The Best Place on Earth by Ayelet Tsabari
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. (2013)

Review by Melissa Janae

What makes someone part of a place? Must they be born there? Do they have to share the same heritage? Is it a matter of speaking the same language, or passing through the same rituals?

Ayelet Tsabari deftly explores these questions and others in The Best Place on Earth. Set in Israel, Canada, and India, these stories are fraught with conflict. In “Tikkun,” Lior passes by a group of people watching news of a pigua—Hebrew for terror attack—before having coffee with the ex-girlfriend he never truly got over. Teenaged Uri weathers missile attacks in Ramat Gan during Operation Desert Storm in “The Poets in the Kitchen Window.” The poets are Uri and his sister Yasmin, and while he always dazzled his sister during metaphor games at the kitchen table, Uri has “never…