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

Poetic and poignantly written book, 05 Jun 2008
This poetic and poignantly written book is a multigenerational family saga set against the backdrop of Israel's trials and tribulations, mirrored by the trials and tribulations of the family that is being traced, and a focus on the fruitful family orchard in Petach Tikva.

Written in amodern Israeli style, it begins with a Jewish family in Jerusalem in the 1830's and it continues to the present day.
Stark and explicit writing.
It tells of the story of the sorrow of immigrants and the joy of pioneers, and of the many experiences of generations of Jewish children and adults growing up and living in the Land of Israel.
It is the story of Yochanan and his wife Esther, and Esther's affair with a baker, the love of the stepbrother and stepsisister, Eliezer and Golda, the girl thief Avra, the irrepressible twins Zohar and Moshe, Eliezer and his American born children.
It tells of the experiences of these families against the backdrop of the First World War, the Arab pogroms against Jewish communities, the War of Independence and a free Israel.
It illustrates the deep roots of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel, and affirms the extraordinary spirit of the people of Israel,
the most humane, giving, life-affirming people on the planet--
whatever sick propaganda you might have read to the contrary.