews and the Jewish State reset the heart after a trauma?

Wherever You Go also freshly explores the paradoxical relationship between American Jews and their Israeli counterparts.  At a dog and pony show for wealthy, sympathetic Orthodox Jews visiting from Chicago, Adamah’s charismatic and deeply flawed leader Nafatali Schroeder indulges his self-righteousness, excoriating a woman in the audience – assembled in Dena’s living room no less – for her son choosing Harvard over “protecting our holy ancestral lands.”

Jerusalem embodies the Emersonian principle that Leegant raises in the novel: “We have a choice between truth and ease, but we can never have both.” Joan Leegant looks at the truth as one might stare at Jerusalem stone on a sun-drenched summer afternoon.