Thursday, 03.04, start 18:30, free entry.
Please join us for an evening to celebrate the launch of
MAZELTOV
by Eli Zuzovsky.
Eli is joined by Bea Setton, the author of Berlin & Plaything.
About Mazeltov:
In a glorious debut, a boy confronts queer lust, shame, the threat of war, and the plague of family on the day he becomes a man
At a banquet hall, at the onset of war, Adam Weizmann’s bar mitzvah party turns into a glorious catastrophe. On the cusp of manhood—and the verge of a nervous breakdown—Adam has been bracing for his special day, mired in family neuroses and national dysfunction.
In a chorus of voices, a fractious cast of well-wishers narrates Adam’s coming-of-age in Israel: his newly devout father and the mystic rituals he practiced on his young son; his best friend, Abbie, who points the way to joyful transgression; Khalil, a Palestinian poet, who offers a glimpse of a different way to be; and Adam himself, filled with shame and desire as he faces the brokenness of his world.
At once tender and lustful, a work of scathing satire and piercing insight, Mazeltov is a wholly original vision of a young man’s quest to know his own heart.
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ELI ZUZOVSKY is a film and theater writer and director, born and raised in Tel Aviv. He graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s in filmmaking and English, winning the Sudler, Hoopes, and McCord Prizes. Zuzovsky holds a master’s in French and German from Oxford, where he teaches film while pursuing a Ph.D. in fine art as a Rhodes Scholar.
Shortlisted for an Israeli Academy Award, his work has been presented at the Harvard Film Archive, the American Repertory Theater, and Modern Art Oxford, among others. He’s been selected for the Venice Biennale College, Berlinale Talents, the Israeli Forbes list of “30 Under 30,” the Séries Mania Writers Campus, and the London Library Emerging Writers Programme. Zuzovsky is the winner of the 2025 Einstein Fellowship for “outstanding young thinkers.”
Bea Setton was born in Paris to Franco-British parents and has lived in the US, Colombia, Belgium, Germany, and the UK. Currently residing in Oxford, Mississippi, she is working on her third book, a Southern Gothic novel set in the Deep South. Her first novel, Berlin, was critically acclaimed in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, the Financial Times, and The Times Literary Supplement, among others.
Setton is interested in philosophy and enjoys reading a good coming-of-age story or thriller. Her favourite writers include Sylvia Plath, Patricia Highsmith, Donna Tartt, Ottessa Moshfegh, Daphne Du Maurier, Brandon Taylor, Naghib Mahfouz, Phillip Pullman, Frank O’Hara, Sayaka Murata, and Orhan Pamuk. When her nose is not in a book, Setton can be found playing soccer, watching Twin Peaks, listening to some old Kanye, or sitting on the floor drinking tea, as seen to the left.
Bea Setton author photo credits: Adam-Holmgren