Maya Arad is an Israeli-born writer, now living in California. She was born in 1971, so part of the same generation as Etgar Keret and Eshkol Nevo. Arad has published 11 works of fiction but The Hebrew Teacher, published in Israel in 2018, is her first to be translated into English. A book of three novellas, it has received acclaim from many leading writers including Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Allegra Goodman and Elif Batuman.

The title story, The Hebrew Teacher, is the most political and topical of the three. Ilana Goldstein has taught Hebrew at a small-town college in America for 40 years. Her life is turned upside down by an appointment in her department. It turns out that Yoad Bergman-Harari, like Ilana, born in Israel, is appalled by the new Israel. Ilana not only teaches Hebrew, she embraces her Jewishness, cooking classic Jewish food, observing the holidays (unlike her grown-up children). At first, she is baffled by Yoad’s politics but then cannot cope with his aggressive anti-Zionism.

But The Hebrew Teacher is not just about politics. It is about issues that run through the other stories. In each story the central character is a woman. Miriam is a grandmother in her seventies, visiting her son and his family, in California. Efrat, also lives in California, with her husband and two children.

These women face very human problems that many readers, perhaps especially women, will identify with. Miriam is estranged from her son, cannot connect with his wife, and cannot form the bond she longs for with her grandson. Efrat is worried about her daughter who is nearly 13. Libby is overweight, spoilt, and, most worryingly for her mother, has no friends at school.

This turns out to be the key link between all these stories. All these women are likeable, passionate about their Jewishness, but they seem strangely isolated. Ilana has become marginalised at work. The ghastly Yoad loathes her and no one will stand up for her. Miriam is a widow, and seems to have lost her son and his family to the remote world of California. Efrat is losing touch with her daughter and her very American teenage world of mobile phones and sleepovers.

Suddenly you realise Israel is not just about the conflict with Palestinians. It’s a very different culture from the new world of California with its high-tech lifestyles and venture capitalists. In Arad’s stories Israel is about an old world of traditional values, above all, family and religion, California is about dysfunctional families and losing touch with the Jewish past.

In A Visit, the story of Miriam’s visit to her son, California seems a world away from Israel. It’s not just the geographical distance. The cultural difference seems much greater. These three women, a grandmother and two middle-aged mothers, find their families and their new lives difficult to deal with, their loneliness almost unbearable.

They try to deal with the problems of living with two languages. Ilana, the Hebrew teacher, cannot attract new students. “It wasn’t a very good time for Hebrew,” she reflects. Is that because of the troubles in the Middle East? Or does Israel seem remote to her new students? As she sets out to write a memoir, she wonders whether she should write it in Hebrew, the language she loves, or English, the language her students live in. The dilemma recalls the one earlier one around Yiddish literature in America. Does it have a future? Who does it speak to?

As we watch, appalled, by the rise of antisemitism and the crisis facing Israel, these stories ask big questions about the future of Israel and of Jews in the English-speaking world.

The Hebrew Teacher, by Maya Arad

New Vessel Press, £16.99