Librettist Leah Lax gives voice to compelling immigrant stories
‘Not From Here’ captures hopes, fears of those looking for a home in America
One story emerges from the scores of stories that comprise Leah Lax’s new book, “Not From Here: The Song of America.” Lax spent a year speaking to people who came to Texas from faraway places: El Salvador, Vietnam, Pakistan, India, Ukraine, Cuba. Each situation was different. Each arrival was different. But each story in the book becomes a meditation on the security sought from place … the notion of home.
After a year of interviews, Lax found herself changing the terminology she used for those who come to the United States from some other place. “Digging through human stories, I felt like there was no such thing as immigration,” she says. “That’s a stupid, abstract word. It’s a euphemism. It’s individuals. Individuals seeking a home. They are not immigrants, not in my mind. They are New Americans.”
“Not From Here” is something of an accidental document but a timely one considering the politicization of immigration, a subject that prompts Lax to grumble. Houston Grand Opera commissioned Lax to write the oratorio for a new opera about immigrant experiences with composer Christopher Theofanidis. Lax found inspiration in Stephen Klineberg’s Houston Area Survey, which started more than 40 years ago.
Klineberg’s long-running demographic survey framed Houston as a bellwether for the nation. But the city’s cultural breadth requires movement to appreciate.
“Klineberg let the news out that Houston had become the most ethnically diverse city in the country,” she says. “But Houston was slow dealing with that information. The city didn’t know itself.”
After the opera, “Refuge,” was completed, she had more than 1,000 pages of transcript. “This book comes out of that,” she says.
Lax met some immigrants eager to share everything about their path here. Others preferred anonymity. In each case, she didn’t want to start here. She wanted to start there. She asked her storytellers to start their stories at the very beginning: “I was born…”
With a fixed place set, then she wanted to hear the circumstances that prompted people to leave behind family, homes, possessions and native countries.
“Some had hidden or buried their stories,” she says. “They were relentlessly forward-focused. But when they started telling the stories, they came pouring out.”
Lax’s skill as a listener flows through her work as a writer. She frames the details given to her in ways that allow them to swarm the senses. A woman from El Salvador comments on the absence of birdsong in her town because gunfire has frightened away the birds. Rather than simply transcribing a snippet about fish sauce, she asked a Vietnamese interviewee to discuss its creation and cultural usage.
Sometimes, the results are phrased with a bit of humor.
A man from the former U.S.S.R. recalls a social worker offering him a sofa. He says “sofa” in Russian is a woman’s name. “Why I want Sofa when I have my wife?”
Sometimes the humor comes from a matter-of-fact telling of darker things: “You ask about my childhood home,” says one interviewee from the Republic of Benin. “I don’t recommend polygamy for anybody.”
Other times they’re stark and harrowing: “Every night we heard shooting, and in the morning we found out who they killed,” says Samuel, whose parents brought him and three siblings from Rivers State, Nigeria.
“It’s important to realize the person telling that story is talking about their childhood,” Lax says. “That was happening when he was 10.”
If Lax is particularly attuned to these stories of identity and place, it’s because her own journey had its own series of dramatic changes. A Dallas native, she joined the ultra-Orthodox Hasidim as a teenager, entered an arranged marriage at 19 and lived that life for three decades. Shortly after the turn of the millennium, she left the Hasidim. She made a dramatic pivot, living openly as a lesbian and enrolling in the University of Houston’s creative writing program. This part of her life also informed an opera and book.
She wrote the memoir “Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home,” which covered three decades of her life. From the book, she developed a libretto and collaborated with composer Lori Laitman on “Uncovered,” which made its world premiere two years ago with the Utah State University Opera.
So Lax knows something about leaving a former self behind. She has spent energy considering the theme of the self relative to home, which puts her in a position not just to collect stories of transition as though by antennae but to feel empathetically the details offered her.
Having identified these stories as a song about America and turned them into an opera about America, Lax arranged the book much like a musical piece.
“I find music in everything,” she says, chuckling. Some of the stories feel arialike and span pages. She also intersperses several pages labeled as “Intermezzo,” in which a flurry of comments, observations and reflections are reduced to a sentence or two and harmonized with one another. She also pulls from her own cultural background as a Jewish person to reflect on the ways people have moved and been made to move from place to place.