Happy New Years

The friendship of women from your past are sometimes so important that you work hard to keep those people in your life.  Sometimes those relationships are the ones you can pick up where you left off even after a long passage of time. Some women have a yearly reunion and others keep in touch randomly.  In Happy New Years the characters all keep in touch through letters. 

We meet Leah Zuckerman as she is finishing up at the Teachers College hoping with her fellow classmates to find work teaching school in Israel. Summoned to the principal's office, Leah is offered a position teaching in a school in the United States.  As she leaves Israel she decides the best way to stay in touch with her classmates will be through letter writing.  She proposes they all write a New Year's letter each Rosh Hashanah updating each other on their lives during the year.

Happy New Years by Maya Arad, is a very multi layered look at Leah Zuckerman's life, through her New Year letters.  Each year she writes to the group as a whole with news of her life, then adds an even more personal look at her life when she shares more information in her letter to Mira, the one friend in whom she confides the deeper darker secrets to.

Leah's life is full of ups and downs as she is the last of her group to get married and have children.  She goes through a number of job and career changes always in pursuit of the American dream.  We follow as Leah reinvents herself many times, going through marriage, divorce, relationships and work ups and downs in a life lived to the fullest.  

This is a story that covers a fifty year span of time and historic events both in the US and in Israel.  Leah experiences all that life in America has to offer and the consequences of all her choices.  Choosing in her letters to present a certain narrative, she struggles with her ability for reinvention and self-delusion.  She also struggles with the accepted norms of her time.  

She raises two sons, giving them everything she thinks they need to be successful. Then she struggles with her inability to control how their lives turnout.  Ari, who becomes a substance abuser and does not finish college. Yonatan, who is successful in business but not in love. 

As she writes her New Year's letters, putting a positive spin on her life, trying never to show jealousy about the news of her classmates and their successes, we see the author, Arad, showing us the more subtle story of women's behavior toward one another,  judging and misjudging each other. The competition between women more than the support of one another.

Women of a certain age, who grew up in the 1960s, will find so many references that are nostalgic.  In her letters she mentions making Yonatan and Ari fit in with their friends she buys them Levi's and Nike sneakers.  There will be many ideas and concepts that they will be able to relate to.  Leah writes to her friends about being invited to party where they are selling storage containers and later she starts selling these Tupperware containers herself at home parties. 

 Leah also writes about the difficulty of negotiating between motherhood, romance and work balance.  The book brings back for the reader memories of the prejudices and challenges of the time and how things have progressed as she lives into the 21 century.