The Hebrew Teacher by Maya Arad comprises three novellas. One, dealing with academic friction on an American campus, the second an Israeli grandmother’s USA visit to her indifferent family. Finally the battle for parental  control between a mother and her teenaged daughter. Though all three stories are stirring, the most impactful is the titular The Hebrew Teacher.

 An adjunct professor, Israeli expat, Ilana Goldstein teaches introductory Hebrew at a Midwestern college. Ilana first started teaching Hebrew in 1971, after the triumphant Israeli victory in the ’67 war. She built the popular Jewish Studies program. Students were flocking to her classes. She felt boundless pride and hope singing, “you will see, you will see how good it will be” accompanied by her guitar celebrating Israel’s Independence.

Now in 2016, “Israel was a tough sell.”   Difficult to  attract  even six  students to her classes,  Ilana admits,  “ It wasn’t a very good time for Hebrew,”  Bemoaning the   declining enrolment to her colleagues,  Ilana was elated to learn the arrival of a new faculty member, Yoad Bergman –Harari,   a Columbia- trained, American professor with a specialty in  Jewish literature.

Ilana hoped the brash, energetic, superstar, academic would revive the badly sagging attendance in Hebrew classes.  In an effort to    break the ice with the new heavyweight, Ilana invites Harari to her house for Shabbat dinner. She hopes to encourage him  to  reenergize the love of Hebrew on campus or  speak at her synagogue about Jewish literature.

 

But Yoad declines any further intervention to elevate the Hebrew program, claiming, “It’s not part of my job”.   Instead during his visit, Harari makes Ilana feel “ashamed” of  her home. He derides  Ilana’s   Chagall reproductions, and  walls   decorated with Hamsas, disdains the   Seder plates, menorahs and other  religious  accoutrements. “in Ilana’s  home.  Harari asserts these   house trimmings reflect a Jewish “diasporic home,” all irrelevant to Harari’s anti-Israel, “post Zionist”  sensibilities.      

The tension between Ilana and Harari polarizes from enmity into an ongoing feud when Ilana learns Harari’s area of specially, lies in the research of Heidegger, a Nazi philosopher who, Yoad claims, is “a decidedly Jewish writer.” The    hostility between them rises to a high pitch until it requires intervention by  the Dean of Humanities to resolve the rising acrimony between the two warring  academics.  

 Author Arad, an expat herself, has an uncanny insight into the mindset of  Israelis living in the America and the acuity   to tap the political  barometer inside American colleges.  Extraordinarily prescient .