The Anatomy of Exile: A Novel
“a tight plot woven with complicated moral questions faced by characters willing to confront their circumstances creates a novel that’s impossible to put down.”
The Anatomy of Exile is set between Israel’s 1967 Six-Day War, when near disaster turned into seeming invincibility, and its 1973 Yom Kippur War, when a surprise attack nearly destroyed the country. Twisting within these geo-political conflicts are the individual moral choices forced by love and loyalty when a Jewish Israeli family and a Palestinian Israeli family seek respite in a Brooklyn apartment building.
Tamar Abadi is a sabra, an Ashkenazi Jew born in Israel, bound to a secret she doesn’t understand and fearful that its fatal consequences will repeat in her daughter’s life. Her husband Salim is Mizrahi, an Arab Jew who fled Syria with his beloved sister Hadas and was smuggled into pre-state Israel. What sparks this compelling novel is Hadas’ death, ostensibly from a terror attack, but due to her long-standing, hidden affair with a Palestinian poet.
Author Zeeva Bukai delves into Tamar and Salim’s fears, their strengths, their very different commitment to a country trapped in cycles of warfare, their hopes for the future despite a past that stalks them across an ocean. Less clear are the Mahmoudi family. Financially more successful than the Abadis, Ibrahim Mahmoudi is very much the family patriarch, dominant yet gracious. Indicative of the shifts in identity and status this novel explores, he and Salim share a welcoming common ground of Arabic language and culture, one that eludes Tamir and her husband. Younger son Faisal Mahmoudi is handsome, brave, wise beyond his years, and arguably more perfect than a character should be, while Hussein’s turn from boisterous older brother to slingshot swinging rebel is never examined.
Unexplored family and historical conflicts haunt this otherwise engrossing story. Bukai never explains why Salim and Hadas had to flee Syria as children. While Tamar obediently accepts what Hadas and Daoud tells her of their love, Hadas’ proclivity for lies, together with Daoud’s sustained participation, hint at something far less benign.
If Bukai references too briefly the terror that gripped Israel before the Six-Day War, she well understands the carnage and sorrow left by Egypt and Syria’s 1973 surprise attack , which ignited the Yom Kippur War: “Tel Aviv had become a city of women, children, and old men, all of them conscious of the missing and the lost, of ghosts that roamed the streets and cafes. There were empty chairs everywhere and, on the advertisement pillars, posters alerting neighbors to the daily funerals, the shiva calls, and the words May you be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem muttered in their ears.”
Unfortunately, she neglects to mention that the war was deliberately launched on a Jewish religious holiday when radio, TV, and mass transit would be shut down, and most Israelis would be fasting. The war escalated into a standoff between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union with international fears that a larger conflict would result. This lack of context subtly undercuts The Anatomy of Exile’s emotional and moral complexity.
Instead, Bukai’s compassionate, lyrical language looks long, hard, and yet empathetically at the way war and the secrets it creates warp individuals and their families, writing how “The heart lived in the liminal space between heaven and earth when a beloved was in danger.”
She remembers what so many contemporary authors have forgotten, namely that a tight plot woven with complicated moral questions faced by characters willing to confront their circumstances creates a novel that’s impossible to put down. Tamar’s slow, steady transformation from insecure teenage bride grateful for handsome Salim and charismatic Hadas’ attention, to devoted wife and over-protective mother, to a lioness determined to protect her daughter’s freedom while finding her own is at once remarkable yet realistic.
The Anatomy of Exile’s ending is appropriately ambiguous. Throughout the course of this moving story, homes shift, countries change, and characters stumble toward their own uncertain yet true ground. While more strongly recommended for readers with a background in Middle East history, The Anatomy of Exile is a well-written, thought-provoking novel that earns its need for a sequel.