My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner

My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner

Author:

Publisher: Schocken Books Incorporated

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0805242872

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Traces the author's grandmother's darkly comic, obsessive cleaning behaviors that prompted her to receive most of her visitors outdoors, describing her relationship with a mysterious vacuum cleaner that was hidden away after its first use.


My Wild Garden

My Wild Garden

Author: Meir Shalev

Publisher: Schocken

Published: 2020-03-31

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0805243526

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A colorfully illustrated round of the season in the garden of the best-selling novelist, memoirist, and champion putterer with a wheelbarrow On the perimeter of Israel’s Jezreel Valley, with the Carmel mountains rising up in the west, Meir Shalev has a beloved garden, “neither neatly organized nor well kept,” as he cheerfully explains. Often covered in mud and scrapes, Shalev cultivates both nomadic plants and “house dwellers,” using his own quirky techniques. He extolls the virtues of the lemon tree, rescues a precious variety of purple snapdragon from the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv highway, and does battle with a saboteur mole rat. He even gives us his superior private recipe for curing olives. Informed by Shalev’s literary sensibility, his sometime riotous humor, and his deep curiosity about the land, My Wild Garden abounds with appreciation for the joy of living, quite literally, on Earth. Our borrowed time on any particular patch of it is enhanced, the author reminds us, by our honest, respectful dealings with all manner of beings who inhabit it with us.


Two She-Bears

Two She-Bears

Author: Meir Shalev

Publisher: Schocken

Published: 2016-09-13

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0805243305

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One of Israel’s most celebrated novelists—the acclaimed author of A Pigeon and a Boy—gives us a story of village love and vengeance in the early days of British Palestine that is still being played out two generations later. “In the year 1930 three farmers committed suicide here . . . but contrary to the chronicles of our committee and the conclusions of the British policeman, the people of the moshava knew that only two of the suicides had actually taken their own lives, whereas the third suicide had been murdered.” This is the contention of Ruta Tavori, a high school teacher and independent thinker in this small farming community who is writing seventy years later about that murder, about two charismatic men she loves and is trying to forgive—her grandfather and her husband—and about her son, whom she mourns and misses. In a story rich with the grit, humor, and near-magical evocation of Israeli rural life for which Meir Shalev is beloved by readers, Ruta weaves a tale of friendship between men, and of love and betrayal, which carries us from British Palestine to present-day Israel, where forgiveness, atonement, and understanding can finally happen.


Light Fell

Light Fell

Author: Evan Fallenberg

Publisher: Soho Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1569474672

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20 years have passed since Joseph left behind his entire family and the religious Israeli farmer community he grew up in when he fell in love with a man, the genius rabbi Yoel Rosenzweig. Now, for his 50th birthday, Joseph is preparing to have his five sons spend the Sabbath with him in the Tel Aviv penthouse he shares with a man who is conveniently out of town that weekend. It will be the first time Joseph has come together with all his sons in nearly two decades. Joseph, his ex-wife and their sons must confront what was, what is and what could have been.


A Pigeon and a Boy

A Pigeon and a Boy

Author: Meir Shalev

Publisher: Schocken Books Incorporated

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0805242511

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A young, dying pigeon handler dispatches a bird with a message for the girl he loves, while many years later, that girl's middle-aged son falls in love with a childhood friend and receives a gift from his mother on her deathbed.


Some Day

Some Day

Author: Shemi Zarhin

Publisher: New Vessel Press

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 607

ISBN-13: 1939931045

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On the shores of Israel’s Sea of Galilee lies the city of Tiberias, a place bursting with sexuality and longing for love. The air is saturated with smells of cooking and passion. Seven-year-old Shlomi, who develops a remarkable culinary talent, has fallen for Ella, the strange girl next door with suicidal tendencies; his little brother Hilik obsessively collects words in a notebook. In the wild, selfish but magical grown-up world that swirls around them, a mother with a poet’s soul mourns the deaths of literary giants while her handsome, wayward husband cheats on her both at home and abroad. Some Day is a gripping family saga, a sensual and emotional feast that plays out over decades. The characters find themselves caught in cycles of repetition, as if they were “rhymes in a poem, cursed with history.” They become victims of inspired recipes that bring joy and calamity to the cooks and diners. Mysterious curses cause people’s hair to fall out, their necks to swell and the elimination of rational thought amid capitulation to unhealthy urges. This is an enchanting tale about tragic fates that disrupt families and break our hearts. Zarhin’s hypnotic writing renders a painfully delicious vision of individual lives behind Israel’s larger national story.


Four Meals

Four Meals

Author: Meir Shalev

Publisher: Canongate Books

Published: 2012-11-15

Total Pages: 427

ISBN-13: 1847677363

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Four Meals is the extraordinary story of Zayde, his enigmatic mother Judith and her three lovers. When Judith arrives in a small, rural village in Palestine in the early 1930s, three men compete for her attention: Globerman, the cunning, coarse cattle-dealer who loves women, money and flesh; Jacob, owner of hundreds of canaries and host to the four meals which lend the book its narrative structure; and Moshe, a widowed farmer obsessed with his dead wife and his lost braid of hair which his mother cut off in childhood. During the four meals, which take place intermittently over several decades, Zayde slowly comes to understand why these three men consider him their son and why all three participate in raising him.


Fierce Attachments

Fierce Attachments

Author: Vivian Gornick

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2005-09-14

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1466819006

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Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments—hailed by the New York Times for the renowned feminist author’s “mesmerizing, thrilling” truths within its pages—has been selected by the publication’s book critics as the #1 Best Memoir of the Past 50 Years. In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. There have been numerous books about mother and daughter, but none has dealt with this closest of filial relations as directly or as ruthlessly. Gornick’s groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O’Brien has called “the principal crux of female despair”: the unacknowledged Oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond. Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of “urban peasants,” Gornick grows up in a household dominated by her intelligent but uneducated mother’s romantic depression over the early death of her husband. Next door lives Nettie, an attractive widow whose calculating sensuality appeals greatly to Vivian. These women with their opposing models of femininity continue, well into adulthood, to affect Gornick’s struggle to find herself in love and in work. As Gornick walks with her aged mother through the streets of New York, arguing and remembering the past, each wins the reader’s admiration: the caustic and clear-thinking daughter, for her courage and tenacity in really talking to her mother about the most basic issues of their lives, and the still powerful and intuitively-wise old woman, who again and again proves herself her daughter’s mother. Unsparing, deeply courageous, Fierce Attachments is one of the most remarkable documents of family feeling that has been written, a classic that helped start the memoir boom and remains one of the most moving examples of the genre. “[Gornick] stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others—at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters...[Fierce Attachments is] a portrait of the artist as she finds a language—original, allergic to euphemism and therapeutic banalities—worthy of the women that raised her.”—The New York Times


Sophie's World

Sophie's World

Author: Jostein Gaarder

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2007-03-20

Total Pages: 599

ISBN-13: 1466804270

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A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.


When We Danced on Water

When We Danced on Water

Author: Evan Fallenberg

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2011-05-17

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 0062033433

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A conversation between a Tel Aviv waitress and her elderly customer sparks a journey of healing in this compelling novel by the author of Light Fell. At eighty-four, Teo, one of the world’s most influential choreographers, is ready to withdraw from the bombast and romance surrounding his long and illustrious career. But then he meets Vivi, a waitress at a Tel Aviv café, and the slumbering passions of his youth are rouses once more. Suddenly and unexpectedly, his desire for a woman’s touch, his anguished memories of World War II, and his complex, soulful engagement with dance all come rushing back. Vivi’s life will change, too, as Teo’s affection forces her to confront her guilt over an illicit relationship during her days as a soldier. Soon their interactions with art, their very investment in living, will reawaken ghosts of their painful, suppressed pasts—from Warsaw to Copenhagen, from Berlin to Tel Aviv—that cry out for forgiveness and peace.