About the Book
With the breakup of her marriage, a once famous actress of the Yiddish theater travels to Tel-Aviv to revisit the apartment she once shared with her husband, Max.
Soon after, she finds herself at the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Apparition Hospice in Jaffa, a sanitorium, run by a group of nuns. Unclear as to how she got there, she begins to piece together the events that led her to this moment. From New York to Tel -Aviv, and the Siberian gulag, The World Between explores the landscape of a marriage, friendship, loss, and the way childhood war trauma bleeds into every aspect of the characters’ lives.
Praise for The World Between
The World Between is a beautiful rendition of life as art, and art as life, in the portrait of one woman’s struggles through what has been called the Century of Wars, but should be called the century of suffering. ‘Fiction is art,’ John Cheever said, ‘and Art is the triumph over chaos, no less.’ This book is a triumph.
― Richard Bausch, author of Peace, and The Fate of Others: Stories
Zeeva Bukai’s The World Between gives us the long life of an actress in the fading world of Yiddish theatre. From a wartime childhood in a Siberian camp, to a tempestuous marriage in post-war New York, to sorrow and decline in later Israel, an unforgettable character leads us through a page-turner of a story with history at its heart.
― Joan Silber, author of Improvement and Secrets of Happiness
Zeeva Bukai’s stunning novel takes place nischt ahn, nischt aher, where memory and damage conjoin and there are no solutions. Bukai’s luminous prose heals even as it wounds, and I was utterly entranced by her wisdom and masterful approach to trauma. The World Between should be required reading for anyone seeking understanding of the Holocaust, survival, and the profound impact of both.
― Erika Krouse, author of Save Me, Stranger
The World Between is fragile. It’s mysterious. It’s wonderfully written. Zeeva Bukai has created characters who breathe with weighty, tragic experience.
― Max Gross, author of The Lost Shtetl
Praise for The Anatomy of Exile
Awe and joy for this marvelous novel.
― John McWhorter, The New York Times
About the Author
Zeeva Bukai was born in Israel, raised in New York City and the author of a previous novel, The Anatomy of Exile. Her stories have appeared in Smashing the Tablets: A Radical Retelling of the Hebrew Bible, Carve Magazine, Pithead Chapel, the Lilith anthology, Frankly Feminist: Stories by Jewish Women, December Magazine, Mcsweeny’s Quarterly Concern, Image Journal, Jewishfiction.net, Women’s Quarterly Journal, and the Jewish Quarterly. She is the Assistant Director of Academic Support at SUNY Empire State University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Author’s Website: www.zeevabukai.com