A Jewish family’s trauma is the villain in an epic Israeli-Palestinian love story
Zeeva Bukai on how a tragedy drives intergenerational conflict in her debut novel, ‘The Anatomy of Exile’
Zeeva Bukai shared over tea how her own family’s history inspired her debut novel: an epic story about a Mizrahi Israeli family overcoming intergenerational trauma. Photo-illustration by Zeeva Bukai headshot by Ghila Krajzman/book cover by Colin Dockrill/Canva
By Samuel Eli Shepherd January 17, 2025
Zeeva Bukai wrote The Anatomy of Exile from the perspective of a familiar literary figure: the anxious Jewish mother. But in this novel about a Mizrahi Israeli family moving to America, the main character, Tamar, has a reason to be anxious.
In Israel after the 1967 War, Tamar’s sister-in-law, Hadas, is killed in a suspected terrorist attack. In reality, Hadas was dating a Palestinian man, Daoud — a taboo in wartime Israel — and her death was a crime of passion. Only Tamar knows the truth, and she keeps it a secret from her husband.
Tamar later immigrates to Brooklyn with her husband and their three children. But when Tamar’s teenage daughter, Ruby, falls in love with a sensitive son of a Palestinian family that has moved upstairs, Tamar fears that history will repeat. She vows to stop the young lovers.
The resulting book is a sprawling epic about diaspora, war, immigration and the lasting scars of intergenerational trauma; one that lands with particular power and poignance amid the latest Israel-Hamas war. Equally impressive is that The Anatomy of Exile is Bukai’s first novel.
“First published novel,” Bukai corrected me, nursing a mug of chamomile tea. A lifelong writer of short stories with a dazzling resume of literary journals and fellowships, Bukai said she had written drafts of other novels that have never made it to print.
The Anatomy of Exile took nearly 10 years to write, Bukai said. She was parenting two children and working full-time; Bukai was in the process of editing the novel when Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7.
I spoke to Bukai, who is herself an Israeli-American immigrant, at a cafe in Park Slope right before Shabbat the week before her book launch. She sketched out the process of bringing The Anatomy of Exile to life, and what she hopes her long-brewing story about a Mizrahi family’s immigration saga can offer a post-Oct. 7 world.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Your book takes place around two major events in Israeli history: the 1967 War, which resulted in Israel occupying the West Bank and Gaza, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Israel was taken by surprise. Why ground your story in these two pivotal moments?
I chose those wars because I think that they are seminal moments in Israeli history and in the history of the Middle East. The Six-Day War changed the face of Israel’s map. Before ’67, East Jerusalem was under Jordanian rule. After ’67, it was under Israeli rule. Before ’67 they didn’t have the Gaza Strip. After ’67, they did, and of course they also gained control over the West Bank and the Golan Heights.
And so, I think everything that we are encountering now has to do with that specific war. To paraphrase Tom Friedman, “They won the war in six days, but they’ve been fighting it ever since.”
The Six-Day War was an existential moment, and after the war there was a feeling of triumph and victory in Israel. And the only person in the novel that is uneasy about that victory is Hadas [Tamar’s sister-in-law] and this is because of her love affair with Daoud.
How did you land on Tamar, the matriarch of the Abadi clan, as the main character for this story, rather than her daughter Ruby, or Tamar’s sister-in-law, Hadas?
It was not a straightforward writing experience at all. I began the novel from Ruby’s point of view and because I wanted a wider perspective, I wrote from Tamar’s as well. But as I was writing, Tamar’s story began to overtake me, and I got very interested in her, her inner life, and her relationship with Salim.
I chose Tamar as the main character because I wanted to write a human story. I didn’t want a story about heroes and villains. I wanted people to understand that she’s not prejudiced or bigoted. What she is is terrified. She is traumatized because of Hadas’ tragic death, and she is living with the knowledge and pain of that trauma every day.
Mizrahi stories are underrepresented in Jewish-American literature, especially in this sub-genre of stories about relationships between Israelis and Palestinians. Why center a story about star-crossed lovers on a Mizrahi perspective, rather than an Ashkenazi one?
I know the Mizrahi perspective. My father was Syrian, and he was smuggled across the Golan Heights into Israel at the age of 13 along with his two younger brothers. When he went to Israel, he was part of Operation 1,000 Children, a clandestine operation run by the Jewish British Brigade and Keren Kayemet, the Jewish Agency in their effort to save 1,300 Syrian Jewish children. This was in the early ’40s.
My father was placed on a Moshav [an Israeli village] with a Czech couple. The only languages they spoke were Czech and Yiddish. So for my father to be able to speak to them, he had to learn Yiddish. I find it interesting that he and the two brothers who escaped to Israel with him all married Ashkenazi women.
The reason I placed the romance between Hadas and Daoud there — the reason that I have a Jewish Syrian woman who falls in love with a Palestinian man — is because she feels alienated from her own culture, like my father did in Israel, for a time. I also think that the familiarity of the Arabic language and culture, even though she’s Jewish and Daoud is Muslim, is something Hadas finds comforting and enticing.
It’s an attraction: a kind of unconscious attraction that says you’re an outsider, I’m an outsider, let’s become insiders together. It’s also an attraction of opposites, and the attraction of opposites drives a lot of the relationships in this story.
I also haven’t seen this kind of dynamic done before, at least not often.
Why did you choose to make the three central characters, Tamar, Hadas and Ruby, all women?
I think history is often told from the perspective of men. It was important for me to get the historical perspective through the feminine eye. I also don’t know how many Mizrahi women’s stories are told, and telling that story was important to me.
I wanted a multi-generational story because I wanted to show Ruby as someone who doesn’t have to wait until she’s 35, 40 to feel a sense of independence. Tamar plays the role of being the subservient wife for most of the novel and Ruby is not that at all. I wanted to portray Faisal [Ruby’s Palestinian-American lover] and Ruby as a younger generation exploring a different male-female dynamic. Being in America, and being of a younger generation, gives Ruby a sense of strength that her mother doesn’t have.
This book is being published after Oct. 7 and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war. Do you think this kind of star-crossed love story between Israelis and Palestinians in the diaspora could ever occur today?
I would hope so, but I would not have placed this book in the present. The history that the book is set in is very specific to the action of the narrative. And I think today, with the reactions we’ve had here in the U.S. since Oct. 7 — cancel culture, Jewish and Israeli authors being boycotted — I almost can’t imagine it.
Given the history that has occurred in the last 50 years, I can imagine Faisal being more radicalized. Things have gotten more difficult in Israel and in the Palestinian territories. Ruby would have to pick a side. There would have been many more hurdles to leap over. I think their story would have been much more tragic than it is now.
I’m so sad about everything today. I think we are so polarized now that even people in high school or junior high school feel more hate, and social media just feeds that hatred.
Your book ends hopefully, with the Abadi family finding a way to work through their trauma. What made you decide to ultimately land on a hopeful ending, and why did you decide to stick to that ending even after Oct. 7?
I really think that without hope we are lost, and if we don’t have a sense of hope that things can change, why bother getting up in the morning?
But before anything can move forward, we need to acknowledge the pain that we’ve caused each other. We need to be able to say I’ve caused you pain and you’ve caused me pain, and we need to move forward from there. This doesn’t mean that a future Palestinian state has control over Ramat Aviv or that Israel has control over the West Bank. What it means is that we have to find a way to live side by side as neighbors.
My hope is that this book is an antidote to the crisis we are in today. My hope is that when you read this book, you feel a sense of possibility.
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