Happy New Years

This subtle epistolary novel from Arad (The Hebrew Teacher) comprises 50 years' worth of letters sent by a woman to her former classmates at an Israeli teacher's college on Rosh Hashana. Though ostensibly filled with good cheer, Leah Zuckerman's letters are also comically passive-aggressive, due to her long-running resentment toward the others for looking down on her as an immigrant from Romania. This context becomes apparent in separate, more candid versions of the letters, which she sends to Mira, her closest friend from the group. The reader learns of Leah's disappointments following graduation in 1966, when she's tricked by the head of the college into moving to Massachusetts for a nonexistent teaching opportunity. She marries and has two sons, but her gambler husband deserts the family. She continues forming disastrous relationships with men and finally comes clean to Mira about a traumatic incident that happened in Israel and drove a wedge between them. Whether in cleverly ironic depictions of Leah's inflated self-regard, passages that reveal the depth of her homesickness, or scenes showing her resilience, Arad elicits sympathy for her complex lead. This will move readers. (Aug.)

After decades of bad choices, a woman reveals who she is beyond an inveterate optimist. Leah Zuckerman, an Israeli emigree to the United States, tells her story starting in 1966 through 50 years of New Year's letters to schoolmates. Each letter is embellished by a postscript, most to her friend Mira, disclosing more private information. Leah lands in Worcester, Massachusetts, as a young woman to take what turns out to be a nonexistent job as a Hebrew teacher. We watch her become a wife and then mother to two sons, and cycle through a series of failed relationships with men--some that fizzle out, others that are disastrous. We suspect Leah is an unreliable narrator but we're not sure why or how. Is she a husband stealer? Blind to her own actions? As her personal life fluctuates from man to man and place to place, her letters bring us into the lives of her friends and frenemies, and into her unceasing efforts to reinvent herself. Her older son breezes through school and the job market, while her younger drops out and becomes an addict. Themes the author explored to great effect inThe Hebrew Teacher (2024) are at play here: the push and pull between homeland and adopted country, the struggle to create an identity apart from mother and homemaker, the challenges of getting a foothold in a new country and extreme financial precarity take place against sweeping changes in American culture. Unexpected--and satisfying--turns at the end of the book disclose what Leah has been hiding, revealing her to be more lovable and complex than her yearly letters have suggested. A life replete with grit, optimism, and mystery is created through the simple artifice of a series of New Year's letters. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.