The Family Orchard (Vintage International) - Softcover

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