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The Anatomy of Exile, with Zeeva Bukai

The talk

Zeeva Bukai’s first novel follows an Israeli family from the 1967 war to Brooklyn. It won the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction.

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The Book

Cover of The Anatomy of Exile by Zeeva Bukai: the title in tall yellow letters over a drawing of the New York skyline behind a mesh of lines.

Read it in your own time. You buy the book; the hour is ours.

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Speaker

  • Zeeva Bukai

    Zeeva Bukai

    Author of The Anatomy of Exile

    Zeeva Bukai’s first novel, The Anatomy of Exile, won the 2025 National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction. Her second, The World Between, came out in 2026. Her stories have appeared in Carve Magazine, The Masters Review and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and she has won the Lilith Fiction Award and the Curt Johnson Prose Award. She has an MFA from Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

    Photo: © Ghila Krajzman

The Anatomy of Exile starts in Israel just after the Six-Day War. Tamar Abadi’s sister-in-law is killed in what looks like a terror attack, and it turns out she’d been in a secret relationship with a Palestinian poet. Tamar’s husband, Salim, who is both an Arab and a Jew, moves the family to America to start over. Then a Palestinian family moves into the apartment upstairs, and Tamar’s daughter falls for their son.

It’s a family saga about exile, and about a mother trying to hold her family together when the fight they left behind moves in upstairs. It won the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction, and there’s plenty in it to argue about.

Zeeva joins us from Brooklyn to talk about the book and to take your questions. When she goes, we carry on talking about it. Stay on afterwards to schmooze. That part is never recorded.

Free for AIC members at every level. You just buy the book.

It runs on Zoom. On a computer you join in your browser or the Zoom app, no account needed. On a phone or tablet you need the free Zoom Workplace app.

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