Havurah Shalom

Fiction/Short Stories, 141 pages.

A family saga in realist style resembling a linked set of short stories. The protagonist has Egyptian roots going back many generations: on her father’s side, to the expulsion of the Jews of Spain in 1492, when seven brothers of the Kastil family (from Castille) landed on the Gaza. Two brothers of the family, Vita and Charlie Kastil (i.e. from Castille) immigrated from Egypt to Israel in the 1950s with their future wives Adele and Vivienne and settled on a kibbutz of the Marxist-Zionist Hashomer Hatzair. They were soon expelled for Stalinism and moved to Tel Aviv. 

Mixing historical and biographical facts, made-up legends plus other fictions and exaggerations, Castel-Bloom writes an unconventional saga of her family, the Kastils. As in other sagas, there are family meals and get-togethers, deaths and funerals, sayings and stories, and things that are not to be mentioned because they disgrace the family. But here these elements all slip and slide sideways into parody and the absurd.

Castel-Bloom is a leading Israeli author, but less known in the US than the canonical trio of Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman (because she is a Mizrahi woman?). She blends fact with fiction, history with legend, reimagining the lives of her forebears.

Discussion led by Joel Beinin in Zoom Room Bet.