The Family Orchard

Nomi Eve

This book is about liaisons and relationships - sexual, familial and the linking of the grand tradition of story-telling with age-old Jewish tradition and family trees, and the work to cultivate the citrus trees in the family orchards of Lebanon/Israel. This is not a dull book - the characters, full of life and lust, live through the story-teller.

Extract

I know so many stories - the twin stories, the double tree, Avra the thief, my grandmother and the grenade, my grandfather on the motorcycle across the sands of Lebanon ... about Esther and Yochanan (and her affair with the baker) and about the rabbi who was murdered as he sat down for lunch. I stand in the middle of the trees (orchard) surrounded by these little ghosts. We will press our bodies backward into the pages of the book that grows here, from the soil of the orchard. I say, 'Here lived one thousand generations of fruit and love and family dust'.

Parallels