BAI Book Group

Please join us at a member’s home to discuss The Hebrew Teacher by Maya Arad.

Accord­ing to many crit­ics, Maya Arad is the most accom­plished Hebrew-lan­guage writer liv­ing out­side of Israel, and per­haps one of the best Israeli nov­el­ists of her gen­er­a­tion. Through­out her eleven nov­els and books of short fic­tion, she has cre­at­ed deeply affect­ing and often wrench­ing por­traits of the foibles of con­tem­po­rary soci­ety, par­tic­u­lar­ly those of mid­dle-class fam­i­lies and acad­e­mia. So while it’s a lit­tle sur­pris­ing that The Hebrew Teacher is the first to be trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish, it sure­ly won’t be the last. Com­posed of three novel­las cen­tered on three Israeli immi­grants to the Unit­ed States (each woman is in a dif­fer­ent phase of their accul­tur­a­tion to the new soci­ety), and the fam­i­lies, friends, and col­leagues sur­round­ing them, this book is bristling with insights into the sharp divides between cul­tures, and between generations.