“She knew: it was time... No one heard the scream that cut through the air, no one saw the black figure of a bird woman flashing like a meteor in the middle of the night.” The school is shocked by the suicide of teacher Elsa Weiss, about whom no one knows almost anything. The secret of her life and death haunts her former student for many years. And 30 years later, she begins her own investigation. The result is a deep novel, on the pages of which, intertwining fiction and reality, a dark portrait of a mysterious heroine emerges. “Teacher” (Sapir Prize 2016) is an unusual novel about the Holocaust. Ben-Naftali's characters are not heroes or martyrs, but those who, having escaped concentration camps, became victims of their own conformity. This is a reflection on the tragic fate of a woman for whom salvation from the Nazis turned into a curse of eternal guilt.