When Leah Lax was asked to write an opera to celebrate local immigrants, she began by spending a year listening to accounts of upheaval, migration, and arrival told her in confidence by people from around the globe. She felt she had discovered America, found its great beating heart.
In interludes between the astounding and powerful stories in Not From Here, Leah uncovers the lost history of her Jewish family and finds a larger context for her own story. "In a way," she writes, "we Americans are all immigrants."
Leah has had a dual career as an author and librettist. Her previous book Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home was the first gay memoir ever to come out of the Jewish ultraOrthodox world, now a modern opera by composer Lori Laitman.
"Leah Lax understands that everyone has a story and a secret. To experience this ourselves, we have only to read her utterly irresistible Not from Here."
--GLORIA STEINEM
"A masterwork! Brilliant, profound, heart-shattering, hopeful - I couldn't breathe! Not From Here is full of stories of people who hang onto hope, people who will not give up struggling for what could be, and it's all interspersed with Leah's own extraordinary journey. This is the kind of book that leaves you forever changed."
--CAROLINE LEAVITT, NYTimes bestselling author
"An amazing and powerful book of the struggles and triumphs of people from far away who we might have dismissed as 'other, ' except that Leah edges them dexterously into our hearts."
--CHITRA DIVAKARUNI, American Book Award winner, author of The Last Queen