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BOOK CLUB MEETING
Our next meeting will be Sunday, July 27 at 10:00am in the comfort of your own home via Zoom!
We will be discussing Iddo Gefen’s: Mrs. Lilienblum’s Cloud Factory
JOIN ZOOM MEETING
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85858525861?pwd=5du1Rr3x504kwXrEZy8nxs483yFZwK.1
Meeting ID: 858 5852 5861
Password: 1955
SYNOPSIS
“[A] comic masterpiece . . . the novel’s many savvy moments . . . reveal its undeniable humanity and make it such a delight.”
—Harvey Freedenberg, Shelf Awareness
“[Mrs. Lilienblum’s Cloud Factory is] an endlessly entertaining send-up of startup culture as well as a story about families, love, and secrets.”
—Naomi Firestone-Teeter, GOLDA
“Iddo Gefen has produced a marvelous novel—wise, surreal, funny and a fascinating story. Mrs. Lilienblum’s Cloud Factory has traces of Gabriel García Márquez, mixed with the wise men of Chelm, and a dash of Sunset Boulevard. A spectacular achievement.”
—Max Gross, author of The Lost Shtetl
A comic novel for fans of Adelle Waldman about a tech startup that turns sand into rain clouds from Sami Rohr prize winner Iddo Gefen.
Our story opens with Mrs. Lilienblum discovered drinking a martini in a crater in the Israeli desert. Eli, her adult son, tries to understand what happened to his wacky mother, while he also tackles the legend of a missing hiker named McMurphy, and whether he might be in love with Tamara, a visitor to his family’s hostel on the edge of a crater.
The story races forward as the Lilienblum family builds a company around Eli’s mother’s invention and makes comedy out of startup culture, the obsession with company valuation and funding, the secrets families keep, romantic and family love–all with humor, warmth and compassion.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Iddo Gefen is an author and a Ph.D. student in cognitive neuroscience at Columbia University, currently based in New York City. His research explores the intricate relationship between narrative understanding, human memory, and decision-making. Gefen’s debut short story collection, Jerusalem Beach, won the 2023 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. One of the stories from the book is currently being adapted into a film by Ryan Gosling’s production company.