Life
Happy New Years review: ‘another fine novel by one of Israel’s best writers’
The Hebrew teacher in Maya Arad’s latest novel is a heroine for our times
September 12, 2025 16:41
The Hebrew teacher in Maya Arad’s latest novel is a heroine for our times
September 12, 2025 16:41Maya Arad was born in Israel in 1971, but she has lived for the past 20 years in California. She is the author of 12 works of Hebrew fiction and her acclaimed book The Hebrew Teacher, published in Israel in 2018, was her first to be translated into English.
Happy New Years also begins with a Hebrew teacher, Leah Moskovich. Leah was born in Romania in 1942 and came to Israel with her parents as a child. She later trains as a teacher and the novel consists of the letters she writes every year at Rosh Hashanah to her old college friends. The first letter, written in 1967, drops a bombshell. She has moved to America to teach at a Jewish school.
Almost immediately things go wrong and this sets a pattern that runs through her letters over 50 years. Just when things start to go right for her – she falls in love, she finds a new job – everything falls apart. Men abandon her. A succession of Mr Rights become Mr Wrongs, some disastrously so. Her jobs, whether teaching in Massachusetts or working in real estate in California, flop. Her get-rich schemes leave her poorer than ever.
Leah shares all of this with her old friends. Here too, there are a number of twists. First, her friends often don’t write back and don’t seem interested in her dramas. She is deeply hurt but it’s not hard to see why they don’t care. She’s so self-obsessed and narcissistic that even the most loyal friends might wonder whether she has brought her woes upon herself.
Second, she writes two kinds of letters. Often her letters are positive, even gushing about her life. But the letters shared only with her friend Mira are desperately honest, at times despairing.
Finally, her letters also refer to big events of the time: the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the Gulf War, 9/11, but also larger American cultural changes, the feminist revolution, the rise of computers, from Silicon Valley to the internet. But she doesn’t really engage with these great events, which matter less to her than the comings and goings of her own life.
And yet as the novel goes on, it is hard not to feel for Leah. She is such a good person at heart, badly let down by the men in her life. But she means well and stands by her friends and her family, coming to regret the bad choices she has made. By the end, she has learnt so much about life and emerges as a deeply moving heroine for our times. This is another fine novel by one of Israel’s best writers.
Happy New Years
By Maya Arad translated by Jessica Cohen
New Vessel Press
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