In her loosely autobiographical The Egyptian Novel (not yet translated into English), the Israeli writer Orly Castel-Bloom tells the story of a family of Jews from Cairo who emigrate to the Jewish state. The novel, writes Liel Leibovitz, rejects the pretensions of much Israeli fiction and instead captures something of the human experiences of actual Israelis:
In the hands of a lesser author, . . . [this book] would’ve turned into an exercise in sentimentality. . . . Instead, to tell the story of herself and her family and the places that they’ve tried to call home and from which they’ve been expelled—Spain, Egypt, the kibbutz—Castel-Bloom layers the heartbreaking and the grotesque and the intolerably mundane and the nearly mythological and the maddening and the transcendently joyous and all the other emotions that make families work into a novel made up of short stories that sacrifices the factual truth for the much more meaningful ecstatic one. . . .
[F]or all of its death and disillusionment, the book is rarely gloomy and never hopeless. It is . . . a book about life under the weight of a thousand shattered dreams and soured ideologies, about finding grace and sweetness and real satisfaction among the ruins of a fallen Eden, which is what life in Israel in 2015 is and what life as part of a family, any family, has always been and shall forever be.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/195237/castel-bloom-egyptian-novel