TBE Reads will be gathering for a pot-luck brunch and discussion with Zeeva Bukai, author of The Anatomy of Exile. Zeeva will be joining us in person.
Please log in at arrive at 10:30 for brunch. The discussion with Zeeva will begin at 11:00 a.m.
RSVP to Debbie Herman.
In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, Tamar Abadi’s world collapses when her sister-in-law is killed in what appears to be a terror attack but what is really the result of a secret relationship with a Palestinian poet. Tamar’s husband, Salim, is an Arab and a Jew. Torn between the two identities, and mourning his sister’s death, he uproots the family and moves them to the US.
While Tamar struggles to maintain the integrity of the family’s Jewish Israeli identity against the backdrop of the American “melting pot” culture, a Palestinian family moves into the apartment upstairs and she is forced to reckon with her narrow thinking as her daughter falls in love with the Palestinian son. Fearing history will repeat itself, Tamar’s determination to separate the two sets into motion a series of events that have the power to destroy her relationship with her daughter, her marriage, and the family she has worked so hard to protect. This powerful debut novel explores Tamar’s struggle to keep her family intact, to accept love that is taboo, and grapples with how exile forces us to reshape our identity in ways we could not imagine.
Aeeva Bukai was born in Israel, raised in New York City and the author of The Anatomy of Exile. Her stories have appeared in Carve Magazine, The Master’s Review, Mcsweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and elsewhere. Her honors include a fellowship at the New York Center for Fiction, residencies at Hedgebrook Writers Colony, and Byrdcliff AIR program in Woodstock NY. She is the recipient of the The Master’s Review fall fiction prize, the Curt Johnson Prose Award, and the Lilith Fiction Award. Her work has been anthologized in Smashing The Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible, Frankly Feminist: Short Stories by Jewish Women from Lilith Magazine, and Out of Many: Multiplicity and Divisions in America Today. She studied Acting at Tel-Aviv University, and holds a BFA in Theater and an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College. She is the Assistant Director of Academic Support at SUNY Empire State University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
This event was made possible by a partnership with the Jewish Book Council.