After emigrating to the United States in the mid-1960s, Leah maintains her connection to Israel by writing an annual letter on the Jewish New Year to her old friends from a women's teaching college. Composed of fifty-one letters penned between 1966 and 2016, the novel skillfully documents Leah's high hopes and deep disappointments, from relationships, marriage, and divorce to raising two children by herself, financial debt, and professional ups and downs. Leah rarely acknowledges the injustices she has had to overcome, but her letters turn increasingly introspective, ultimately exposing the secrets that shaped her trajectory from a naive but driven social climber to an independent woman at peace with herself.

This book is simultaneously a theoretical study in morphosyntax and an in-depth empirical study of Hebrew. Based on Hebrew data, the book defends the status of the root as a lexical and phonological unit and argues that roots, rather than verbs or nouns, are the primitives of word formation. A central claim made throughout the book is the role of locality in word formation, teasing apart word formation from roots and word formation from existing words syntactically, semantically and phonologically.

In-depth investigation of Hebrew verb morphology in light of cutting edge theories of morphology and lexical semantics

An original theory about the semantic content of roots

An account of how roots function in word-formation

A wide empirical basis containing a complete corpus of verb-creating roots in Hebrew

'Everyone knows, all of them... that when all's said and done, she is no more than a fig leaf hiding the thing everyone else would be much happier never having to look at.' An Israeli violinist. Living in her trendy canal-side Amsterdam apartment. Nine months pregnant. One day a mysterious unpaid gas bill from 1944 arrives. It awakens unsettling feelings of collective identity, foreignness and alienation. Stories of a devastating past are compellingly reconstructed to try and make sense of the present. First seen at the Haifa Theater, Israel, in 2018, Amsterdam is a strikingly original, audacious thriller by Maya Arad Yasur. It received its UK premiere, in this English translation by Eran Edry, at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, in 2019, directed by Matthew Xia, in a co-production between the Orange Tree, Actors Touring Company and Theatre Royal Plymouth.