Threading Impossible Needles: Elisa Albert Talks to Maya Arad
Maya Arad is a classical storyteller, a keen observer of character in relation. Her work, including the linked stories The Hebrew Teacher and newest novel Happy New Years, bears witness to the Israeli-American immigrant experience, and somehow manages to thread an impossible needle: politically nonbinary, neither pandering nor pretentious, irreconcilable, and utterly relatable.
Arad’s work is accessible and challenging in all the best ways, because it’s about genuine people. In writing workshops, we often shorthand the quality of fiction with the word “trust.” Is the writing worthy of the reader’s curiosity, openness, and time? What a relief it is to trust. Arad was generous enough to correspond with me via email in October and November 2025.
–EA
EA: What do you want to talk about? Are you comfortable discussing national and personal identity, and how you’ve been received?
MA: Thanks for asking what I want to talk about. As far as identity etc. goes, being a woman, a woman writer, an Israeli in America (so, a minority both among Israelis and among American Jews) are crucial aspects of my identity. Also, writing in Hebrew while living in America (so, my books are read as somewhat “foreign” both in Israel and in America).
Impossible not to acknowledge the terrible weight of this war, and all that has come to the surface. What’s it like to be an Israeli-American writer at the moment?
My book The Hebrew Teacher appeared in English translation shortly after October 7th. This means I’ve only been an Israeli-American author post–October 7th, so I don’t have a “before” to compare my experience with. It’s a challenging time; I know quite a few people won’t read a book by an Israeli author. But at the same time, it seems that Jewish American readers are curious about the lives of Israeli expats and about books translated from Hebrew, so in that respect, it was actually a good time for the book to appear.
Needless to say, the challenges I face as an Israeli American writer are minor compared with the challenges all writers face in a world where reading has become an almost marginal pastime.
In the title story of The Hebrew Teacher, your two main characters burned themselves into my mind – talk about duality…
Usually I’m driven by plot. In this story I started with a character. I saw before me an older Hebrew teacher at a small Midwestern college, and I wanted to write a story about her. Ilana is very different from me—she’s a generation older, lives in the Midwest, married to an American Jew—but we’re both Israeli women in America who make a living from Hebrew in one way or another, and that’s where my connection to her lies. And maybe it’s no coincidence that I began writing the story a few months after the announcement that writers who don’t live in Israel are not eligible for the Sapir Prize—I felt something of Ilana’s sense of exclusion, the feeling of being pushed to the margins, and I was able to write her character.
But a character isn’t enough for a story. Without a plot there is no story. And for there to be a plot, there has to be conflict. That’s where the character of Yoad came in. He’s different from Ilana in every possible way: a generation younger, a man, a tenure-track professor, hates the Midwest, anti-Zionist. For the story to work, I had to see reality through Yoad’s eyes as well.
The way they come to reckon with one another… I found it indelibly moving.
Of course Yoad is aggressive and unpleasant, but Ilana too can be naive to the point of blindness; she pesters Yoav with requests and suggestions. In the end, although it’s easy to read the story primarily as a political one, it’s a story about aging, about the feeling that your life’s work is becoming irrelevant, about the power dynamics between an older woman, an adjunct instructor, and a young male academic star. I assume the course of the plot didn’t surprise any reader. It’s like a train wreck waiting to happen.
You’ve lived in the U.S. for decades. How has your identity shifted during all this time? Have you ever composed stories in English?
My identity changes and evolves over time, like most people’s. I’ve lived in America longer than I lived in Israel, and I have two adult daughters for whom California is the only home they know. These things make me strongly attached to the U.S., and I feel that this is home now. At the same time, I spent my most formative years in Israel. I speak Hebrew at home, I read mostly in Hebrew, and I write in Hebrew. So, I really live at two worlds (not between two worlds, I hope).
I can’t imagine writing fiction in English. Ilana, the protagonist of The Hebrew Teacher, feels that her Hebrew is rusty but her English isn’t good enough. Unlike Ilana, I knew from the start that my English would never be good enough, so I put all my efforts into keeping my Hebrew supple. I play both Hebrew and English Wordle every day—but I always do the Hebrew one first.
It’s said that we are different people in different languages. How are you different when you write in Hebrew as opposed to English?
I think I am the same person in Hebrew and in English, and that means a lot to me. I’m not the same person in the other languages I speak. This doesn’t mean I can write prose in English, or that I can express myself with the same precision in both languages, but I do feel I’m the same person, and that’s a lot.
How closely do you work with your English translator, and what comes up in that process?
I work very closely with Jessica Cohen, who has translated both my books so far. She’s a wonderful translator, and she puts up with all the questions and comments I make. The process of working with her is truly enjoyable, and I learn a lot about both Hebrew and English prose styles, and the differences between them. Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned from the process of translation is to let go. The goal is to have a seamless, flowing text, not to transfer every single word from one language to another. So, if a sentence or even a paragraph ends up feeling too cumbersome, it might be best to let it go. I try to remember that when I write in Hebrew, too.
Ever thought about doing translation work, or translating your own work?
You could say I’ve done some translation work, in the broader sense of the term. My first book, Another Place, A Foreign City, is a novel in verse loosely based on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. I transferred the 19th-century boy-meets-girl plot from the Russian countryside to the late-20th-century Education Corps in the IDF, and I experimented with writing Hebrew stanzas in the same meter that Pushkin developed for Russian. My second book was a closer translation-adaptation of another Russian masterpiece, Woe from Wit. I’ve also translated some poetry, mostly when I needed it for my work, to embed in a piece of prose I was writing.
Sounds like Pushkin was a big influence. Can you share your literary origin story?
My two literary origins are in Hebrew and English. I see that I keep returning to this duality. My major Hebrew influence was the Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin, and my major English influence was Nabokov. They are both extraordinarily funny and, at their best, also deep and poignant. Readers of Lilith know Nabokov, but most likely do not know Hanoch Levin. He is very hard to translate, yet he is nevertheless among the greatest 20th-century authors in any language.
Nabokov was my entry point into Russian literature, and as I read more, I came to appreciate how wonderful Pushkin was. (Eventually I learned Russian and read him in the original.) But the truth is that in this case there was more serendipity than deliberate influence. I came across Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate by chance. It is a book written in English, in the stanza form Pushkin invented for Eugene Onegin, set in contemporary California. I became obsessed with the idea of writing a novel in verse, in this stanza form, in Hebrew, set in contemporary Israel—and this is how my first novel came to be written.
How do you balance family life with writing life? (Yes, it is a traditionally gendered question, but henceforthI think we should ask it of everyone.)
I’d start with just balancing, period. I started writing fiction—scribbling the first stanzas of my novel in verse—when I was a PhD student in linguistics. I didn’t have children, but I did have to balance writing with other occupations. At the time, it seemed that the balancing act didn’t really work, because I spent more time and creative energy on my writing, somewhat neglecting my academic work.
And indeed, I didn’t end up getting an academic job. But I became a writer and have published twelve books so far, so although it once seemed I wasn’t managing my time properly, I ultimately made the right choice for me. It took me four years to write my novel in verse, during which I was still keeping up the cover story of being an academic—finishing my PhD, taking on several postdocs, and holding temporary teaching positions. It took another two years to get the book published in Israel. By the time it came out, I was already expecting my first child. When my daughter was six months old, I had a babysitter for twelve hours a week. I have never been as efficient in my writing as I was during those twelve hours. I remember thinking: every minute costs me a quarter (that was twenty-one years ago)—I’d better make the most of it. And I did. I wrote the draft for Seven Moral Failings, an academic novel set in a private university in Northern California, in five months.
Since then, I’ve written many more books, and I’ve learned that there isn’t always a direct correlation between the amount of time you have and how smoothly the writing goes. Both my daughters are adults—a freshman and a senior in college. I have more time to write than ever. Somehow, though, the book I’m working on now still proves difficult to write.
— Elisa Albert’s novels, stories, and essays have been published widely and in translation.
