THE ANATOMY OF EXILE

Two generations of displacement, loss, and star-crossed love in Tel Aviv, Brooklyn, and Kafr Ma’an, a village that no longer exists.

Bukai’s timely debut opens shortly after the Six-Day War in 1967, when Tamar Abadi learns that her sister-in-law, Hadas, has been killed by a gunman outside the house where she grew up in the village of Kafr Ma’an, since then more or less obliterated by the Israeli government. But what was she doing there? Hadas and her brother—Tamar’s husband, Salim—are Mizrahi Jews originally from Damascus, Syria; they were settled in Kafr Ma’an by the Israeli government on the heels of the mass displacement of the town’s Arab villagers in 1948. At the heart of this book is a tragic romance between an Arab and a Jew who lived in the same house at different times, and that doomed love is the first of several that shape the story. Devastated by the death of his sister, Salim makes the unilateral decision to move his family to the United States. Tamar’s feeling that it will not go well proves well-founded; when the Mahmoudis, a Palestinian family formerly of Jaffa, moves in upstairs, Tamar’s daughter falls in love with their son and all the old chickens come home to roost. The story moves forward to the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Tamar has the chance to redeem herself for some of the mistakes she has made. Bukai depicts not just the tensions between Arabs and Jews, but also between the Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jewish communities, and the trouble that continues to roil life in the American so-called melting pot. Shying away from villains and heroes, the novel creates sympathy for a spectrum of individuals trapped by tribalism, land grabs, heartless government actions, and economics.

A book to read right now.