Place is the osten­si­ble theme of this col­lec­tion of short sto­ries by Savy­on Liebrecht, an admired and pop­u­lar Israeli writer, with the title of each sto­ry nam­ing its locale — ​”Amer­i­ca,” ​“Kib­butz,” ​“Hiroshi­ma,” ​“Tel Aviv,” ​“Munich,” ​“Jerusalem,” and the title story.

But the exac­ti­tude of geog­ra­phy offers no anchor to the char­ac­ters in these sto­ries. In the open­ing sto­ry, Amer­i­ca is the imag­ined place of romance and adven­ture where the narrator’s moth­er lives with her new hus­band, hav­ing aban­doned the nar­ra­tor, then a young girl, and her father to a drea­ry rou­tine exis­tence in Jerusalem. Only many years lat­er does the nar­ra­tor learn about her mother’s life in Amer­i­ca, cast­ing an entire­ly new light on her life.

The blast of knowl­edge that throws open ​“Amer­i­ca” marks the oth­er sto­ries in the col­lec­tion. Hid­den facts undo the social order of ​“Kib­butz,” half-sus­pect­ed truths make the Bauhaus archi­tec­ture of ​“Tel Aviv” more than a guide’s love of the build­ings, new per­spec­tives in ​“Hiroshi­ma” and ​“Munich” strike strange chords on an Israeli con­scious­ness. ​“Jerusalem” is a home with both its wel­come and its dan­gers. ​“A Good Place for the Night,” set in a world that doesn’t yet exist, wrench­es the hope of the future from the deep pain of the present.

These are unset­tling sto­ries, pre­sent­ing the read­er with ques­tions about the mean­ing of place and how — real or imag­ined — it under­lines our quest for mean­ing and love in the world we inhabit.