The hero of Castel-Bloom's latest novel-an exploration of Jewish identity and family history-can trace her roots back on her father's side to the expulsion of the Jews of Spain in 1492, when seven brothers of the Kastil family landed on the Gaza coast after a long series of trials and tribulations. Her mother claims their family goes back even further, 3,000 years, to the only clan that Jewish history has ignored: the one that said `No' to Moses and stayed behind in Egypt. Mixing historical and biographical facts, made-up legends plus other fictions and exaggerations, Castel-Bloom has written an unconventional saga of her family, the Kastils: family meals and get-togethers, deaths and funerals, sayings and stories, and all those things that are not to be mentioned.

About the Author

Orly Castel-Bloom was born in Tel Aviv in 1960 to parents originally from Egypt. After studying film at the Beit Zvi Institute and Tel Aviv University, she published her first collection of stories in 1987 and has been a leading voice in Hebrew literature ever since.

Todd Hasak-Lowy is a writer and Professor of creative writing and literature at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago.

Reviews

Orly Castel-Bloom is a leading voice in Hebrew literature today

* White Review *

Castel-Bloom layers the heartbreaking and the grotesque and the intolerably mundane and the nearly mythological and the maddening and the transcendantly 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.

* Tablet Magazine *



Book Information
ISBN 9781943150229
Author Orly Castel-Bloom
Format Paperback
Page Count 141
Imprint Dalkey Archive Press
Publisher Dalkey Archive Press