My Russian grandmother and her American vacuum cleaner

Disclosure: memoir is not my genre. That said, this book was a refreshing change from the dystopian novels I've been reading lately, and it's very funny. It also stands squarely in the tradition of Jewish storytelling.

The author's Grandmother Tonia lives and works in the cooperative farming community of Nahalal, Israel in the early 50s. She is an obsessive cleaner and buffer. She has a brother who is a businessman in Los Angeles, and who has a longstanding feud with one of her other brothers. To make his brother jealous, the L.A. brother sends a monster vacuum cleaner to Tonia, who locks it away forever. Shalev's narrative is the story of how that happened and why that story is so important to his family.

The family members have several different versions of every family story, and almost all of them are hilarious. Shalev explores how those stories can separate family members, and how they can bind them together. He also offers insight into why storytelling is so important in Jewish culture.

My primary criticism is that of most memoirs I have read: there are too many discrete stories with the same quality that start to feel repetitious. Most of us live lives as a series of stories, and it takes a special talent to select only parts of a life and structure them into an interesting read. By the middle of this book I started to feel bored. Things picked up a bit with a story about the narrator bringing a young woman to stay overnight at Tonia's house, but then drifted back to repetitious. Nevertheless, it is clear that these people were working hard to build their new country and had no time to write the stories down. They told them out loud instead. The stories were passed down through generations and give a richness and sense of community and connection to Jewish culture that are worthy of envy.