Not From Here
The Song of America
Not From Here began as an opera. Like a life still lived, this book’s songs—its stories—are unfinished, as is mine. As is my country’s. Each story was given me as an offering, a shared rush to freedom. Come closer, they whisper. Let me tell you how I did it, and you will know what we have a little bit more…
I was born a grandchild of refugees, but my family never told me our stories. My grandparents’ experiences in coming to the United States were intentionally buried in favor of their American Dream. All through my childhood, I wondered, who are we?
What are we without our stories? Sometimes we write new ones in the void. I set about listening, not for the marginalized, but for the truest collective voice of mainstream America in this nation of immigrants, my family’s voice among them.
In a way, we are all immigrants.
Praise for Not From Here
“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.”
“When I lived in the Hasidic world, mine were the only people fully real to me,” Leah Lax writes in the powerful compilation that is Not from Here: the Song of America. Exiled from the only world she knew once she began to live openly as a lesbian, Lax embarks on a quest to understand the true plurality of our national identity. This chorus of voices, from the brutal to the ecstatic, is both a love song and an indictment of what it means to be ‘an American.’”
“Rereading these accounts years after The Refuge vividly brings back my heartresponse at the time. How grateful I am that this book provoked me to remember the details on which my own life is built.”
“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.”
“Not From Here awakens long-buried family memories and insists we pay attention to our own personal histories. Leah Lax is our patient ear, waiting for what comes, for what is. Listening, she finds the deep continuity in our collective stories.”
“With breathtaking compassion, Leah Lax honors the deeply personal and often traumatic journeys recounted to her by turning them into a mirror. Reading Not From Here becomes an infinitely rich experience of shared humanity. ‘We are you,’ these stories sing. ‘Our struggles are your struggles.’ Leah’s passionate eloquence is profoundly important for us and for our world.”
“Not from Here” gives expression to the drama, the determination and exhilaration, the drumbeat of fear, and ultimately the triumph that are themes of the immigrant experience. These are quintessentially American stories, stories of people prepared to risk everything in order to survive, people who refuse to give up hope in the American Dream.”
“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.”
“These captivating accounts are delightfully engraved with the speakers’ strengths, their flaws, and charisma. They somehow lead to all the rest of us who were once ‘not from here.’”
“Rarely has the immigrant experience been so powerfully and richly presented as in this vivid account of people who made their way to a new home in a foreign land despite all obstacles. This is an extraordinary book.”
