Happy New Years

After emigrating to the United States in the mid-1960s, Leah maintains her connection to Israel by writing an annual letter on the Jewish New Year to old friends from a women’s teaching college. This is an emigration story of high hopes and deep disappointments, but it’s also a chronicle of an unabashed love of the act of writing. Composed of fifty letters penned between 1966 and 2016, the novel skillfully documents Leah’s life challenges, from relationships, marriage, and divorce to raising two children by herself, financial debt, and the ups and downs of a second career in real estate. Yet the protagonist holds on to a flickering dream of perhaps someday becoming a writer. As the novel progresses, author Maya Arad hints at personal details and old resentments that Leah conceals from recipients of her yearly missives, and even from herself. At the conclusion, Leah confronts some of the secrets that shaped her trajectory in this moving work about female friendship, self-esteem, and the constraints of social status.