In com­pos­ing this slim vol­ume of four linked sto­ries, Cherne was inspired by the mem­o­ries of a friend who, as a child, had fled with her fam­i­ly from Rus­sia dur­ing that country’s rev­o­lu­tion in 1917. When the book opens, the sto­ries’ pro­tag­o­nist, Devo­ra Mar­cus, is an elder­ly wid­ow liv­ing in south­ern Cal­i­for­nia. The first sto­ry, ​“The Con­ver­sion,” in which Devo­ra falls briefly under a guru’s spell before reclaim­ing her Jew­ish iden­ti­ty, is per­haps the book’s strongest, although some read­ers may find the inten­si­ty of Devora’s bond to the young man who comes to her home to teach her Hebrew as depict­ed in ​“A Holo­caust in My Break­fast Room” to be the most emo­tion­al­ly pow­er­ful and poignant aspect of the work. Occa­sion­al­ly repet­i­tive (as with the dis­turb­ing mate­r­i­al con­cern­ing the rape of Devora’s elder sis­ter back in Rus­sia), Devo­ra in Exile nonethe­less draws us in and allows us to get to know a sym­pa­thet­ic char­ac­ter and, with the excep­tion of the brief sec­ond piece, offers full and com­pelling stories.