The World Between

by Zeeva Bukai

Overview

With the breakup of her marriage, a once famous actress of the Yiddish theater travels to Tel-Aviv to revisit the apartment she once shared with her husband, Max. Soon after, she finds herself at the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Apparition Hospice in Jaffa, a sanitorium, run by a group of nuns. Unclear as to how she got there, she begins to piece together the events that led her to this moment. From New York to Tel -Aviv, and the Siberian gulag, The World Between explores the landscape of a marriage, friendship, loss, and the way childhood war trauma bleeds into every aspect of the characters’ lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781953002693
Publisher:	Delphinium Books, Incorporated
Publication date:	02/24/2026
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook

About the Author

Aeeva Bukai was born in Israel, raised in New York City and the author of a previous novel, The Anatomy of Exile. Her honors include a Fellowship at the New York Center for Fiction and residencies at Hedgebrook, and Byrdcliffe Artist In Residence program. Her stories are forthcoming in the anthology Smashing the Tablets: A Radical Retelling of the Hebrew Bible, and have appeared in Carve Magazine, Pithead Chapel, the Lilith anthology, Frankly Feminist: Stories by Jewish Women, December Magazine where her story The Abandoning (an early version of the first chapter of her novel, The Anatomy of Exile, was selected by Lily King for the Curt Johnson Prose Prize, The Master’s Review, where she was the recipient of the Fall Fiction prize selected by Anita Felicelli, Mcsweeny’s Quarterly Concern, Image Journal, Jewishfiction.net, Women’s Quarterly Journal, and the Jewish Quarterly. Her work has been featured on the Stories on Stage Davis podcast. She studied Acting at Tel-Aviv University, and holds a BFA in Theater and an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College. She is the Assistant Director of Academic Support at SUNY Empire State University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Editorial Reviews

"Zeeva Bukai’s The World Between gives us the long life of an actress in the fading world of Yiddish theatre.  From a wartime childhood in a Siberian camp, to a tempestuous marriage in post-war New York, to sorrow and decline in later Israel, an unforgettable character leads us through a page-turner of a story with history at its heart. Joan Silber, author of Improvement and Secrets of Happiness. 

From the Publisher