Hunting in America
By Tehila Hakimi. Translated by Joanna Chen (Penguin Books)

I’ve never seen the popular Apple TV series Severance. However, I’ve read enough to know that it’s about employees at a biotech company who undergo a procedure so they retain no memories of their lives outside work while on the job—and vice versa. Yet I immediately thought of the central premise of Severance when encountering the unnamed narrator in Israeli author Tehila Hakimi’s Hunting in America.

What we do know about the teller of Hakimi’s tale is that she’s an Israeli woman, around 40, and a recent arrival in the United States, where she’s begun working at the American division of an unnamed Israeli tech firm. She doesn’t divulge exactly where she lives, though we have a few clues: It’s somewhere out west, has cold winters, and the nearest IKEA is about three hours away. For most of the novel, she reveals nothing about the life she left behind in Israel.

In her new environment, she has almost no life outside work. And, no matter what happens throughout this slim book, she seldom tells us how she feels, even about her newly discovered obsession—hunting.

What she does do, in clinical but somehow poetic microchapters, is describe in almost excruciating detail the oddity of being an Israeli woman navigating American office culture. She recounts being told to smile more and eventually develops a sunny grin that, while necessary to American success, is alien and inauthentic to her previous life.

“The smile I’d acquired in Israel had something gloomy about it, something incomplete,” she thinks.

After similar coaching, she spends hours editing her emails to co-workers so they sound less aggressive.

She’s eventually invited to join a group of male co-workers on a hunting expedition and impresses them—and, perhaps, herself—with her firearms skill, honed during her service in the Israel Defense Forces two decades earlier. The book comes alive most vividly in its graphic portrayal of hunting: “We approached the dead buck, and David identified the points of impact. He looked carefully at the first point, bleeding at the center of the torso, and then he turned to me and said, ‘It was a beautiful hit.’”

Most of the novel centers on the narrator’s relationship with David, her hunting guide and married co-worker, who goes on regular hunting trips despite a past traumatic gun incident—one of the author’s many comments on America’s gun culture. Long after the reader senses it’s coming, she begins an affair with David. In their strange courtship, the boundaries between work and life become increasingly blurred.

At other times, the narrator seems to lose her grip on reality, seeing human heads on the bodies of animals she’s killed. It gets increasingly difficult for the reader to trust her telling.

Toward the end of the book, the narrative flashes back to her last weeks in Israel before emigrating. On one hand, it’s refreshing to see the narrator with a fuller life; she has parents, friends and a long-absent boyfriend attempting to win her back. Yet, as before, much about her is left unexplained.

Hakimi’s restrained, hyper-focused style makes for compelling, propulsive reading. The short chapters ensure the narrative never drags, and the novel’s ambiguous ending adds to the tale a genuine level of horror.

Yet with Hakimi’s minimalistic prose, too much is left off the page. I waited for a revelation or emotional self-reflection that never arrived.

With Hunting in America, Hakimi, already a noted poet, joins a growing cadre of Israeli authors like Maya Arad, Ruby Namdar, Ayelet Gundar-Goshen and Ayelet Tsabari who write about Israelis living in North America.   

Bryan Schwartzman is a writer living outside Philadelphia. Follow his work on his website.