Happy New Years, by Maya Arad

Translated by Jessica Cohen, FICTION

Facilitated by Shlomit Ritz Finkelstein

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. 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.

 "Maya Arad is the smart, tart, and heartbroken sibyl of exile, who is remaking expectations of Hebrew literature book by book."

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