Zeeva Bukai's Romeo and Juliet Tale Set in 1960's Israel, 'The Anatomy of Exile'

In The Anatomy of Exile, Israeli-born fiction writer, Zeeva Bukai, presents her debut novel about an Israeli family who moves to the United States following a terrible family tragedy that occurs in the period after The Six Day War of 1967. Bukai explains, “…A beloved aunt is killed in what appears to be a terror attack, but is actually a crime of passion between this Jewish-Israeli-Syrian aunt who lives in Israel and a Palestinian man… Tamar is the main character. It is her sister-in-law who is killed at the beginning and her husband, Salim, decides that he is going to move the family to America for five years, make a million dollars, and come back rich as a king to Israel… Being in America is difficult for the family to navigate… most especially for Tamar who only longs to go home… and of course, irony of ironies, a Palestinian family moves in upstairs and Tamar’s daughter… falls in love with… the Palestinian boy upstairs and Tamar is terrified that history is going to repeat itself and she does everything she can to break up this relationship and in the process winds up almost destroying her marriage, her relationships that she has with her children, and basically her own identity and self as how she sees herself as a mother, as a wife, as a human being on the planet…”

With so many stories that could have been created around the Six Day War time period, what inspired Bukai to write this particular story? “So, I started this book 10 years ago, and I hadn’t expected that it would come out now at a time where it’s really, really so difficult… So, I’m hoping that the book is an antidote to that, that in a sense, the Romeo and Juliet story is… [about how] people from two different cultures come together… I really feel like this is a story about a marriage, about people keeping secrets from each other, about small betrayals that chip away at trust… and what family means and how outside forces could affect families… and also, I wanted to see what it would be like for a mother who’s desperate to hold on to her marriage, is desperate to save her daughter from what she perceives is this terrible threat because she saw her own sister-in-law die… I also wanted to look at the years 1967 during the Six Day War, which really changed everything on the ground for Israel, and the 1973 War… and so those two wars bookend. The relationships bookend… as well as these wars.”