The nation of Israel is constantly in the news, a small nation whose very existence attracts a disproportionate interest from the rest of the world. Israel is also a modern creation, whose groundwork was laid in the late 19^th century, and whose birth came as a promised land of safety and return after the horrors of WWII. Return from what? From the Diaspora of Jews after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD. From Roman Palestine, over the next 1900 years, the Jews spread throughout much of the world. And with the creation of Israel, many did return. But many communities of the Jewish Diaspora either remain where they planted themselves centuries (or even millennia) ago, or have continued to spread into different, and sometimes unlikely places around the world.

Exile, the first published book by an author already known here on Ricochet, Annika Hernroth-Rothstein, is Annika’s investigation into a number of these Diaspora communities. How did they arrive where they are? When did they arrive? And why do they stay, with the promise of a return to Israel beckoning? Over the past several years, Annika has been visiting some of the most unlikely or far-flung Jewish communities around the world, and she presents their stories here in a single volume.

Annika has chosen communities that seem very unlikely — Jewish communities within Muslim-majority nations both liberal and repressive, communities deep within Asia, the last remnants of a Jewish community in Cuba, and several other surprising ones along the way. For instance, the author chose to avoid looking at places like Germany or Poland or France, in no small part because for those places the Holocaust looms ever large. One of the common threads in her selection is instead the study of communities who either were largely sheltered from the Holocaust, or who are peopled by those who managed to stay ahead of it, though she confesses that this was not entirely by design: