Join author Maya Arad and novelist Tova Mirvis for a discussion of Arad’s new book, “Happy New Years.”
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 as she navigates relationships, marriage, divorce, single motherhood, financial struggles, and professional ups and downs. Leah’s relentless optimism and cheerfulness conceal disturbing truths behind her carefully crafted words. As her letters turn increasingly introspective, the secrets and shame that shaped her trajectory unravel. 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 author of 12 books of Hebrew fiction, as well as studies in literary criticism and linguistics. Born in Israel in 1971, she received a Ph.D. in linguistics from University College London and for the past 20 years has lived in California, where she is currently writer-in-residence at Stanford University’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies. She won a National Jewish Book Award for “The Hebrew Teacher.”
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