THE FAMILY ORCHARD

Name: THE FAMILY ORCHARD
Author: Nomi Eve
ISBN: 0-375-41076-7

by Nomi Eve ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2000

Erratic, often lyrically overpowering, bountifully imagined. This isn’t the Jewish One Hundred Years of Solitude, but one...

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Strong echoes of Aleichem and Singer sound throughout this ambitious first novel, a piecemeal portrayal of a Jewish family in Europe, the Holy Land, and America from the 1830s to the present day.

The dual narrative is initially awkward: brief factual summaries (under the heading “My Father Writes”) offer capsule versions of longer stories told by a narrator eventually identified as “Nomi.” There follows a rich parade of colorful characters and dramatic incidents: some lavishly developed, others quickly sketched, many given a pronounced magical-realist coloring. Eve begins in Jerusalem with the figures of Rabbi Yochanan Schine and his adulterous wife Esther, then moves on (back and forth among Russia, Jerusalem’s Old and New Cities, and several other key locations)—in a manner that sometimes seems as haphazard as it is chronological and calculated—to focus successively on the happy marriage of “Avra the Thief” and her husband Shimon, an orchard worker in the village of Petach Tikvah (“the citrus-growing center of the Jewish Settlement”); the contrasting fates of their twin sons Zohar and Moshe, growing up during the flowering of Arab-Israeli tensions in the 1920s; the suspected murder, in 1851, of an esteemed ancestor; Zohar’s wife Miriam the seamstress, who “sews” stories both real and imaginary into the garments she creates; their participation in an underground illegal immigration movement during the (1940s) British Mandate in Palestine—an activity mocked by the “disappearance” of their deformed, in effect discarded youngest son Gabriel; and the dream-haunted, “uprooted” life of Gabriel’s brother (and narrator Nomi’s father) Eliezer, in Jerusalem and America. The metaphor of grafting is employed (and explained, in a concluding “manual of orchard terms”) to describe how this novel separates, splices, and otherwise connects the individual stories—even while acknowledging the ultimate mystery and unknowability (“Family chronology defies consciousness”) of the souls herein both preserved in memory and lost to history.

Erratic, often lyrically overpowering, bountifully imagined. This isn’t the Jewish One Hundred Years of Solitude, but one suspects Eve may yet be capable of producing it.

Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-41076-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.