“In the funny and harrowing short stories of Joan Leegant’s excellent collection Displaced Persons, characters navigate myriad forms of displacement, from putting a new life together after divorce to finding their place in an adopted country...The stories address difficult issues of Jewish identity and social expectations about marriage and family with complexity.”
 

"I hadn't planned to begin Joan Leegant's Displaced Persons quite so soon, but I was in the mood for a short story one day last week and decided to read "The Baghdadi," the first story in this fourteen-story collection, to see what I should expect from the book. And I was wowed by it, to say the least. I know that most authors lead off a compilation with a story they feel is one of the strongest in the book, but this story of an American academic's experience with an Iraqi Jew who moved to Israel fifty years earlier is so exceptional that now I can't wait to read the other thirteen.”

"It was 34 degrees, cold even for Boston, the vast parking lot at Gillette Stadium at 8 a.m. an uninviting gray sea. Waving clipboards beside a small fleet of pristine white charter buses, young volunteers cheerfully shouted instructions to the hundred-plus adults — average age 60 and that’s being generous.”

"Let it flow. Allow associations to emerge on the page...let the sentences guide you. Just trust the page." Listen to Joan on New England Review's Out Loud.

"The collection...deeply engages with Jewish themes."