Tells the stories of the founding members of the Feyge Levin Workingman's Circle, Jewish immigrants from czarist Russia who became pioneer settlers of the Jezreel Valley in Israel

The Blue Mountain: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Shalev, Meir

Contemporary

Harpercollins

Esau is a saga of several generations in a family of bakers spanning the period from World War I and the inception of the British Mandate in Palestine through the mid-seventies in Israel. Patriarch Abraham Levy, the proud descendant of fifteen generations of Sephardic Jews, and his wife, the convert Sarah, a monumental, generous woman, illiterate and complex, establish themselves in a village to the west of Jerusalem and become the center of a sprawling, colorful family whose passions, suffering, and unexpected fates partake of both the real and the mythic, not to mention the miraculous. Esau's eponymous narrator is one of a pair of near-sighted Levy twins, who have only a single set of eyeglasses between them. The life choice each boy makes as a result of this childhood experience determines the course of the novel: Jacob, who wears the eyeglasses most of the time, follows his father and becomes the village baker, marrying Leah, fathering children, and shouldering the responsibility of ancestral tradition; while the narrator, with his willfully blurred vision, is cursed and disinherited by his beloved mother and leaves his family and village to become a writer in the United States. After thirty years of exile, he returns home and offers us the brilliant and deeply moving mosaic that is the story of the Levy family. Like his progenitor, Meir Shalev, the narrator finds his portion of the world in books, and the two of them share a Rabelaisian appetite for story and character, an exuberant playfulness, a mischievous sense of irony, and a fascination with the sensuality of childhood, those images, sounds, and odors at the origin of all memory and roots.

Esau: A Novel

The absorbing first novel by one of Israel's most important and acclaimed contemporary writers focuses on four idealistic early settlers of the modern state of IsraelSet in a small rural village prior to the creation of the State of Israel, this funny and hugely imaginative book paints an extraordinary picture of a small community of Ukrainian immigrants as they pioneer a new life in a new land over three generations. Narrated by Baruch, a grandson of one of the founding fathers of the village, this lyrical novel transcends time and place by touching on issues of universal relevance, showcasing the skill of a master storyteller who never fails to entertain.

Perennial

The bestselling and prize-winning Israeli author Meir Shalev describes the many "firsts" of the Bible – the first love and the first death, to the first laugh and the first dream – providing a fresh, secular and surprising look at the stories we think we know. The first kiss in the Bible is not a kiss of love. The first love in the Bible is not the love of a man and a woman. The first hatred in the Bible is the hatred of a man toward his wife. The first laugh in the Bible is also the last. In Beginnings, Meir Shalev reintroduces us to the heroes and heroines of the Old Testament, exploring these and many more of the Bible’s unexpected "firsts." Combining penetrating wit, deep empathy, and impressive knowledge of the Bible, he probes each episode to uncover nuances and implications that a lesser writer would overlook, and his nontraditional, nonreligious interpretations of the famous stories of the Bible take them beyond platitudes and assumptions to the love, fear, tragedy, and inspiration at their heart. Literary, inquisitive, and honest, Shalev makes these stories come alive in all their complicated beauty, and though these stories are ancient, their resonance remains intensely contemporary.

Beginnings: Reflections on the Bible's Intriguing Firsts

History

World

Harmony

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.

A Pigeon and a Boy: A Novel

United States

Schocken

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.

My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner: A Family Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

A woman with three loves and a son with three fathers: a universal story of passion and personal destiny by the award-winning author of A Pigeon and a Boy. When the mysterious Judith arrives in a small agricultural village in Palestine in the 1930s, she attracts attention of three men: Moshe, a widowed farmer; Globerman, a wealthy cattle dealer; and Jacob, who loses his wife—the most beautiful woman in the village—because of his obsession with Judith, who insists on living in a cowshed rather than settling down with any of her admirers. When she gives birth to Zayde, all three suitors consider him their son, and Zayde, who tragically loses Judith, imbibes their triple wisdom and their distinct versions of his origins. As Zayde pieces together the beguiling story of the singular woman who was his mother, Meir Shalev weaves a magical novel of the joys and secrets of village life, of an unconventional family, and the unexpected fruits of love.

The Loves of Judith: A Novel

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Regional & International

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

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.

Two She-Bears: A Novel

Literary

A colorfully illustrated round of the season in the garden of the best-selling novelist, memoirist, and champion putterer with a wheelbarrow &nbsp; 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. &nbsp;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. &nbsp; 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.

My Wild Garden: Notes from a Writer's Eden

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Gardening & Landscape Design

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Shalev, Meir. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Shalev, Meir

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Shalev, Meir. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Blue Mountain: A Novel

Esau: A Novel

The Blue Mountain: A Novel

Beginnings: Reflections on the Bible's Intriguing Firsts

A Pigeon and a Boy: A Novel

My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner: A Family Memoir

The Loves of Judith: A Novel

My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner: A Family Memoir

Two She-Bears: A Novel

My Wild Garden: Notes from a Writer's Eden