Ask for a Convertible: Stories

Ask for a Convertible, Danit Brown’s absorbing book of connected stories, revolves around the lonely, restless Osnat and a select few in her orbit over a period of about 15 years, mostly Israelis who feel the pull of another place no matter where they settle. Brown is wonderfully attuned to what’s special and strange about this particular pool of immigrants, but she’s careful to neither show more valorize where they come from nor paint their fraught relationships with their home and adopted countries as entirely unique.

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These sensitive (and often hilarious) stories ask what it means to be loyal to a place, and to a people, and what it says about you if you choose to defect. Brown paints Israel as a place that’s familiar and yet incredibly specific, where people respond calmly to terror alerts, work at dull jobs, worry about water damage to their apartments and fail their driving tests. To these characters, the country is somewhere to live, as well as to long for. It’s also somewhere to leave. show less

“Deadpan doesn't come much better than this. Brown's outsider-looking-in observations kill, while her characters' emotional rootlessness infuses even drily delivered punch lines with poignancy.”

“At once openhearted and close-minded, Brown's characters often offend one another when they collide, and their stories capture the awkwardness of both coming to America and coming-of-age.”