Writer Judy Lev, a Cleveland transplant who lived in Jerusalem’s Baka neighborhood for 38 years, is putting the beloved locale on display with her new book, an ode to the charming cluster of streets and shops that scores of English-speaking immigrants have called home for decades.

“Bethlehem Road: Stories of Immigration and Exile” (published by She Writes Press and distributed by Simon & Schuster) is a collection of 12 short stories named for the neighborhood’s main artery, and is Lev’s fictionalized take on the people and places she knew during those nearly four decades.

Dividing the stories into four sections, “Immigration,” “Settling Down,” “Family Life” and “Dispersion,” Lev loosely follows her own trajectory on Bethlehem Road through her characters, their complex lives, and the constant motion of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

The stories begin in the first days after the 1967 Six Day War, as Baka recovers from the effects of Jordanian shelling.

The book continues with tales told against the background of terror attacks, and as former Arab residents of Baka, a prestigious neighborhood built by wealthy Christian and Muslim Arabs in the 1920s, return to see the homes they fled during the 1948 War of Independence.

The stories are also populated, of course, by new immigrants from the United States — Chicago, Ohio, Boston and other places far from the Middle East.

These newcomers are named John and Simon, Helen, Dick and Bonnie, in sharp contrast to locals called Ovadia,........

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