Zeeva Bukai’s debut novel, The Anatomy of Exile, follows the Abadi family, who in the wake of the 1967 Israeli Six-Day War, moves to America, where the complicated foreign relations of their home country continue to influence their daily lives. This work feels resoundingly timely in this moment of unspeakable violence, but it also reminds us that this regional conflict is so historically intricate that it serves to reflect the basis of the human understanding of the foreign. Through her immediately knowable characters, Bukai demands introspection on one’s allegiances and obligations—those most valuable ideals that come to inform one’s sense of belonging.
The novel opens weeks after the end of the war, when Tamar Abadi learns of her sister-in-law’s death. Her husband’s sister, a married woman with children, has been killed in a murder-suicide by her Palestinian boyfriend, and Tamar is now the only person with knowledge of the affair. Tamar’s husband, Salim, is an Arab Jew bound to his family and community by their outsider status in a divided region, and Tamar, a Jew of European descent, feels that her husband could never accept her as one of his own. This fear fuels her to keep the affair from Salim, despite its relevance, because she is convinced that to tell Salim that she knew about the relationship would be to lose him. From the beginning, we grapple with the contradictions of Tamar’s assessment of herself in relation to her husband. While she seems aware that her skin color and religion grant her a geopolitical upperhand, Tamar sees herself as a potential intruder in her own marriage, due to a lack of understanding of her husband’s experience.
In the face of loss, Salim moves the family to Brooklyn. There, the couple’s misaligned wishes for the future produce a tense household, in which Salim, overworked and frustrated, remains determined to find success in his new country while his wife dreams of the family’s return to Israel. Salim’s fatigue leads to frequent outbursts that Tamar quietly navigates, even as her dissatisfaction with his leadership grows. Bukai keenly explains Tamar’s perception of this fragility in her marriage, as she realizes that “[e]verything they [are] [is] more tenuous now. A word, an action, could ruin them. […] in time his outburst [will] dissolve like salt in rain, while her words [will] drill into the foundation of their marriage.”
This divide that first resembles a stress-induced marital strife refocuses on the couple’s fundamental differences when their teenage daughter, Ruby, strikes up a romantic relationship with a Palestinian Muslim neighbor, Faisal Mahmoudi. Tamar forbids her daughter from seeing Faisal, claiming that her resistance to their love is not racism, as her Americanized daughter charges, but instead “about tribes, religion, land, history.” In pursuing the relationship, Tamar believes that her daughter “will always have to choose between love and duty to [her] family, to [her] country.”
As this generational boundary widens, so too does the distance between Salim and Tamar and Tamar’s true fears reveal themselves. Salim’s relative indifference toward their daughter’s relationship highlights both his adaptability as well as Tamar’s resistance to her new environment, of which she continues to grow increasingly resentful. His response also heightens Tamar’s perception of an inherent bond between Salim and all who share his native language and race. She wants not only to protect Ruby from difficulty, but also herself from being “the outsider” in her own home. Tamar sees that “Salim and Ruby [are] connected […] in a world where she [is] a foreigner. The place where the Mahmoudis live.”
By Bukai’s masterful hand, we travel deep inside the paranoid, unhappy mind of Tamar. As betrayals accumulate, the novel tactfully depicts the complexities of a marriage with a foundation that is tender and passionate, but also unsound. Tamar’s knowledge of Salim’s love is not enough for her to feel secure in their relationship, nor is her admiration for him enough to “alleviat[e] the isolation and loneliness” he feels in the wake of his sister’s death.
Positions shift and Tamar becomes the outsider in her new country and in her changing relationship. Her belief that she stands on the sidelines in her family places her exactly there, as she buries herself under secrets and an unwillingness to embrace her new country. When war erupts again back home, Tamar’s unwavering loyalty to Israel combats her husband’s familial loyalty, which never seems to fully include his Ashkenazi wife. In this empathetic telling of a family repeatedly driven apart by their shifting allegiances and complicated love, Bukai offers reprieve from today’s divisive rhetoric that often results in meaningless, oversimplified remedies and generalizations. This novel reminds us of the purpose of the novel as an artform—to paint human experiences that initiate nuanced thought on how one defines oneself.
The Anatomy of Exile, by Zeeva Bukai. Delphinium Books, January 2025. $28.00, hardcover.
Mia Carroll is an engineer and writer based in Manhattan, where she lives with her husband. She writes essays, short stories, and book reviews.
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