My Russian Grandmother And Her American Vacuum Cleaner A Family Memoir

Author : Meir Shalev
Publisher : Schocken
ISBN 13 : 080521240X
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner written by Meir Shalev and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the acclaimed novel A Pigeon and a Boy comes a charming tale of family ties, over-the-top housekeeping, and the sport of storytelling in Nahalal, the village of Meir Shalev’s birth. Here we meet Shalev’s amazing Grandma Tonia, who arrived in Palestine by boat from Russia in 1923 and lived in a constant state of battle with what she viewed as the family’s biggest enemy in their new land: dirt. Grandma Tonia was never seen without a cleaning rag over her shoulder. She received visitors outdoors. She allowed only the most privileged guests to enter her spotless house. Hilarious and touching, Grandma Tonia and her regulations come richly to life in a narrative that circles around the arrival into the family’s dusty agricultural midst of the big, shiny American sweeper sent as a gift by Great-uncle Yeshayahu (he who had shockingly emigrated to the sinful capitalist heaven of Los Angeles!). America, to little Meir and to his forebears, was a land of hedonism and enchanting progress; of tempting luxuries, dangerous music, and degenerate gum-chewing; and of women with painted fingernails. The sweeper, a stealth weapon from Grandpa Aharon’s American brother meant to beguile the hardworking socialist household with a bit of American ease, was symbolic of the conflicts and visions of the family in every respect. The fate of Tonia’s “svieeperrr”—hidden away for decades in a spotless closed-off bathroom after its initial use—is a family mystery that Shalev determines to solve. The result, in this cheerful translation by Evan Fallenberg, is pure delight, as Shalev brings to life the obsessive but loving Tonia, the pioneers who gave his childhood its spirit of wonder, and the grit and humor of people building ever-new lives.

Author :
Publisher : Schocken Books Incorporated
ISBN 13 : 0805242872
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner written by and published by Schocken Books Incorporated. This book was released on 2011 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the author's grandmother's darkly comic, obsessive cleaning behaviors that prompted her to receive most of her visitors outdoors, describing her relationship with a mysterious vacuum cleaner that was hidden away after its first use.

Author : Meir Shalev
Publisher : Schocken
ISBN 13 : 0805242988
Total Pages : 219 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner written by Meir Shalev and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the acclaimed novel A Pigeon and a Boy comes a charming tale of family ties, over-the-top housekeeping, and the sport of storytelling in Nahalal, the village of Meir Shalev’s birth. Here we meet Shalev’s amazing Grandma Tonia, who arrived in Palestine by boat from Russia in 1923 and lived in a constant state of battle with what she viewed as the family’s biggest enemy in their new land: dirt. Grandma Tonia was never seen without a cleaning rag over her shoulder. She received visitors outdoors. She allowed only the most privileged guests to enter her spotless house. Hilarious and touching, Grandma Tonia and her regulations come richly to life in a narrative that circles around the arrival into the family’s dusty agricultural midst of the big, shiny American sweeper sent as a gift by Great-uncle Yeshayahu (he who had shockingly emigrated to the sinful capitalist heaven of Los Angeles!). America, to little Meir and to his forebears, was a land of hedonism and enchanting progress; of tempting luxuries, dangerous music, and degenerate gum-chewing; and of women with painted fingernails. The sweeper, a stealth weapon from Grandpa Aharon’s American brother meant to beguile the hardworking socialist household with a bit of American ease, was symbolic of the conflicts and visions of the family in every respect. The fate of Tonia’s “svieeperrr”—hidden away for decades in a spotless closed-off bathroom after its initial use—is a family mystery that Shalev determines to solve. The result, in this cheerful translation by Evan Fallenberg, is pure delight, as Shalev brings to life the obsessive but loving Tonia, the pioneers who gave his childhood its spirit of wonder, and the grit and humor of people building ever-new lives.

Author : Meir Shalev
Publisher : Schocken
ISBN 13 : 0805243518
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book My Wild Garden written by Meir Shalev and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A colorfully illustrated round of the season in the garden of the best-selling novelist, memoirist, and champion putterer with a wheelbarrow On the perimeter of Israel’s Jezreel Valley, with the Carmel mountains rising up in the west, Meir Shalev has a beloved garden, “neither neatly organized nor well kept,” as he cheerfully explains. Often covered in mud and scrapes, Shalev cultivates both nomadic plants and “house dwellers,” using his own quirky techniques. He extolls the virtues of the lemon tree, rescues a precious variety of purple snapdragon from the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv highway, and does battle with a saboteur mole rat. He even gives us his superior private recipe for curing olives. Informed by Shalev’s literary sensibility, his sometime riotous humor, and his deep curiosity about the land, My Wild Garden abounds with appreciation for the joy of living, quite literally, on Earth. Our borrowed time on any particular patch of it is enhanced, the author reminds us, by our honest, respectful dealings with all manner of beings who inhabit it with us.

Author : Meir Shalev
Publisher : Schocken
ISBN 13 : 0805243305
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Two She-Bears written by Meir Shalev and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Israel’s most celebrated novelists—the acclaimed author of A Pigeon and a Boy—gives us a story of village love and vengeance in the early days of British Palestine that is still being played out two generations later. “In the year 1930 three farmers committed suicide here . . . but contrary to the chronicles of our committee and the conclusions of the British policeman, the people of the moshava knew that only two of the suicides had actually taken their own lives, whereas the third suicide had been murdered.” This is the contention of Ruta Tavori, a high school teacher and independent thinker in this small farming community who is writing seventy years later about that murder, about two charismatic men she loves and is trying to forgive—her grandfather and her husband—and about her son, whom she mourns and misses. In a story rich with the grit, humor, and near-magical evocation of Israeli rural life for which Meir Shalev is beloved by readers, Ruta weaves a tale of friendship between men, and of love and betrayal, which carries us from British Palestine to present-day Israel, where forgiveness, atonement, and understanding can finally happen.

Author : Meir Shalev
Publisher : Schocken
ISBN 13 : 0805242686
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Pigeon and a Boy written by Meir Shalev and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2009-01-06 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A mesmerizing novel of two love stories, separated by half a century but connected by one enchanting act of devotion—from the internationally acclaimed Israeli writer Meir Shalev. During the 1948 War of Independence—a time when pigeons are still used to deliver battlefield messages—a gifted young pigeon handler is mortally wounded. In the moments before his death, he dispatches one last pigeon. The bird is carrying his extraordinary gift to the girl he has loved since adolescence. Intertwined with this story is the contemporary tale of Yair Mendelsohn, who has his own legacy from the 1948 war. Yair is a tour guide specializing in bird-watching trips who, in middle age, falls in love again with a childhood girlfriend. His growing passion for her, along with a gift from his mother on her deathbed, becomes the key to a life he thought no longer possible. Unforgettable in both its particulars and its sweep, A Pigeon and A Boy is a tale of lovers then and now—of how deeply we love, of what home is, and why we, like pigeons trained to fly in one direction only, must eventually return to it. In a voice that is at once playful, wise, and altogether beguiling, Meir Shalev tells a story as universal as war and as intimate as a winged declaration of love.

Author : Anne Roiphe
Publisher : Grand Central Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9780446673884
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Lovingkindness written by Anne Roiphe and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 1997-10-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of "Fruitful" comes a novel of the love between a mother and daughter. Annie Johnson has worked hard to raise her daughter, Andrea. She is shocked, therefore, when 22-year-old Andrea calls from Israel and announces that she has joined an extreme right-wing Orthodox Jewish group and will be seeking an arranged marriage.

Author : Bess Kalb
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0525654720
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nobody Will Tell You This But Me written by Bess Kalb and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: VOGUE • FORBES • BOOKPAGE • NEW YORK POST • WIRED “I have not been as profoundly moved by a book in years.” —Jodi Picoult Even after she left home for Hollywood, Emmy-nominated TV writer Bess Kalb saved every voicemail her grandmother Bobby Bell ever left her. Bobby was a force—irrepressible, glamorous, unapologetically opinionated. Bobby doted on Bess; Bess adored Bobby. Then, at ninety, Bobby died. But in this debut memoir, Bobby is speaking to Bess once more, in a voice as passionate as it ever was in life. Recounting both family lore and family secrets, Bobby brings us four generations of indomitable women and the men who loved them. There’s Bobby’s mother, who traveled solo from Belarus to America in the 1880s to escape the pogroms, and Bess’s mother, a 1970s rebel who always fought against convention. But it was Bobby and Bess who always had the most powerful bond: Bobby her granddaughter’s fiercest supporter, giving Bess unequivocal love, even if sometimes of the toughest kind. Nobody Will Tell You This But Me marks the creation of a totally new, virtuosic form of memoir: a reconstruction of a beloved grandmother’s words and wisdom to tell her family’s story with equal parts poignancy and hilarity.

Author : Meir Shalev
Publisher : Canongate Books
ISBN 13 : 1847677363
Total Pages : 427 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Four Meals written by Meir Shalev and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2012-11-15 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four Meals is the extraordinary story of Zayde, his enigmatic mother Judith and her three lovers. When Judith arrives in a small, rural village in Palestine in the early 1930s, three men compete for her attention: Globerman, the cunning, coarse cattle-dealer who loves women, money and flesh; Jacob, owner of hundreds of canaries and host to the four meals which lend the book its narrative structure; and Moshe, a widowed farmer obsessed with his dead wife and his lost braid of hair which his mother cut off in childhood. During the four meals, which take place intermittently over several decades, Zayde slowly comes to understand why these three men consider him their son and why all three participate in raising him.

Author : Lev Golinkin
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0385537786
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka written by Lev Golinkin and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[A] hilarious and heartbreaking story of a Jewish family’s escape from oppression."--The New York Times A compelling story of two intertwined journeys: a Jewish refugee family fleeing persecution and a young man seeking to reclaim a shattered past. In the twilight of the Cold War (the late 1980s), nine-year old Lev Golinkin and his family cross the Soviet border with only ten suitcases, $600, and the vague promise of help awaiting in Vienna. Years later, Lev, now an American adult, sets out to retrace his family's long trek, locate the strangers who fought for his freedom, and in the process, gain a future by understanding his past. Lev Golinkin's memoir is the vivid, darkly comic, and poignant story of a young boy in the confusing and often chilling final decade of the Soviet Union. It's also the story of Lev Golinkin, the American man who finally confronts his buried past by returning to Austria and Eastern Europe to track down the strangers who made his escape possible . . . and say thank you. Written with biting, acerbic wit and emotional honesty in the vein of Gary Shteyngart, Jonathan Safran Foer, and David Bezmozgis, Golinkin's search for personal identity set against the relentless currents of history is more than a memoir—it's a portrait of a lost era. This is a thrilling tale of escape and survival, a deeply personal look at the life of a Jewish child caught in the last gasp of the Soviet Union, and a provocative investigation into the power of hatred and the search for belonging. Lev Golinkin achieves an amazing feat—and it marks the debut of a fiercely intelligent, defiant, and unforgettable new voice.