Editor’s Note: I read The Anatomy of Exile by Zeeva Bukai earlier this year and was struck not only by the story, but by how each character lives with a different kind of exile, both external and internal. So when Zeeva asked if she could elaborate on her own Mizrahi family’s particular exile, I eagerly said yes. What she gave me is a powerful tribute to her father and his almost-forgotten heritage. — Howard Lovy
In memory of my father, Shlomo Bukai
November was Mizrahi Heritage Month. A month to honor the millennia of Jewish life in Arab lands. I am half Mizrahi on my father’s side. Yet in my early childhood, I was barely aware of that. We were Jews who had emigrated from Israel to America in 1961. We spoke Hebrew at home, and both my parents spoke Yiddish. I do not remember Arabic uttered in our house, except for the occasional Arabic curse peppered in my parents’ Hebrew conversations, usually spoken in a heated moment.
I was vaguely aware that my father had a family living in another part of the world, especially when he sent money and medicine to my grandparents and uncles and aunts left behind in Syria. The ones who were able to escape had immigrated to Israel, but there were many relatives who hadn’t left the shrinking Jewish community of Damascus. I did not even know all the names of my father’s siblings, of which there were nine. I did not bother to ask. The serrated photographs pasted into the dark pages of our photo albums were of dour, stern people with hawkish noses and swarthy skin. They had nothing to do with my life in America, and I was content to keep it that way.
Holidays were celebrated with my mother’s Ashkenazi family in Canarsie, Brooklyn. My grandmother and uncle, and his wife and child, were the closest relatives we had in the US, along with a great-uncle and second cousins in New Jersey whom we rarely saw except on the occasional holiday, at weddings, and, more recently, at funerals. Although my grandmother was also one of ten, only she and her brother survived the Siberian gulag and death camps in Germany and Poland.
Our Ashkenazi family did increase when my widowed grandmother remarried, and we inherited a step-grandfather and his son. Like the majority of the Jews we knew in America, my step-grandfather was a Holocaust survivor. He was a tailor, a skill that saved his life in the camps, and had a wonderful sense of humor. To my father’s dismay, most of his jokes were about his experiences in Auschwitz-Birkenau. He had the ability to turn humiliation and sorrow into laughter, something my father couldn’t do. He was too proud and too insecure to laugh at himself in those early years.
My step-grandfather wore short-sleeved, button-down shirts in shades of green, which exposed his tattoo, a sequence of numbers that began with the letter A, for all to see. I’d run my fingers across the black and blue numbers, my father glaring at me to stop being disrespectful. My father understood and accepted that the Holocaust overshadowed all other suffering and rarely spoke about the hardships he and his family had endured and continued to endure in Damascus. He diminished his own Mizrahi story and centered the Ashkenazi one.
As for Mizrahi family in the United States, we had none, nor any real contact with other Mizrahim, except for a Yemenite boy I had a crush on in middle school. It seemed to be the story at that time of many Jewish families who’d been exiled by poverty, hunger, and war to find themselves nearly alone in their adopted country.
In writing my novel, The Anatomy of Exile, I thought deeply about my father’s life. He died in 2005 of liver disease caused, we think, by his years of work as a foreman in plastics factories and later in the dry-cleaning business. He had not been an easy man to know or to live with, and we’d had a difficult relationship. His patriarchal views were oppressive, and so it was inevitable that I would disappoint him. To him, life was serious business, and above all, it was about parnasa, making a good living for his family. Wealth was freedom, wealth was liberation from poverty and toil. He envisioned a successful future for me, beginning with marriage at eighteen, in which I would stay at home, cook, clean, and raise children. I rejected that, telling him I wanted to study and travel. I wanted to be a writer, an actor, singer, dancer, an artist—all pursuits he considered frivolous and a waste of time. He disapproved of how I spent my time. I always had my head in a book, and even then, I was only an average student. I had, he said, “butterflies in my head.”
However, by the end of his life, we had reached a rapprochement, a way of being. We had learned to skate the surface of our shared experiences and leave the subtle cruelties and tragedies we’d lived through out of our conversations—wounds too sensitive to touch with words.
In the last two years of his life, long after my mother had died, I invited him each week to spend the Shabbat meal with us. I’d call him every Wednesday. He was always noncommittal. “We’ll see,” he’d say, as if he had other plans, other invitations, which was never the case. He was a loner; even when he enjoyed company, some internal alarm would sound and, in the course of a conversation I thought was going well, he’d lurch to his feet and gather his things. He feared overstaying his welcome. He feared intimacy and connection. Feelings of closeness were too much for him. He could be generous with his time but resented feeling obligated.
Friday mornings, when I’d call again requesting his presence at my Shabbat table, he’d ask, “What can I bring?” He needed to know that he was wanted, valued. This need, I believe, had more to do with his troubled childhood than with our fraught relationship. He was the eldest son of a large family that lived in abject poverty and dhimmitude. He knew hunger, penury, extreme cold, and relentless heat. As a small child, he went barefoot, except on the Sabbath. When my siblings and I were young, he’d often tell us the story of how his father strung him up to a tree limb by his feet and beat him unconscious for stealing ten centime from the household money tin. He was nine years old. He never stole again, but he despised his father all his life.
My father was an outsider, always. He lived side by side with brutality. His childhood was in direct opposition to the life he imagined for himself.
He was born in 1931 and raised in Haret El Yahud, the Jewish Quarter in Damascus. The Jewish community in Syria was an ancient one, three thousand years old, with a population of approximately forty thousand before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Life there was rich in Jewish tradition and revolved around the Hebrew calendar. Boys studied Torah and prayer. Women kept kosher homes, and Shabbat was observed each week. Friday afternoons, the streets in the Quarter emptied in anticipation of the sabbath. The air grew fragrant with the scents of stewed meat, stuffed grape leaves and courgettes, tamarind, orange, and rose. Twilight—men draped in tallits strode to the temple while mothers and daughters stayed behind and lit the candles and said the prayer, calling the Sabbath Queen to their table.
There were at least five synagogues in the Jewish Quarter, filled to bursting on Friday nights and Saturday mornings. But with the rise of Arab nationalism in the early part of the twentieth century, a distinctly anti-Jewish atmosphere prevailed, and the streets were no longer safe. When I’d ask my father what life was like for the Jews in Syria, he’d say one word, kasheh, hard. The only respite from dhimmitude, their second-class existence under Ottoman rule, was after WWI in 1920, when the French Mandate over Syria and Lebanon was established. Under French rule, Jews had more freedom and opportunity. Wealthy merchants built palatial homes for their families within the Jewish Quarter, and Jewish children could now get an education at an Alliance Francaise school. However, the majority of the Jewish population still struggled. A struggle that grew more desperate during WWII under the Vichy government.
In June 1945, at the age of thirteen, just days after his Bar Mitzvah, my father and his two younger brothers—eleven, and eight—were smuggled out of Damascus in what was then known as Aliyat HaElef, Operation One Thousand Children, a kind of Kindertransport of the Middle East, a program whose goal it was to bring one thousand Jewish children from Syria into Palestine. They crossed the Golan Heights on foot in pitch darkness, a treacherous journey, which was also dangerous for the family left behind. My grandmother certainly suffered for it. She was hounded by the Tahiri, the Syrian police, and she was arrested, jailed, and beaten, more than once for arranging and facilitating her children’s escape. All that my father ever achieved began with her sacrifice.
My young uncles were placed on Kibbutz Tel-Yosef, where there were other Syrian children like them. My father, however, was placed on Moshav Balforia with a Czech couple, childless, dour, and traumatized by war, Holocaust survivors whose only language was Yiddish. Writing, The Anatomy of Exile, I spent a lot of time imagining how isolated and frightened my father must have been living among people who didn’t speak his language, who knew nothing of his Arab-Jewish culture, and who cared for him only insofar as he could work as their farmhand, milk their dairy cows, and plant and harvest their fields.
After 1948, conditions in Syria became more difficult and more precarious for those Jews who remained. The community began to suffer the consequences of having a Jewish state less than two hundred miles from Damascus. Nowhere was this more evident than on August 9, 1949, a year after Arab nations declared war on the new state of Israel. During armistice negotiations, a seventeen-year-old Muslim boy and two of his friends threw hand grenades into the El Menashe synagogue, known as the great synagogue of Damascus. It was Friday night, and my grandfather and Uncle Sammy were there. My uncle lost an eye. He was five years old. Twelve people died in the attack, eight of them children.
Those who didn’t make it out before the establishment of the State of Israel were finally permitted to immigrate in the 1990s when government restrictions eased. Now in 2025, after years of civil war, there are fewer than nine Jews in all of Syria, not even enough to make a quorum to pray to God.
In The Anatomy of Exile, I used elements of my father’s story and integrated them into the story of my protagonist’s husband, Salim. In the novel, Salim yearns for his home in Damascus and feels exiled from it, even though he knows it holds no promise for him. Like Salim, my father’s life in Syria held no future. In Damascus, from the age of eight, he’d spent his hours after school as a child laborer, climbing into junk heaps collecting metal and leather scraps for his father to sell, harassed by Arab children in the streets of the city for being a Jew. But it was in those streets that he attained the attributes that would save him: grit, resilience, determination, and ambition.
Given his childhood experiences, it was no surprise that in America, he lived modestly. He didn’t know how to be extravagant. Taking his children out for a slice of pizza or a falafel was considered lavish. It enraged him when he thought we didn’t fully appreciate his generosity and his sacrifice, even though we said thank you. We were bewildered by his anger and frightened by it, too.
I wanted to understand him, his rage, his longing, his crushing love, and quiet despair and, finally, his sense of pride in all that he’d accomplished: a family, a house, a business, property. For me, he was the Mizrahi story I wanted to tell. But when I began writing the novel a decade ago, I hadn’t heard many Mizrahi stories. They were shrouded in silence and in some cases shame. It’s only recently that we talk about the more than 850,000 Jews from Arab lands expelled, exiled, forced to leave their homes and businesses after the establishment of the State of Israel, punished because Jews had dared to create a state of their own in their indigenous homeland. We don’t talk enough about the pogroms in Hebron and Tripoli, massacres in Fez, or the Farhud in Iraq, the blood libels in Syria, or the many assaults on Jews and Jewish life across the Middle East and North Africa, where Jews had lived since before the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE.
We don’t talk enough about how these Arab lands, where Jewish communities had once thrived for millennia, were now Judenrein, Jew-less. So, when it came time for me to write my novel, I knew that I would not only include my father’s story, my Mizrahi story, I would center it, because after he died, there was no one else to tell it.
Zeeva Bukai was born in Israel and raised in New York City. She is the author of the novel, The Anatomy of Exile. Her stories have appeared in Smashing the Tablets: A Retelling of the Hebrew Bible, Frankly Feminist; Short Stories by Jewish Women, CARVE, The Master’s Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and elsewhere. Her honors include fellowships at the Center for Fiction, Hedgebrook, and Byrdcliff Artist in Residence program. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and is the Assistant Director of Academic Support at SUNY Empire State University. Her novel, The World Between, is forthcoming from Delphinium Books February 2026. The paperback edition of The Anatomy of Exile will be published January 13 and can be preordered wherever books are sold. You can reach her at www.zeevabukai.com.
Five tiny delights
Spending time with my granddaughters, who bring such light into the world.
Spending time with family and friends, especially when we’re laughing, which we do often.
Reading under the covers when it’s cold outside.
Walking in Prospect Park and watching the swans and ducks float across the lake.
Making pottery.
Five tiny Jewish delights
Being in Israel on a Friday Afternoon after 4 p.m. when the streets grow hushed and peaceful in preparation for Shabbat.
Participating in the chavurah on Saturday mornings at Rosmarin’s bungalow colony.
Seeing my granddaughter eat the challah she made in nursery school—such joy.
Lighting Shabbat candles and watching the flames flicker, knowing they’ve been flickering like that for centuries.
Reading books by Jewish and Israeli authors.
Thank you, Zeeva (and Howard), for bringing this beautiful, heartbreaking piece to us.
Wonderful and complex. Adding Anatomy of An Exile to the reading list