Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.
An Israeli woman takes her toddler to a birthday party at a mansion in Los Altos Hills. The woman’s mother-in-law, who has just arrived from Israel for a visit, marvels at the party’s opulence. There’s a clown, face painter, bouncy castle and birthday cake “as huge as a wedding cake.”
“Do people here always throw big parties like that for a 2-year-old?” Miriam asks her daughter-in-law. No, the latter explains, this one was bigger than usual because the parents are “loaded” venture capitalists.
Wealth, status and family dynamics are the central themes of Maya Arad’s “A Visit (Scenes),” one of three novellas in her new book, “The Hebrew Teacher.” The novellas center on Israelis living in the United States, with two of them set in Northern California.
Arad herself lives in Stanford and has been based in California for two decades. A writer in residence at Stanford’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Arad is a major literary figure in Israel yet isn’t widely known outside of the country.
“The Hebrew Teacher,” released Tuesday, is her first book to be translated into English. Jessica Cohen, a close friend of Arad’s and a translator for works by David Grossman, Amos Oz and other top Israeli writers, did the honors.
Arad, 53, agreed to answer questions by email about herself and “The Hebrew Teacher.” On May 2, she will give a book talk at the Jewish Community Library in San Francisco.
J.: You’ve written 11 works of fiction, but “The Hebrew Teacher” is your first to be translated into English. Did you specifically choose this book to be the first, or were there other factors at play?
Maya Arad: The novella “The Hebrew Teacher” was translated first, so it made sense for this collection to be my first book in translation. All three stories are set in the U.S. and their protagonists are Israeli expats, so perhaps this makes it a good candidate for a book in translation.
Many of my other books are written with certain formal devices which makes their translation more difficult (including my first book, a novel in verse, which is not likely to be translated anytime soon), but I am glad to share that my most recent book, the epistolary novel “Happy New Years,” is forthcoming with New Vessel Press in 2025.
Is there a story you’re trying to tell by putting these three novellas in conversation with each other? Something you wish to communicate to readers about what life is like for Israelis living in the U.S.?
I think the book has a recurrent theme of the struggle to maintain a sense of family and identity, which are threatened by immigration. Two of my protagonists immigrated themselves; one was left behind after her only son moved to California. Of the two women who immigrated to the U.S., one lives in the Midwest and married an American Jew, while the other is married to an Israeli and lives in Northern California.
Taken together, the book explores several pieces of the puzzle of Israeli lives in the U.S. But for me, its theme is simultaneously more universal and more intimate.
In the first novella, the son of the protagonist Ilana — a Hebrew instructor who feels alienated at her Midwestern university — tells his mother, “Young Jews in America are sick of your generation, which defends Israel at any cost no matter what.” Is the real-world generational divide in the American Jewish community over Israel something that concerns you?
It concerns me, of course. I am somewhere in the middle between the generations. Like Ilana’s son, I am angry and exasperated with the Israeli government, but like Ilana, I am deeply connected to Israel, where I grew up and where my friends and family still live. Writing [in] Hebrew in the U.S. is my way to reconcile these two conflicting views.
In the same novella, you suggest that many American Jews are “thirsty for Hebrew literature” and read books by Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and Etgar Keret in translation. It wasn’t lost on me that you mentioned only male writers. Why aren’t more novels by female Israeli writers available in English? Is it pure sexism, or something else?
It’s a very good question, and I am not sure there is one definitive answer. First, women came to Hebrew prose relatively late. The big wave of women writers started only in the 1990s (whereas in poetry this happened 30 years earlier).
It could be also that Hebrew literature in translation is associated with themes like war, the Holocaust, kibbutzim, etc., and women tend to write less about those issues. But I think this is changing now, and there are quite a few translations of Hebrew women writers that came out in recent years: Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Yael Neeman, Noa Yedlin, to name just a few.
Who are your favorite Israeli writers?
My two all-time favorites are novelist Aharon Meged (1920-2016) and playwright Hanoch Levin (1943-1999). There are many other contemporary authors I love, but they are too many to number.
There’s a funny line in “The Hebrew Teacher” about how Ilana finds it baffling that American Jews “reschedule” their holiday celebrations to the weekend because it’s more convenient to gather then. Are there aspects of American Jewish culture that you find amusing? Are there aspects that you appreciate?
Coming from Israel, some of the local customs of American Jews seemed indeed strange to me at first, but over the years I learned to appreciate them, and in some cases also adopt them. I am more involved with the Israeli community on the Peninsula — it is one of the areas in America where the Israeli community is as significant as the American Jewish one — but this seems to be changing now, as the Israeli and American Jewish communities draw nearer under the external pressure of renewed antisemitism. It’s the one hopeful aspect of this depressing circumstance.
In “A Visit,” you write about a woman who travels from Israel to Sunnyvale to spend time with her son and his family. Miriam gradually comes to terms with the fact that she hardly knows her son after so many years spent apart. What inspired you to explore the mother-son relationship?
The theme of family visiting from abroad is very significant in the lives of immigrants. You have an outsider looking at you and your life closely, observing how you live, always making comparisons, the same comparisons you keep making, implicitly, and that now become explicit:
Did I make the right choice? Was my immigration worth it?
Now when you write, you are looking for the more extreme situations, like a mother and son who are nearly estranged. Otherwise, what’s the point of writing about a happy family? So this sets the stage for a deeply difficult mutual examination.
“Make New Friends” is a very zeitgeisty novella about the pitfalls of social media, both for children and their parents. But it’s also about the messiness of friendship, and how difficult it is for some adults to make and keep friends. What role does friendship play in your life?
Friendship is always important, I believe, but when you live so far away from your extended family, friends become your family of choice: You celebrate the holidays together. They serve as your contacts for an emergency. They come to see your child’s school play when the grandparents are 8,000 miles away. The ups and downs of adult friendship are something that hasn’t been sufficiently explored in literature, I think — it’s a great topic to write about.
The events of Oct. 7 must have been devastating for you, as an Israeli but also as someone who grew up on Kibbutz Nahal Oz, near the border with Gaza. How have you been processing the attack and the unfolding war? Do you think you’ll write about Oct. 7 at some point?
I think Oct. 7 was a life-altering event for all of us, Israelis as well as most American Jews. For me personally, there are the childhood friends and neighbors from my kibbutz, the war that has been going on in Israel, the way the events are perceived in the U.S. — it’s a lot to process. It’s too early to tell if I will ever write about it. Knowing myself, I am more likely to write something about my childhood in the kibbutz, to remember what life used to be like, than about what happened on Oct. 7.
What have the last few months been like for you as an Israeli at Stanford, where there have been several anti-Israel/antisemitic incidents? Do you feel the administration is doing enough to combat antisemitism on campus?
I am a writer-in-residence at the Taube Center for Jewish Studies, which means I am not teaching. It also means I am relatively shielded from the winds that are blowing around us. Many Israelis expect HR to save us, as if the statement “it is against college rules to be antisemitic or anti-Israeli” will create a safer environment. HR does actually say this, but what prevents college students from expressing other kinds of bigotry is not that HR disallows bigotry, but that the students themselves enforce the social norm that bigotry is beyond the pale. Unfortunately, antisemitism and especially anti-Israeliness are not beyond the pale. Socially, we are often considered legitimate targets. Of course, we should fight this, but we should be clear-eyed: There is no magic bullet that is going to save us, and this is a long, frustrating process of education.