HAPPY NEW YEARS

After decades of bad choices, a woman reveals who she is beyond an inveterate optimist.

Leah Zuckerman, an Israeli emigree to the United States, tells her story starting in 1966 through 50 years of New Year’s letters to schoolmates. Each letter is embellished by a postscript, most to her friend Mira, disclosing more private information. Leah lands in Worcester, Massachusetts, as a young woman to take what turns out to be a nonexistent job as a Hebrew teacher. We watch her become a wife and then mother to two sons, and cycle through a series of failed relationships with men—some that fizzle out, others that are disastrous. We suspect Leah is an unreliable narrator but we’re not sure why or how. Is she a husband stealer? Blind to her own actions? As her personal life fluctuates from man to man and place to place, her letters bring us into the lives of her friends and frenemies, and into her unceasing efforts to reinvent herself. Her older son breezes through school and the job market, while her younger drops out and becomes an addict. Themes the author explored to great effect in The Hebrew Teacher (2024) are at play here: the push and pull between homeland and adopted country, the struggle to create an identity apart from mother and homemaker, the challenges of getting a foothold in a new country and extreme financial precarity take place against sweeping changes in American culture. Unexpected—and satisfying—turns at the end of the book disclose what Leah has been hiding, revealing her to be more lovable and complex than her yearly letters have suggested.

A life replete with grit, optimism, and mystery is created through the simple artifice of a series of New Year’s letters.