When Leah Lax was asked to write a libretto for an opera intended to celebrate local immigrants, she began by spending a year listening to the stories of upheaval, migration, and arrival, told to her in confidence by people from around the globe. She felt she had discovered the song of America, found its great beating heart. But Leah also discovered troubling truths about America, through the eyes of immigrants, and in so doing was inspired to uncover the lost history of her own Jewish family. Through this interwoven experience of their story and hers, Leah found not only a larger context for the story of immigrants, but a new way of looking at how her own identity, rather than as a member of a small “minority”, but as a part of a very large majority who are here in this country because either they or their parents immigrated from another country. Nearly two decades after Leah had those conversations, long after the opera she wrote had left the stage, she captured those stories into this “libretto” of a story, her extraordinary new book, Not From Here: The Song of America.

Leah was a guest on The Morning Glory Project after her deeply stirring memoir, Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home, which was the first gay memoir ever to come out of the Jewish ultra-Orthodox world. Leah’s dual career as an author and as a librettist has brought her many well-deserved accolades. When she’s not writing, you can find her playing cello or kayaking around the world with her wife.