Zeeva Bukai is the author of the new novel The Anatomy of Exile. She is the assistant director of academic support at SUNY Empire State University, and she lives in Brooklyn.
Q: What inspired you to write The Anatomy of Exile, and how did you create your character Tamar?
A: There were a few things that inspired me to write The Anatomy of Exile.
The first was my own immigrant experience. I was born in Israel and moved to the US when I was 4 years old. I was very young, but the experience left its mark. It took a long time for me to stop feeling like an outsider.
The second was my family history. My father was from Damascus, Syria. In 1941, he, aged 13, and his two younger brothers, aged 11 and 8, were smuggled across the Golan Heights as part of Operation 1000 children, a program run by the Jewish Agency that tried to save the lives of 1,000 Jewish Syrian children living in abject poverty and as dhimmis, second-class citizens, in Syria.
When the war of independence ended in 1949, the nascent Israeli state placed my father, his sister, and her husband, along with 200 mostly Mizrahi families, in Sheik Munis, a village on the outskirts of Tel-Aviv that had been abandoned by its Palestinian residents in March 1948, two months before the establishment of the State of Israel. My parents lived in that village after they married.
I wanted to understand the tragedy of that village, why the inhabitants of Sheikh Munis left, and what it was like for the families that were placed there. Sheikh Munis became the basis of Kafr Ma’an, the village in my novel where the characters, Tamar and Salim, begin their married lives.
These threads became the starting point of the novel, which allowed me to explore the immigrant experience, the themes of homeland, displacement and exile, and the cross-cultural relationship between Tamar and Salim, a Mizrahi and Ashkenazi couple, as well as the Romeo and Juliet storyline that runs through the novel with two generations of their family in which the lovers are Israeli and Palestinian.
At first, I didn’t know that Tamar was the main character. I began the novel from the point of view of Ruby Abadi, Tamar and Salim’s eldest daughter.
However, as time went on, I felt Ruby’s perspective wasn’t wide enough and I began to add chapters from Tamar’s point of view and soon realized that hers was the more dominant voice. She was the main character, a woman desperate to keep her marriage and family intact.
Tamar came to me a haunted woman, haunted by the death of her sister-in-law, Hadas, whose affair with a Palestinian man ends in tragedy, haunted by her husband’s desire to leave their home and start a new life, and haunted by the belief that history could repeat itself and destroy them, and finally that her family could lose themselves, and their identity in the diaspora.
Tamar’s love for Salim, and her family, and her longing for home are themes woven throughout the novel.
Q: The writer Elizabeth Graver said of the book, “Zeeva Bukai writes as perceptively about romantic love and family life as she does about the wider forces that haunt it: war and exile, love across borders, the long, torturous shadow of the past.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: I was so honored to receive Elizabeth Graver’s endorsement of my book. Her support feels monumental. I found her assessment insightful and spot on.
The Anatomy of Exile is a book about love, marriage, exile and complicated characters who have the courage to cross cultural borders. There are three love stories in the novel, two of which are between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims.
The novel also examines how war shapes people’s identities and lives. It’s set between the Six Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, wars that changed the landscape of Israel, Jordan, Syria and Egypt.
Elizabeth Graver is right when she refers to the “long, tortuous shadow of the past.” Memory, the past, and history color everything these characters experience in their lives.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I had no idea how the novel would end when I began writing it. However, once I realized that Tamar was the main character, I knew she would have to return home to Israel.
I worked on this novel for many years and wrote multiple drafts, always honing the characters and plot to create a narrative that would be believable and hopefully compelling enough for the reader to turn the page.
When I completed a full draft in 2019, I knew the story and characters so well that the ending felt both surprising and inevitable. It’s my hope that the reader feels that way too.
Q: Especially considering the situation in the Middle East today, what do you hope readers take away from the novel?
A: I hope readers feel compassion for these characters, no matter what side of the conflict they are on, even when they do questionable things. I hope they come away feeling that the only way forward is through tolerance, acceptance, and compassion for the suffering of others.
I know how hard that is right now but without both sides acknowledging the past hurts they’ve perpetrated on the other, we will never move forward towards peace, and we desperately need to. The current situation is unsustainable for everyone involved. It doesn’t take courage to hate; it takes courage to love, to move beyond the past and into the future.
As Jon Polin, the father of Hersh Goldberg Polin (who was taken hostage on Oct. 7, 2023 and later executed in Gaza by Hamas) stated so eloquently, “In a competition of pain, there are no winners.” At the end, Tamar embraces love and tolerance. As naïve as it sounds, I wish we could all do the same.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m currently working on a set of novellas that deal with mothers and daughters, the trauma of the Second World War, and the hope for redemption.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I want readers to know that what was most important to me in writing this book was to tell a story that was emotionally true, that was balanced and human about a complicated situation and complicated characters.
Kirkus Reviews summed it up best, I think, when they said, “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.”
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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