Short Stories Exploring The Jewish Experience

A Jewish-American dry cleaner who who hadnt' thought much about his grandfather's escape from the Cossacks in Kiev falls in love with a client who turns out to be from Kiev.

A grandmother in New York one day tells her granddaughter how she fled the Nazis through a sewer tunnel when she was a child, and how her quiet grandfather led the equally filthy teenage resistance group she joined.

These are some of the story lines from Molly Antopol's short story collection "The Un-Americans," long-listed for the National Books Awards.

The collection spans — as the New York Times put it — the entire Ashkenazi Jewish universe, from New York to Belarus to Israel, with ancestors watching from their graves as another writes.

Antopol joins Here & Now's Robin Young to talk about her debut collection.