About the Book
In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, Tamar Abadi’s world collapses when her sister-in-law is killed in what appears to be a terror attack but what is really the result of a secret relationship with a Palestinian poet. Tamar’s husband, Salim, is an Arab and a Jew. Torn between the two identities, and mourning his sister’s death, he uproots the family and moves them to the US. While Tamar struggles to maintain the integrity of the family’s Jewish Israeli identity against the backdrop of the American “melting pot” culture, a Palestinian family moves into the apartment upstairs and she is forced to reckon with her narrow thinking as her daughter falls in love with the Palestinian son. Fearing history will repeat itself, Tamar’s determination to separate the two sets into motion a series of events that have the power to destroy her relationship with her daughter, her marriage, and the family she has worked so hard to protect. This powerful debut novel explores Tamar’s struggle to keep her family intact, to accept love that is taboo, and grapples with how exile forces us to reshape our identity in ways we could not imagine.
Praise for The Anatomy of Exile
in her tremendous, transporting debut, The Anatomy of Exile, Zeeva Bukai demonstrates the unique power of literature to transcend borders, excavate our shared humanity, and perhaps even heal. . . .This is a vital exploration of what it means to be in exile, and how the loss of an anchor necessitates a reckoning with the self — a self without borders, without country, without land. Bukai writes with lyrical urgency and compassionate insight about identity, belonging, dispossession, and desire, capturing the doomed irony of homeland and the lengths to which people will go to insulate themselves in a false notion of safety.
― Sara Lippman, Jewish Book Council
Its characterizations nuanced and complicated, the novel reflects deep cultural mores and customs from both Palestinian and Israeli cultures. . . .How history is dealt with in the present matters in The Anatomy of Exile, a novel that lays bare human complexities with tentative, wistful hope.
― Forward Reviews
Zeeva Bukai writes as perceptively about romantic love and family life as she does about the wider forces that haunt it: war and exile, love across borders, the long, torturous shadow of the past. The Anatomy of Exile is a compassionate, searing and full-of-life that bears witness in important ways.
― Elizabeth Graver, author of Kantike, winner of the National Jewish Book Award
In The Anatomy of Exile Zeeva Bukai beautifully weaves one Mizrahi family’s tragic tale of love and loss and deftly illuminates the liminal space between places and languages, Arabness and Jewishness. With great empathy and profound insight, Bukai explores our attachment to place, family, and tradition and the lengths we would go to protect them, showing history repeating itself in inexplicable yet inevitable ways. The Anatomy of Exile is a remarkably assured debut—radiant, intelligent, and deeply moving.
― Ayelet Tsabari, author of The Best Place on Earth, The Art of Leaving, and Songs for the Brokenhearted, winner of the Sami Rohr prize
Laura Newman aims this dazzling collection of stories straight at us, straight from the heart. By turns wry, madcap and tragic, we are in the hands of an intrepid storyteller. These generous tales are an antidote–maybe even healing–for times we feel mired in our own here and now. A work of boundless imagination, we’re lifted out of ourselves and into the wondrous world of others.
― Joanne Meschery, Pen/Faulkner nominee for The Gentlemen’s Guide to the Frontier
In Zeeva Bukai’s stunning debut, the burden of history is masterfully woven into the intimate journey of an Israeli family. With elegant prose and unflinching honesty, this novel about love, betrayal, and exile reminds us of the necessity of storytelling in troubled times.
― Amy Gottlieb, author of The Beautiful Possible
The heartbreak of being exiled from the land of your birth is beautifully described in this wrenching novel, a deep dive into the immigrant experience, family dynamics, and the misunderstandings that needlessly divide people. The fiber of loyalty is tested until it frays–yet redemption does come and is sweet. The Anatomy of Exile, both timely and timeless, is a startlingly brave debut.
― Chris Cander, bestselling author of The Young of Other Animals
Zeeva Bukai has written a gorgeous, soulful novel whose aching, mismatched characters limp bravely towards love even when it wounds them to the quick. But even more, she’s written a portrait of Israel as a young country and reveals the enormous and even magnetic power this sacred ground exerts on those who call it home.
― Yona Zeldis McDonough, Fiction Editor, Lilith Magazine
Zeeva Bukai’s The Anatomy of Exile is a captivating and moving account of displacement, sacrifice, and ultimate loss. With expansive prose and deft dialogue, Bukai interrogates the ways in which a family attempts to love each other in spite of differing cultures, and how the world conspires to prevent it. But this is also a universal narrative; one that might take place anywhere and at any time. Such is the power of love, and the story that Bukai so beautifully invites us to enter into. I loved this book.
― Marcia Butler, author of Oslo, Maine, and The Skin Above My Knee
Propulsive and gorgeously written. With meticulous observation that misses nothing, Zeeva Bukai brings to life two worlds and a family torn between them. What is home? Who are we when the ground shifts beneath us? How can we sustain love and hope in the face of betrayal? A richly textured novel brimming with insight and compassion. I was riveted from the first page.
― Joan Leegant, author of Displaced Persons
About the Author
Zeeva Bukai was born in Israel and raised in New York City. Her stories are forthcoming in the anthology Smashing the Tablets: A Radical Retelling of the Hebrew Bible, and have appeared in Mcsweeny’s, Carve Magazine, Pithead Chapel, and Frankly Feminist: Stories by Jewish Women, December Magazine where her story The Abandoning (an early version of the first chapter of The Anatomy of Exile, was selected by Lily King for the Curt Johnson Prose Prize, She holds a BFA in Theater and an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College. She is the Assistant Director of Academic Support at SUNY Empire State University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Author photo credit: Ghila Krajzman
Author’s website: www.zeevabukai.com