From Year Course to Published Author
At 17, I left home for Young Judaea Shalem with an extremely sophisticated plan for my future: go to Israel for a year, have an adventure, and figure out the rest later.
Over a decade later, I published a novel about a 22-year-old who gets on a one-way flight to South America with approximately the same strategy.
I spent 2013–2014 on Young Judaea Shalem, the Modern Orthodox track of Year Course. Israel was already a significant part of my life. My dad is American, my mom is Israeli, I grew up speaking Hebrew, and I had spent several years of my childhood living in Ra’anana. Returning at 17 was different. For the first time, I was beginning to build a life of my own.
During Shalem, I spent months living and volunteering on Kibbutz Yavne and in Jerusalem, traveling around the country, and participating in Marva, an IDF immersion program.
Shalem was my first real taste of the particular freedom that comes with being young, away from home, and surrounded by other people who are also figuring out who they are. When you live and travel together, friendships develop at warp speed. Someone you’ve known for three weeks can feel like an old friend, and ordinary experiences become stories you’ll tell for years.
I didn’t know it then, but that feeling would eventually become central to my debut novel, The Road to Us.
From Shalem to the tiyul gadol
After Shalem, I returned to New York for college. But Israel wasn’t finished with me just yet.
I moved back and served in the IDF’s International Relations Unit. When my service ended, I participated in an unofficial Israeli institution: the tiyul gadol.
Like countless Israelis before me, I packed a backpack and headed to South America.
There, I encountered an entire ecosystem thousands of miles from Israel that felt unmistakably Israeli.
Years later, I realized that for such a recognizable part of contemporary Israeli culture, I rarely saw the tiyul gadol represented in English-language fiction.
I decided to write the book I wanted to read.
Turning a familiar world into fiction
The Road to Us follows Sophia Jacobs, a Jewish New Yorker who joins her Israeli friend Camille on a backpacking trip through South America. When they link up with a few Israeli backpackers for a road trip through Patagonia, their journey takes an unexpected turn.
While the novel is fictional, I drew on my own travels to build the world surrounding the characters.
I knew the feeling of arriving somewhere with a backpack and no real idea what the next few weeks would look like. I knew the intensity of friendships formed while traveling and the Israeli backpacking culture I wanted to capture: the humor, Chabad dinners, hostel life, overnight buses, and sense that normal life had temporarily been put on hold.
At its heart, The Road to Us is about what happens when you leave the version of yourself everyone knows at home and discover who you might be somewhere else. Young Judaea Year Course was one of my first opportunities to experience that myself.
My own background also shaped the perspective from which I wrote the story. I’ve spent much of my life moving between American and Israeli culture: growing up in both countries, spending a gap year in Israel, serving in the IDF, and eventually backpacking with Israelis abroad. Sophia enters the novel largely from the American side of that equation, and the Israeli travelers she meets introduce her to another way of thinking about Jewish identity, adulthood, and home.
Over a decade later
When I think about my 17-year-old self arriving on Year Course in 2013, I certainly don’t think she expected the experience to become part of the creative DNA of a novel she’d publish more than a decade later.
We don’t always know which experiences are going to stay with us. It could be living on a kibbutz at 17, a deep friendship formed far from home, a conversation with someone you never see again, or a journey you don’t realize changed you until years later.
I hope The Road to Us captures some of that feeling.
There’s romance, backpacking mishaps, hostel nights, so much Hebrew, and the gorgeous landscapes of Patagonia. I wanted readers to feel, for a few hundred pages, as though they’d thrown on a backpack and joined the trip themselves.
Underneath the adventure, it’s a story about being young, stepping outside the life you know, and discovering how much the people you meet along the way can change you.
Young Judaea Shalem was one of the first times I discovered how much leaving home can change the way you see the world, and yourself.
Read The Road to Us
The Road to Us by Abby Adler is available now on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
Paperback: Read the Road to Us in Paperback
Kindle: Read The Road to Us on Kindle
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