The Family Orchard (Vintage International) - Softcover

Eve, Nomi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375724575 ISBN 13: 9780375724572

Publisher: Vintage, 2001

Synopsis

In the bestselling tradition of The Red Tent, The Family Orchard is a spellbinding novel of one unforgettable family, the orchard they've tended for generations, and a love story that transcends the ages.

Nomi Eve's lavishly imagined account begins in Palestine in 1837, with the tale of the irrepressible family matriach, Esther, who was lured by the smell of baking bread into an affair with the local baker. Esther passes on her passionate nature to her son, Eliezer, whose love for the forbidden Golda threatened to tear the family apart. And to her granddaughter, Avra the thief, a tiny wisp of a girl who thumbed her nose at her elders by swiping precious stones from the local bazaar-and grew to marry a man she met at the scene of a crime. At once epic and intimate, The Family Orchard is a rich historical tapestry of passion and tradition from a storyteller of beguiling power.

About this title

Product Description

[ The Family Orchard Eve, Nomi ( Author ) ] { Paperback } 2001

Review

These days the term "multi-generational novel" conjures up something flabby and cliché ridden, which makes it all the more refreshing that Nomi Eve brings so much verve, warmth and imagination to the genre in her debut novel. Eve shows off a range of talents here--she adroitly weaves 150 years of Jewish and Israeli history into the lives of her characters; she is alive to the intersections of legend, magic and everyday reality; she has an intimate knowledge of the business of grafting and growing fruit trees. But her gift for conjuring up the pleasures of the senses is the finest of all. It's difficult to think of a writer since Colette who has so revelled in the language of smells, tastes, textures, and exquisite sexuality.

The novel opens in 1837 when Esther Herschell, the beautiful granddaughter of the chief rabbi of the British Empire, marries the learned eastern European Rabbi Yochanan Schine, and the young couple takes up residence in a "half-grand, half-decrepit" house in Jerusalem. Within paragraphs Esther embarks on a delirious love affair with a handsome young baker and Yochanan finds out about it, which mysteriously only heightens the married couple's pleasure in each other. So commences a narrative driven by sexual undercurrents, unexpected emotional reactions and the spell of Jerusalem with its "twists, turns, bakers and twin arcane whispers of piety and perversity."

Eve moves the family stories along briskly, and in the twinkling of an eye World War I has broken out, and Avra Schine, Esther and Yochanan's light-fingered granddaughter, is stealing bullets from the Turkish Army to supply daring Jewish spies. Avra bears handsome, blue-eyed identical twin sons, Moshe and Zohar, who come of age during the years of struggle and tragedy that preceded Israeli independence. As the generations revolve, Eve filters the terrible saga of mid-20th century Jewish history through the lives of the Schine/Sepher family--their marriages and deaths, dreams and desires, and the orchard that anchors each generation to the town of Petach Tikvah.

Nomi Eve has drunk deep from the wells of South American magic realists like Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende and Yiddish fabulists and folk writers like Shalom Aleichem and IB Singer. But never do her teachers and masters overpower her own voice, a voice at once clear and resonant, earthy and ethereal. The Family Orchard is not a perfect work of art--but then perfection is not really the point here. It is, however, a deeply moving and highly accomplished novel, and an astonishingly impressive debut. --David Laskin, Amazon.com

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0375724575
• ISBN 13: 9780375724572
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336