Happy New Years
By Maya Arad. Translated by Jessica Cohen (New Vessel Press)

In this epistolary novel, Leah Moskovich Zuckerman gains insights and hard-won truths as she pens annual Rosh Hashanah greetings to her fellow Teachers College alumnae still in Israel.

As she learns to open up, reveal her doubts and fears, and admit her own failings in letters spanning five decades, the reader is treated to a sly and complex portrait of a character beautifully rendered by author Maya Arad. This is Arad’s second book translated into English. Her first book of three novellas, The Hebrew Teacher, received the National Jewish Book Award for Hebrew Fiction in Translation in 2024.

In Happy New Years, the reader first encounters 20-something Leah, when she is a somewhat unreliable narrator. She is a little flip, a little flirtatious, a little petty and, for good measure, a little shallow. She finds herself in Massachusetts, having abruptly departed Israel in the mid-1960s for a Hebrew school job in Worcester that, it turns out, was created to ship her out of the Jewish state (for reasons revealed in the novel). In her 20s, she believes her greatest currency is her looks, having been compared to actresses Tippi Hedren and Kim Novak, and she liberally trades on the comparisons—to ill effect. 

Hadassah Magazine Presents: ‘Happy New Years’ from Master of Israeli Fiction Maya Arad

Join Hadassah Magazine Presents on Thursday, September 18 at 7 PM ET, just in time for Rosh Hashanah, as Hadassah Magazine Executive Editor Lisa Hostein speaks with Israeli-born author and playwright Maya Arad, a visiting scholar at Stanford University whom Haaretz described as one of the “finest living authors writing in Hebrew today.” She will talk about her new book, Happy New Years, as well as the experiences of Israeli expatriates in America today.

This program is free and open to all. 

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Yet even as Leah makes bad choices in romance and fails in all sorts of business ventures following her move to Silicon Valley, where she hopes to make her pot of gold in the real estate market, the reader takes a shine to her. That’s all Arad’s doing. She has created an underdog whom one can’t help rooting for. It turns out that Leah, ever an outsider—in Israel, the sabras derided her Romanian heritage and accent—possesses an indomitable spirit that propels her forward, despite her occasional lapses into self-delusion.

As she approaches 70, the proud divorced mother of two grown sons with a sweet granddaughter comes to see the value in rigorous self-scrutiny coupled with self-acceptance.

In one of her letters to her classmates, she writes, “I did not fight, and I did not change the world. Still, I did do something: I fought for my own livelihood. I learned a vocation on my own. I raised my children alone. I gave them an opportunity for a better future.”

We should all be as honest as Leah Moskovich Zuckerman.

Robert Nagler Miller writes frequently about the arts, literature and Jewish themes from his home near New York City.