The Anatomy of Exile: A Conversation with Novelist Zeeva Bukai
Since I wrote last week, the fires here in Los Angeles are still burning. The Watch Duty app informs me that the Palisades fire (which I read a day or two ago has destroyed a stretch of land larger than the city of Paris) is 22% contained, and the Eaton fire, a few miles north of where I live, is 55% contained.
The Red Cross has a form, accessible here, where, if you’re in the area, you can apply to help with their efforts to remedy the displacement and destruction. For monetary donations, you’ll find the main directory for the GoFundMe campaigns of hundreds of families and individuals who have lost their homes in the fires here.
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Today’s feature is an interview with novelist and short story writer Zeeva Bukai. Zeeva’s debut novel, The Anatomy of Exile, was released this past Tuesday, January 14. I’m not a fast reader, but this story, so propulsive and vividly written, had me quickly turning the pages, and I finished it in only a few sittings.
Zeeva is a gifted short story writer as well as a novelist and has published fiction in excellent literary magazines including McSweeney’s, CARVE, and December, where “The Abandoning” (an early version of the first chapter of The Anatomy of Exile - see the bottom of this post for an excerpt) was selected by Lily King for the Curt Johnson Prose Prize.
Here is a short synopsis adapted from the jacket copy: The Anatomy of Exile is a modern-day Romeo and Juliet story that focuses on a Palestinian and a Jew. The Abadi family flees to America to heal after a tragedy, but encounters more turmoil that threatens to tear them apart.
Christine/Bookish: Your novel begins in 1967 shortly after the end of the Six Day War and concludes in 1973. I'm always interested in how a writer grapples with structure. Did you know this would be its timeline when you began?
Zeeva Bukai: When it came to the timeline, I knew that I wanted to place the action between the 1967 war which ended in a kind of euphoria for Israel because they won against three armies—Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, and the Yom Kippur war in 1973, which ended on a very somber note because although Israel technically won that war, they lost more than 2,600 soldiers.
I wanted the two wars to act as bookends in the novel and for those postwar sensibilities to permeate the story. The difficulty was structuring, though it felt more like harnessing, everything between ’67 and ’73. It was only by writing that I discovered the novel’s internal structure. The four-part structure came to me at the very end when I finally understood what I had written.
CS: Tamar, your main character, makes a number of pivotal decisions that fall within what I'd call a moral gray area—choices that hinge on revealing or keeping secrets. She means well but of course some of the outcomes are not…good. Would you talk about how you see her and how she might have changed as you wrote the book? I don't see her as a villain (not at all), but she's also not necessarily someone you'd want to tell your secrets to.
I love Tamar, but she is a flawed character, insecure in her position as Salim’s wife, haunted by her experiences, her actions, and by the death of her sister-in-law. She feels like an outsider in her own marriage and out-of-step with the world. While her family assimilates to life in America, she stands on the sidelines and watches them change and grow, frightened they will never go back to being who they were.
All Tamar wants is to go home to Israel and have everything and everyone remain the same. Her saving grace is that she loves fiercely, but this is also her downfall. She acts out of fear, keeps secrets without realizing the depth of her betrayal. She is terrified history will repeat itself and acts in ways that jeopardize the integrity of her marriage and family. She is like Cassandra (the mythological Trojan priestess) trying to warn her family that if they don’t return home, they will lose themselves to the great American melting pot. She isn’t wrong, just wrongheaded.
Because of these challenges, there are a lot of opportunities for her to learn and grow and find her way.
CS: Romeo and Juliet is mentioned in the jacket copy I've quoted above--I'm guessing it did serve as an inspiration for The Anatomy of Exile—consciously or not. Were there others?
ZB: Although Romeo and Juliet was an unconscious choice, I think it’s an apt description. The Romeo and Juliet story is dramatic because it centers on a conflict, and so do the relationships in my novel.
My goal was to explore cross-cultural relationships. The novel comprises three love stories; two are between Palestinians and Israelis. These serve as bookends to the story. However, the main relationship is a marriage between an Ashkenazi Jew and a Mizrahi Jew.
Some of the books that inspired me were Marguerite Duras’ The Lover; Silk by Alessandro Barricio; Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante; All the Rivers, by Dorit Rabinyan; To the End of the Land, by David Grossman; and Great House, by Nicole Krauss. Something about the style and sensibilities of these writers speaks to me and I go back to them often.
CS: The male characters in the novel are nuanced and well drawn—Salim, Faisal, Ibrahim, Ari, Daoud. There's machismo here too. Are you especially fond of one in particular? Tangentially, who would you say is the novel's moral compass?
ZB: I have great compassion for the male characters in my book. Each of them tries so hard to get a foothold in a capitalist world that measures their worth by the amount of money they earn. They are also the products of a Middle Eastern patriarchy--macho, sometimes brutal and cruel, and sometimes tender and loving.
Salim (Tamar’s husband) is especially a troubled man. He is desperate to outrun his grief and guilt over his sister’s violent death. Ibrahim Mahmoudi (his upstairs neighbor) is a model for him, a man who has “made it” in America, a man he understands because they come from the same world.
To me, Daoud, who is introduced early in the novel, is the most tragic figure in the story. He loses everything and when he realizes this, he destroys himself and his beloved, Hadas. All of these men are flawed. They each do things that are difficult to accept and yet my hope is that the reader feels a sense of understanding and empathy for them.
But when speaking of a moral compass, that would be Faisal, Ibrahim’s son. He has an innate sense of fair play, of justice, and duty and the thing that sets him apart is that he acts on it. He loves without reservation. He is sensitive, an artist, and although he grows up in a patriarchal society, he does not exhibit machismo. He doesn’t feel the need to prove himself that way.
CS: What are you working on now?
ZB: I’m at the beginning stages of a series of novellas about women and war trauma. Whether they have experienced war firsthand, or if someone close to them has, I want to examine how this affects the relationships they have with their partners and children.
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Zeeva Bukai was born in Israel and raised in New York City. Her stories are forthcoming in the anthology Smashing the Tablets: A Radical Retelling of the Hebrew Bible, and have appeared in CARVE, Pithead Chapel, the Lilith anthology, Frankly Feminist: Stories by Jewish Women, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, December Magazine—where her story “The Abandoning” (an early version of the first chapter of The Anatomy of Exile) was selected by Lily King for the Curt Johnson Prose Prize, and The Master’s Review, where she was the recipient of the Fall Fiction prize selected by Anita Felicelli, among other publications. She is the assistant director of Academic Support at SUNY Empire State University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
So grateful to you, Christine, for hosting this convo with Zeeva. I've had the good fortune of reading the novel already (and celebrating at the Brooklyn launch last Tuesday). Highly recommend it!