Jewish Book Fair Debutantes Meet Nomi Eve and Kate Wenner, two first-time novelists whose works of fiction have set the literary world talking. r SANDEE BRAWARSKY Special to the Jewish News "In some ways I've grafted my own stories onto my father's stories." — Nomi Eve e beginning is in the trees," e narrator relates in the pro- logue of Nomi Eve's debut novel, The Family Orchard, a multigenerational set of family tales, spanning almost 200 years, mostly rooted in a citrus orchard in Israel. The trees also refer to the meticulous genealogical records kept by the narrator's father, whose family trees are reproduced throughout the book. The novel is told in three voices, with a talmudic-like format. Brief sections drawn from the narrator's father's diaries, tided "My Father Writes," serve as a kind of text, providing an overview of Israel's history, from 19th-century Turkish rule to the present. The narrator comments, elaborates and embellishes them with stories told in the third person in sections "I Write," and a fictional Nomi Eve comments in "I Tell" sections. Although it's complicated to explain, the narrative flows gracefully, revealing stories of love, loss, nationhood, tragedy, war, family secrets and, always, trees. Nomi Eve the author arrives at our interview with her husband and new baby, and soon we are joined by her mother. "It's a family book," Eve, who took her middle name as her last name in her early 20s, says, laughing as she does often. This is one of those publishing fairy tales. Eve, now 32, began the novel soon after completing a master's program in writing at Brown. When she finished, she sent the manu- script to an agent who promptly agreed to take it on and within weeks sold it to an admiring editor at Knopf. The novel was published last month with a first printing of 100,000 copies, unusually high for a first novel, and a "very grateful" Eve is on a 25-city publicity tour — accompanied by her husband and baby. The Family Orchard also is a novel about storytelling, how a family's stories are transmitted. The first of a long line of complex, richly drawn characters to be introduced are Yochanan, born in Prussia, and Esther, daughter of the chief rabbi of , Sandee Brawarsky is a New York-based book critic. 11/3 2000 84 the British empire, who move to Jerusalem in an arranged marriage in 1837. Their son Eliezer marries a half-sis- ter, and their daughter turns a talent for thievery into a skill at putting words together when she marries a Russian immigrant. They move to a settlement near Petach Tikvah, which becomes the site of the family orchard. There are wonderful scenes of an aging Eliezer running along the walls of Jerusalem with his twin grandsons, one of whom is the narrator's grandfather. In this family are tales of love affairs, a murder, a handi- capped child who is sent away from the orchard but has a ghostlike presence there. Eve writes beautifully of dreams, souls, a golem, and also about earthly things like grafting, which the pardesanim, orchard men, of the family are particular- ly skilled at. One of the things that make Eve's novel stand out is the vibrancy of her narrative. She writes with an original, sensuous quality, with much attention to details both visual and imagined. When asked about her visual percep- tions, she explains that she's attentive to all of the senses in her writing, that she sees things in her imagination in a "really dra- matic way," but that, interestingly, there's an "essential disconnect" in her life. She says that her husband often laughs when she doesn't notice things right in front of her in everyday life. She explains that she writes and re-writes, cutting descriptions, and that she often has to write 100 pages to get a single page. Eve's father, a finance professor, has traced their family's history back to the 14th century, connecting to Rashi and the Maharal of Prague. When she was a teenager in suburban Philadelphia, she found his work boring, but when she was older realized it offered an entry point for writing about her family. She grew up spending summers in Israel, visiting her grandparents' orchard, and has great love for the land. Frequently asked how much of the novel is based on her father's research, and how much is made up, she says that some of the stories are true, that 75 percent of the "My Father Writes" sections are based on his actual notebooks. About the other voices, she enjoys being evasive. "I believe that fiction is formed truth. I believe that history is a way of knowing all of this. I believe that legend is how we read between the lines," she writes. She talks about writing as a physical experience. In Israel she visited the fields and houses she writes about and sat in her grandmother's kitchen listening to stories, and "the words sunk deep into my skin." To learn about grafting, she spent time with her father in the orchard, "running from tree to tree, ducking low under branches." "In some ways," she explains, "I've grafted my own stories onto my father's stories." In the novel, Shimon explains to his sons that grafting is something unnatural, but it is "as if it were asked of us. Part of our partnership in creation." Just as graft- ing makes the trees more beautiful and stronger, she believes that the combined voices of the father and daughter tell a story "more bountiful than if one of those voices were standing alone." The famous doubletree in the novel, half blood orange and half mandarin, represents for Eve the grafting of the painful and the sweet — "so much of what life is about." The Family Orchard, which includes a manual of orchard terms at the end, is illustrated with engravings of the land- scape and of people from 19th-century travelogues written by Christian mission- aries to the Holy Land. Eve felt strongly that the book should be beautiful to look at, and it is. Having traveled to Israel and returned, as the early authors did with many observations, she feels a kinship with them. "My book is in some way in dialogue with those travelogues," she says. Many writers already have their next few books in mind while they're working. Eve, who lives in Brookline, Mass., is cer- tain that she'll write other books, but believes in taking long breaks, "waiting until you have something to say again." When she starts writing again, she'll probably write more family stories, more stories about people in love, more stories about people profoundly affected by his- tory, more stories about people who think a lot about God." " Nomi Eve speaks 1 p.m. Monday, Nov. 6, at the Jewish Community Center in West Bloomfield, and at 8 p.m. at the Oak Park JCC.