Back to All Events "Happy New Years," a book talk with author Maya Arad

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 twelve books of Hebrew fiction, as well as studies in literary criticism and linguistics. Born in Israel in 1971, she received a PhD in linguistics from University College London and for the past twenty years has lived in California where she is writer in residence at Stanford University’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies.

*Guests must register by Monday, February 16, to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.

Supported by the generosity of the Kaye and Radov families.

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Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University, 617 Kent Hall, New York, United States

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