The Anatomy of Exile by Zeeva Bukai is a riveting novel about an Israeli-born woman, a Sabra named Tamar, married to a Syrian Jew, Salim, who has migrated to Israel. She has been raised with the noble founding values of Israel as an egalitarian society. His experience, however, is that of a Mizrahi, darker-skinned Jews mostly driven out of Muslim countries in Asia and Africa. Salim was derided as a “dirty Jew” in his native Syria, and attacked as a “stinking Arab” in Israel. Their passionate love affair as youth becomes far more complicated as the realities of marriage and children set in.

Salim and his younger sister, Hadas, were smuggled across the Golan Heights by the British Jewish Brigade when the two were ten and eight years old, just after Israel became a state. In their tiny village of Kafr Ma’an, north of Tel Aviv, they shared a deep and abiding cultural bond, sharing the Arabic language, listening to Mizrahi music, eating Arab food.  Years later, Hadas violated her vows to her Mizrahi husband Moti, and engaged in a love affair with a Palestinian, a secret known only to sister-in-law Tamar. Tamar pledges to keep the secret, but not revealing it to to her husband, Salim (Hadas’s brother,) has profound consequences for their marriage. And the betrayals by Hadas and Tamar are not the only betrayals in this extraordinary debut novel.

When Hadas is shot to death (I’ll leave you to discover the circumstances), a grieving Salim insists that he, Tamar, and their three children move to America to build a new life.  In 1960’s Brooklyn, immigrant Salim holds down jobs in a plastic factory and a laundromat to support his family. Entrepreneurial in spirit, he is determined to save enough money to buy a house and build his own business. His efforts ultimately pay off, but Tamar still yearns to return to her idealized Israel. She remains blind to understanding how Israeli Arabs, like Salim, are treated as second-class citizens, relegated to menial jobs as gardeners and street sweepers. Tamar is now the outsider and never feels at home in America. She becomes especially distraught when her teenage daughter Ruby becomes involved with a Palestinian boy.

The Anatomy of Exile gives us sympathetically drawn characters who, each in his or her own way, are forced to choose between love and duty to family and country. In a marriage or relationship, questions are constantly raised about whose culture will be subsumed by the other’s. What gives an immigrant a sense of belonging? How to cope when a house is not a home? How to maintain one’s identity when uprooted to another country.

In a comment still relevant to today, Salim says, “Israel’s just like any other country. Wasn’t sculpted out of the Ten Commandments.”  With seamless and well-paced storytelling, Israeli-American Bukai moves us through the 1967 War and the Yom Kippur War, viewed from America and from Israel. Relationships change, immigrants return and leave again. Wars are “won,” but the threat of war endures in everyday life. The book is highly nuanced and richly woven, a clear-eyed look at a group of people not often written about in Jewish-American literature. A 5-star read.

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