Happy New Years by Maya Arad

Ever since I read The Hebrew Teacher, the first book translated into English by the US-based, Israeli-born writer Maya Arad, I have been eagerly anticipating the publication of her next book in English.

The Hebrew Teacher is a collection of three novellas, all centered around Israeli transplants in America and the complicated bonds they have with one another and their homeland. The title story takes place at a college in the Midwest, and the other two are set in Northern California. Arad's characters typically work in Silicon Valley or in academia. The novellas feature intriguing themes about generational conflicts, fraught family dynamics, and the complexity of female relationships.

Happy New Years touches on some of these same themes, but the format is very different. Arad structures this book as an epistolary novel, written in the form of an annual letter that the protagonist, Leah Zuckerman, sends every Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, to her former classmates at a small teacher's college in Israel.

Leah left Israel as a young woman in somewhat scandalous circumstances. Through her- annual missive, which she keeps up meticulously for 50 years, she recounts to her friends (and frenemies) the ups and downs of life in America. Particularly in her early letters, she is a brazen over-sharer who lacks self-awareness. She is also not a reliable narrator. Leah sugarcoats her problems or omits key details about her actual circumstances. However, in postscripts to her close friend Mira, much more — but not all — of the truth emerges.

Throughout the course of the novel, Leah gets married and divorced, grapples with being a single mother, jumps into a string of disastrous romantic relationships, and makes one terrible financial decision after another. While you want to scream at her for her horrible choices, you can't help but liking her and admiring her relentless optimism.

Arad is a skilled storyteller, and l I enjoyed this book overall. However, I didn't find it as compelling as The Hebrew Teacher, largely because I never found the character of Leah completely convincing. She suffered too many mishaps to be believable, and her letters did not seem like ones anyone would actually write.

Another problem is that the revelations never come as much of a surprise. Leah starts out as a Hebrew teacher and later — red flag alert — she embarks on a new career as a real estate agent in the Bay Area during the dot-com boom. And what do you know? The Internet bubble bursts and, predictably, she takes a financial hit. Fifteen years later, she starts buying investment properties as real estate prices soar and financing is cheap. Surprise, surprise: A few pages later we read that she's been wiped out by the mortgage market meltdown. Leah starts dating an older man who initially showers her with gifts and fancy trips, but as the years go by, he dodges any talk of marriage and only offers vague promises to take care of her. As you might imagine, things don't turn out well. And so on.

A few details in the book do not ring true or are erroneous. For example, in one of her earliest letters from the late 1960s, Leah talks about traveling to Chicago, which she describes as America's "third largest city." Chicago is the third-biggest U.S. city today, but when Leah was there it still would have been the country's second-biggest city and not yet overtaken by Los Angeles.

Despite these minor issues, I found the premise of the book to be innovative, and Leah's story to be ultimately hopeful, showing that someone who has stumbled over and over again can find meaning and contentment later in life. Arad writes insightfully about women who are in middle age or beyond, and she offers nuanced insights into the duality of the Israeli-American experience. I hope more of Arad's books will become available in translation and I look forward to reading more of her work.