As one of Israel’s greatest living novelists, Meir Shalev was certainly entitled to write a memoir. So he did, but it’s not about him. It’s about his peculiar immigrant grandmother and the shiny vacuum cleaner she never used.
“Other members of my family have had far more interesting lives than I,” said Shalev by phone from his home in Jerusalem. “I’m already 63, so I can judge that my grandparents’ lives were more interesting and complicated.”
Shalev’s warmhearted and hilarious “My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner” recounts his bubbe’s journey from Russia to pre-state Israel in the 1920s, and her hardscrabble life on a moshav (collective farm).
As part of Jewish Book Month, the author will be in the Bay Area for a pair of speaking engagements, Nov. 7 at the Oshman Family JCC and Nov. 8 at the JCC of San Francisco.
Shalev’s 2007 novel “A Pigeon and a Boy” became an international bestseller. For this memoir, he takes a similarly novelistic approach, painting rich portraits of real-life characters, such as his quirky grandmother, Tonia.
She was born in Russia and moved as a young woman to Nahalal, a moshav in northern Israel. That’s where Tonia’s zeal for cleanliness fully flowered. A village of mud and dust, Nahalal turned out to be no match for Tonia, who spent most of her days scrubbing, sweeping and mopping her modest shack of a home, in which she and her husband raised a family.
Her desire to keep things immaculate can be explained as a need to “outline the borders of her territory,” Shalev says. “The clean part is my country, the dirty part is all the rest.”
By today’s standards, Tonia likely would be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder or, put plainly, as a crazy neat freak. Shalev does not disagree, but says, “In this period, everyone [in Israel] had OCD. She did concerning cleanliness, others with Zionism and socialism. Everyone was obsessed. Everyone was compulsive. If they weren’t, the State of Israel would not have been built.”
What about that General Electric vacuum cleaner, a gift from Tonia’s brother-in-law in Los Angeles? It became a source of contention, because Tonia’s husband, a proud socialist pioneer, looked down on his brother, who chose capitalist Hollywood over the Zionist dream.
Thus, the vacuum cleaner was tucked away in the bathroom, scorned and unused.
Is it a symbol of the lazy American decadence that ran so counter to the spirit of the chalutzim (Israel’s hardy pioneers)? Does it represent unneeded outside help for Tonia as she battles on her own to carve out a home in former swampland?
No, says the author. Sometimes a vacuum cleaner is just a vacuum cleaner.
“I don’t think of it as a symbol, even today,” Shalev says. “I think of it as a vacuum cleaner: nothing more than that. I know the minute I finish writing a book and it’s out, then people are allowed to find symbols and interpretations as they wish. I can only say I didn’t have this in mind.”
Born in Nahalal himself, Shalev says the village still has an almost mystical reputation throughout Israel because it was the nation’s first moshav, founded in 1921. Its residents still exude a lot of pioneer pride, thought Nahalal is no longer as primitive as it once was.
Today, it boasts the most advanced farm and dairy machinery in the world.
“When I was a little boy, there were still no asphalt or cement roads in the village,” he recalls. “I remember losing my rubber boots in the mud. Agriculture in Israel today is really advanced. We’re well known for our hi-tech, but we have a very advanced agriculture that started in these moshavim.”
Shalev’s beloved grandmother died years ago, though no one knows what happened to the vacuum cleaner. And powerful as genetics may be, Shalev says he did not inherit Tonia’s need for spotlessness.
He did, however, inherit her obsessive ways in one respect.
“I’m not obsessed with cleaning like my grandmother,” he says, “but in my writing, I use the cleaning techniques of my grandmother … I consider myself obsessive in my writing. Every author and artist should be.”
Meir Shalev will speak at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 7 at the Oshman Family JCC, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto. www.paloaltojcc.org or (650) 852-3600. He will also speak at 7 p.m. Nov. 8 at the JCC of San Francisco, 3200 California St., S.F. www.jccsf.org or (415) 292-1200.
“My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner” by Meir Shalev (212 pages, Schocken Books, $25.95)