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- [00:04]
G.P. Gottlieb
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets. Mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com hello everybody, this is Marshall Po.
- [00:31]
Marshall Poe
I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcast podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:37]
G.P. Gottlieb
A few months ago, I was contacted by Jonathan Zuckerman of Mountain View, California, who asked if I could do something with his mother's letters, written in Hebrew over the past 50 years. In our introductory phone call, Mr. Zuckerman told me about his mother's dream of publishing a book, but cautiously expressed his doubts as to the literary merit of the letters. I will put it bluntly, the letters you are about to read have no literary merit. This is GP Gottlieb, host for New Books and Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Maya Arad about her epistolary novel, Happy New Year's. Over the course of some 50 years, an Israeli woman named Leah writes letters to her fellow teachers college colleagues. She considers herself only one of she considers only one of the group as a real friend. While the others were catty and Hurtful still, she doesn't want them to forget her. And every year sends news of her triumphs with minimal emphasis on the sad and depressing moments of her life. Only her friend Mira gets the truth about why Leah's mother in law moves in, why she takes her sons on vacations alone, why, why she doesn't have any friends, and why she moved to California. Hi Maya, thanks for joining me today.
- [03:02]
Maya Arad
Hi Galit, thanks for having me.
- [03:04]
G.P. Gottlieb
So what triggered the idea of writing an epistolary novel?
- [03:09]
Maya Arad
In this particular case, it was the structure that came to me first. I just, I remembered the day and I remembered that I had an idea. I want to try to see if I can write a novel made completely out of letters sent annually every year before Rosh Hashanah by an Israeli woman who goes to America to teach Hebrew and stay there. And every year before Rosh Hashanah, she writes a letter back home telling her friends from the teachers college what happened over the past year. I just found the idea compelling, you know, if I can tell a story in such a way, this was the start.
- [03:46]
G.P. Gottlieb
Yeah. Love it. The book opens with three your protagonist, Leah's son, wanting to get his mother's letters published. Would she have written out a copy and saved it before writing it? Because I remember sending air mail. Little, tiny, thin. And you had to write really tiny in those early years. So how did she save all those letters?
- [04:09]
Maya Arad
I think if you read carefully. Towards the end of the book, she's asking her closest friend, Mira, if you still have all my letters from those many years ago, can you please send them to me? And I think that's how she got them all back. But you're absolutely right. You're very good at reading between the lines. It's a good question how those letters were kept all those years, not just.
- [04:36]
G.P. Gottlieb
Saving them, but I'm thinking when I used to write letters, you had to just fit all the words onto that one page. Cause it was expensive to send. And Leah's letters are beautiful, long, chatty. I want. I wish people sent me letters like that, you know?
- [04:52]
Maya Arad
Right, yes. You still remember those air mail?
- [04:55]
G.P. Gottlieb
That's what I'm saying. Yeah, exactly. So Mira, the story opens with Leah's first letter in November of 1966. She's responding to her friend Mira's response from her first Rosh Hashanah card the previous year. And she acknowledges that the other classmates didn't like her. Can you say more about that?
- [05:17]
Maya Arad
Yes. So every time, you know, I say to readers, so it's a Book about a woman who sends letters to her friends back home. Somebody says friends in parenthesis and they're right because, yes, Leah always felt out of place. And later in the book, she even acknowledges it. She says that it wasn't only she says, I used to think that it's because I was a new immigrant in Israel and everybody else was Sabra Israeli born. And then I thought in Silicon Valley, I felt an outsider because everybody was married and I was divorced. But now I know it's something within me, this feeling of being out of place. But it's true. Yes, Leah was not liked by her friends. She was tolerated, but she holds onto them very strongly. It's very important for her to preserve those connections. She keeps writing to them, even when they don't bother to write back. Some of them do, some of them don't. There are years when she writes to a large group of friends. Some years she only writes to her closest friend, Mira, because nobody else wrote back to her. Yeah, it's very touching. I don't think it's a spoiler, but when I started working on the book, I thought, oh, it's a book about a woman who goes to America. She wants, you know, to find her good fortune there. She's a bit of a gold digger because she's looking for a rich husband. And as I was working on the book, I realized, no, it's something much more basic. It's about human loneliness, about looking for connection with people, with friends.
- [06:51]
G.P. Gottlieb
Also, in the 1960s, women were still taught to look for a husband who makes a good living. That was what they were raised to do, right?
- [07:04]
Maya Arad
That's right, yes. And also the, you know, professional training for women was pretty much being a teacher or maybe being a secretary or a nurse. So many, many women were teachers in those years, or at least attended a teacher's college. And Leah's situation of going to teach Hebrew in America was also a common thing in Israel in the 1960s. You know, if a woman wasn't married by the time she was 24 or 25, they would send her to America to teach Hebrew at the day school. Maybe she will find some nice Jewish men there.
- [07:37]
G.P. Gottlieb
So after they graduate, the other girls get jobs in central cities in Israel. But LE is sent to an immigrant border town by Shula, the director of the college, the Teachers College, who appears several times over the course of the book. Would you introduce Shula? What is her story?
- [07:57]
Maya Arad
Well, Shula is the director of the Teachers College. She's, you know, she's a very. Didactic figure, Right. As Lea likes to imitate her, how she talks very highly about educational mission. And you should all go and teach the immigrant children in the frontier town down in the Negev, in the desert. Whereas, you know, all of the girls who have good connections are, as you said, getting jobs in central towns. And only Leia is being sent to this frontier town. And Shula has a very important role in sending Lea to America to teach Hebrew. But I can't talk much more about that without making a spoiler, so I'll leave it for now.
- [08:46]
G.P. Gottlieb
Okay, But I want to know.
- [08:47]
Maya Arad
Yeah, she appears throughout the book several.
- [08:49]
G.P. Gottlieb
Times, so I want to know, is she. I mean, she's the clo. She's mean. Is she doing this because she's mean spirited of how she treats Leah, why she's important? Ultimately, for Leah, she's important because she made these decisions and. Right. We won't have to say what she does later, but can you talk about that or how she sends her to America and it might have been a mistake, but Leia meets really important people in her life. She meets Svika and Svica introduces and she introduces him to Ruti and they become important too. So talk about all three of those.
- [09:30]
Maya Arad
Right? So, you know, I can't say if Shula is mean or not. I don't know her this well. You know, if I had to be her advocate, I would say, you know, she did what she thought was best given, you know, her own convictions and the times that she lived in the 1960s. But you're right, she sent Leah to America and she started off her journey for the book. She's very, very important because she sets the book in motion. And this Lea and Ruthy and Tzvika are probably the most important figures in Lea's lives all those years in America. So Tzvika is a young man that Lea meets on the plane to America and he becomes badly infatuated with Lea. But Lea is looking for someone wealthier and also more good looking. So she sets him up with her friend Ruti, who is not so good looking, and she thinks they make a perfect match. And indeed they do. And they get married and they live happily ever after, unlike poor Lea, who did not end up in a happy marriage. And Ruti and Tzvika, and in particular Ruti, are Lea's, you know, support system. And all those years in America when she's in trouble, she knows she can rely on them. And even though, you know, she didn't find an enduring love, she found Good friends, which is as important, I think, for her life.
- [10:54]
G.P. Gottlieb
Yes, I'm going to agree with that. So she gets to do a cross country, country trip with friends that she made through colleagues. And by the way, Chicago is named the Windy City not because of our weather, not because of the wind, but because our politicians are long winded or they. Okay, just want to clear that up. And Leah ends up making another decision that adds to her reputation as a marriage breaker. Does she deserve that reputation and the responses she gets?
- [11:28]
Maya Arad
That's a great question because part of me wants to say yes, absolutely. But you know, at each given moment, you know, when you see the decision she makes, not, you know, from the distance of 50 years, which, you know, this is the span of the book, but at this particular moment, you know, she says, but he told me that it's over with his wife and he wants to start a new leaf, so what could I do? So I think this is part of what I wanted to do in this book to make things not so clear cut. So Leah is a very unreliable narrator and she's very naive. She's also, you know, she can only see her own side of things. Every time she gets herself, you know, involved with a married man, she says, but, you know, but he told me it was over with his wife. And she keeps, you know, making this mistake again and again. But you know, maybe it's because she's so naive and I want to believe her. So it's not quite clear. And by the way, being involved with married men is not the only place in the book where we, we can't tell for sure whether you know, Lea is extremely naive or she doesn't want to know things. Maybe she, you know, turns a blind eye. Lea's husband, you know, whom she ends up divorcing. This is not a spoiler. Turns up to be a very problem. And there's a moment in the book when Leah complains about her mother in law who is a very typical, you know, Jewish mother. And she writes to her friends, she's always praising her son. And if she doesn't have anything new, she can tell me tales from many years ago. How when he was 9, he was evaluated by a psychiatrist who found out that he had an IQ of a genius. And Leah doesn't stop to think why was a 9 year old sent to a psychiatrist?
- [13:20]
G.P. Gottlieb
Right, right, right, right.
- [13:23]
Maya Arad
And you know, you can't tell for sure. Doesn't she stop to think or does she prefer to turn a blind eye? Same thing goes with her son's Addictions later on. Yes.
- [13:31]
G.P. Gottlieb
Okay. So, but then there's another thing. Her parents. She talks about them only minimally when they die. She mentions it as the years go by because we're talking about an over 50 year span of life here. And she doesn't ever say, did her parents never teach her anything? She never says, my mother taught me not to do this or that or the other thing. It doesn't sound like she had a very strong, morally comfortable upbringing.
- [14:02]
Maya Arad
Right. And also, you know, again, I don't think that literature has to tell us everything about everyone. But my guess is, you know, as the writer and as someone who knows some people who immigrated in the early days of the state of Israel, you know, immigration is often traumatic. And her parents must have been so busy, you know, just eking out a living and trying to put food on the table, that maybe, you know, they didn't have the mental space to talk to her about that. She mentions something about her mother after her mother dies. She says that my mother was ashamed of me, ashamed of, you know, me, you know, dating many men. But still, you know, her mother worked hard to make to make her new clothes for the teachers college so she can look good on her first day there. So I guess her parents did care for her. But, you know, like many immigrants who had a hard time, they were not really emotionally available.
- [15:01]
G.P. Gottlieb
So Leo whitewashes problems, she cleans them up so that it's the mother in law who has a lot of debt and loans. It's her husband who made bad investments. It takes her a year to admit even that she got divorced. Can you talk about why she was so ashamed of so many things?
- [15:21]
Maya Arad
Well, it's not really surprising because as we know, it's only recently that people have started talking openly about, you know, mental illness and addiction and all those things that Lea had to deal with. And also, you know, about her financial problems. I remember, you know, a saying by Sholem Aleichem, which, you know, he said it in Yiddish, I read it in Hebrew. I don't know if I can transfer it into English, but I think it went something like, being poor is no shame. Being poor is no shame, but it's also nothing to be proud of. So, of course, you know, it took Leah a long time to be able to own all of the things that you had to deal with. And I think only after she's gone, her son can look back and say, I always looked at all the stupid mistakes and all the bad decisions that she made, but only now I can see that she was a very impressive woman. She managed to raise two children on her own, to change careers, to move cross country with two kids in Tower.
- [16:33]
G.P. Gottlieb
That was impulsive. Truthfully. Leah likes to. She likes to share stories of how convenient it is in America in her letters to the girls, the girlfriends still in Israel, the boxed cakes, cake mixes, dishwashers, clothes dryers, for example. And she says, quote, in America, there's no shame in saving money. On the contrary, it's something to be proud of. So can you talk about that? Was it frowned upon to save money in Israel in the 1970s?
- [17:01]
Maya Arad
No, I don't think. I think she wrote this sentence, not so much because, you know, in Israel, it's a shame to save money, but rather, I think in this particular letter, she keeps talking about life in America, and her view of America is, you know, she tries to balance things out. So she says, it's true, we have a lot of convenient things like these cake mixes and the dishwasher and the clothes dryer. But then she says, but remember, even though we make a living in dollars, we also pay for everything in dollars. And, you know, the heating costs a lot and that the doctors are not free like in Israel. And after she says all of this, she says, by the way, I know exactly who told you that, you know, we only have one car and I don't have a cleaning lady, et cetera, et cetera. So all this is in response because, you know, one of the women from the teacher's college, someone who was not at all a close friend, was making a trip to America and was trying to, you know, stay over at Lea's to save on hotels. And what she told everyone, what she told everyone when she came back is, oh, Leah only has one car and she doesn't have a cleaning lady. So Lea is, you know, making an apology and explaining that in America, you know, you save money. You don't. It's not a shame.
- [18:25]
G.P. Gottlieb
So she does make some terrible decisions along the way. I felt like by the end of the book, I knew her and she could have been one of my Israeli friends, except I never knew anyone so optimistic. And I'm wondering, did you have someone in your life, a friend who was like Leah in some way?
- [18:44]
Maya Arad
I did have, you know, some friends, not very close ones, but people who went to school with me who are very, very optimistic. But I think most of all, for me, the joy of writing this book is, you know, I'm a pessimist or, you know, Leah's scientist. And Jonathan says later, some people would Call me a pessimist. I call myself a realistic person. So, you know, I'm a bit of a bit pessimistic.
- [19:09]
G.P. Gottlieb
So.
- [19:10]
Maya Arad
Writing about Lea was such a joy. Writing about someone who's always looked at the sunny side of life, always, you know, everything bad that happens to her just means that from now on, things will be so, so much better. So I thought this was great.
- [19:27]
G.P. Gottlieb
What I really loved is seeing the course of a human life over the, you know, 50 some years, and you're really getting to know and getting to see the 20th century. Also, because she comments on what's happening in the world. It was fascinating. Lovely, lovely novel. Thank you so much. I'm delighted that it came out in English just this year. What are you working on next, Maya?
- [19:53]
Maya Arad
Oh, I'm working on a novel, and it's something so initial that, you know, it's not even viable. I can't talk about it yet, but I am. I just started working on it. It's very exciting.
- [20:06]
G.P. Gottlieb
Okay. Best of luck, and thank you so much for joining me today. It's been a pleasure.
- [20:11]
Maya Arad
Thank you, Khaleed. It was great pleasure for me, too.
- [20:14]
G.P. Gottlieb
And thank you for joining me again. This is G.P. gottlieb, author of the Whipp'd and Sipped mystery series and host for new books and Liter, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Today, I've been talking to Maya Arad about her touching novel, Happy New Year's. Hope you all have a touching book to cuddle up with today. And always happy reading.