Happy New Years
-
- $18.99
-
- $18.99
Publisher Description
"Maya Arad is the smart, tart, and heartbroken sibyl of exile, who is remaking expectations of Hebrew literature book by book."—Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus
After emigrating to the United States in the mid-1960s, Leah maintains her connection to Israel by writing an annual letter on the Jewish new year to her old friends from a women's teaching college. Comprising five decades of correspondence, the novel skillfully weaves together Leah's high hopes and deep disappointments as she navigates relationships, marriage, divorce, single motherhood, financial struggles, and professional ups and downs. Leah's relentless optimism and cheerfulness conceal disturbing truths behind her carefully crafted words. As her letters turn increasingly introspective, the secrets and shame that shaped her trajectory unravel. This is the epistolary novel at its best, inviting the reader to play detective and probe between the lines of Leah's insistently rosy portrayal of her life. Gradually piecing together her true circumstances, we are charmed into forgiving her minor deceptions and richly rewarded with the profound insights that Leah's self-constructed narrative reveals.
Reading group guide to Happy New Years is available for download free of charge at newvesselpress.com.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This subtle epistolary novel from Arad (The Hebrew Teacher) comprises 50 years' worth of letters sent by a woman to her former classmates at an Israeli teacher's college on Rosh Hashana. Though ostensibly filled with good cheer, Leah Zuckerman's letters are also comically passive-aggressive, due to her long-running resentment toward the others for looking down on her as an immigrant from Romania. This context becomes apparent in separate, more candid versions of the letters, which she sends to Mira, her closest friend from the group. The reader learns of Leah's disappointments following graduation in 1966, when she's tricked by the head of the college into moving to Massachusetts for a nonexistent teaching opportunity. She marries and has two sons, but her gambler husband deserts the family. She continues forming disastrous relationships with men and finally comes clean to Mira about a traumatic incident that happened in Israel and drove a wedge between them. Whether in cleverly ironic depictions of Leah's inflated self-regard, passages that reveal the depth of her homesickness, or scenes showing her resilience, Arad elicits sympathy for her complex lead. This will move readers.
