Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.
Amid the polarizing debates and activism around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is often lamented that there is insufficient space for nuance. Zeeva Bukai’s debut novel, “The Anatomy of Exile,” is very much a book devoted to that nuance, attentive to injuries experienced by all sides.
Beginning in 1967 in the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War, the novel is a family drama centering on Tel Aviv native Tamar Abadi.
Tamar, of Ashkenazi descent, is married to Salim, who came from Syria as a youth. Their sense of relief following Israel’s unanticipated victory in the war is shattered by the news that Salim’s sister Hadas, who is also Tamar’s closest friend, has been shot to death and that her assailant then killed himself.
Although the incident is reported as a terror attack, Tamar deduces (and keeps to herself) that it was, in fact, a murder-suicide committed by Daoud, the Palestinian Muslim man with whom Hadas, though married, had been having an affair with for years. Devastated by his loss, Salim decides to move the family — himself, Tamar and their three children — to the United States with the intention of returning after five years.
In the shadow of this loss and dislocation, the novel’s central drama emerges when the Abadis’ teenage daughter Ruby becomes involved with Faisal Mahmoudi, the American-born son of a Palestinian family that has moved into their New York City apartment building. Traumatized by the memory of her sister-in-law’s tragedy, Tamar seeks to put an end to the budding romance. But her course of action has far-reaching consequences.
Bukai’s sensitivity to her subject matter likely emerges from her own background. She was born in Israel to an Ashkenazi mother and a father who came from Syria. And, like the Abadis, her family immigrated to the United States.
Indeed, consciousness of their ethnic differences is one of the factors straining Tamar and Salim’s marriage. Salim proudly inhabits his Mizrahi identity while resenting the privilege that Tamar’s European origin bestows her in the pecking order of Israeli society. Salim at times exhibits more ease with his Muslim neighbors, the Mahmoudis, with whom he communicates in his native Arabic, than he does with his Ashkenazi wife. Likewise, Tamar sometimes feels like a stranger to her husband and carries a sense of inadequacy and insecurity.
The complicated relationships to place are reflected in the book’s title, which invites us to consider the different ways we might feel at home or in exile — and the complex nature of those feelings.
For example, when Tamar speaks to her neighbor Mr. Mahmoudi about Faisal and Ruby’s relationship, she notes, “This never would’ve happened if we were home. Lines are clearly drawn there, but here everything is so open.” She is not mindful that the Mahmoudis may understand the place she is calling “home” very differently. And indeed the lines that are so clearly drawn for Tamar are drawn differently for her own Mizrahi husband, who sometimes felt like an outsider in Israel: When she asks Salim what it was like to be an Arab Jew in an Arab land, he responds, “Somedays not much different from being an Arab Jew in a Jewish land.”
Perhaps the book’s most charged portrayal of place comes through the role of the (fictionalized) village of Kafr Ma’an, where Hadas is killed.
During the early years of Israeli statehood, Hadas, Salim and the rest of their family lived among many newly arrived Mizrahi Jews who were settled there.
But prior to 1948 the village had been inhabited by Arabs, including Hadas’ lover, Daoud. In fact, Daoud elegized the village in a book of poetry, eventually translated from Arabic to Hebrew. As the village gives way to modern development and is erased entirely, it remains only in memory and on the written page.
As readers, the post-Oct. 7 moment we continue to inhabit is a challenging time for this novel — published in January — to emerge. There are Jewish readers for whom the invitation to develop sympathies for Palestinian characters may be too much, and there are certainly many readers on the other side of the aisle who feel the same about Israeli characters. One of Bukai’s achievements is to challenge this binary thinking, offering a more complicated set of identities and relationships.
In reflecting on hundreds of conversations I have had around the conflict, I’ve seen how a lack of empathy — and I include myself here — can form an impasse. I believe that the ability to hear differing narratives and to understand and acknowledge others’ pain is one of the most important keys we have if we are to move forward. “The Anatomy of Exile” is a welcome novel that helps guide us in that direction.