Zeeva Bukai, "The Anatomy of Exile: A Novel" (Delphinium Books, 2025)

The Anatomy of Exile by Zeeva Bukai (Delphinium Books 2025) opens in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, when Tamar Abadi’s sister-in-law is killed by what looks like a terrorist attack but turns out to be the tragic end of Hadas’s love affair with a Palestinian poet. Hadas and her brother Salim, were born in and exiled from Syria, and now Salim moves his wife and children to the U.S. When a Palestinian family moves into their Brooklyn building and their teenage daughter falls in love with the teenage son, Tamar fears that history will repeat while Salim finds commonality in the family’s language and culture. Tamar struggles to separate the two teenagers and grapples with her children, her marriage, and her identity outside of Israel in this novel about love, marriage, history, culture, and politics.

Zeeva Bukai was born in Israel and raised in New York City. Her honors include a Fellowship

at the New York Center for Fiction and residencies at Hedgebrook, and Byrdcliffe Artist in Residence program. Her stories are forthcoming in the anthology Smashing the Tablets: A Radical

Retelling of the Hebrew Bible, and have appeared in Carve Magazine, Pithead Chapel, the Lilith anthology, Frankly Feminist: Stories by Jewish Women, December Magazine where her story The

Abandoning (an early version of the first chapter of her novel, “The Anatomy of Exile”) was selected by Lily King for the Curt Johnson Prose Prize, The Master’s Review, where she was the recipient of the Fall Fiction prize selected by Anita Felicelli, Mcsweeny’s Quarterly Concern, Image Journal, Jewishfiction.net, Women’s Quarterly Journal, and the Jewish Quarterly. Her work has been featured on the Stories on Stage Davis podcast. She studied Acting at Tel-Aviv University and holds a BFA in Theater and an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College. She is the Assistant Director of Academic Support at SUNY Empire State University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

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