Returning home after an unexplained three-day disappearance, robotics teacher Sarai Lilienblum quickly becomes an Internet sensation when a video surfaces showing her using an unplugged vacuum cleaner to turn sand into a rain-producing cloud. That's only the first of a series of hilariously improbable events that make Israeli author Iddo Gefen's wry, wise first novel, Mrs. Lilienblum's Cloud Factory, so enjoyable.
Sarai is an inveterate inventor of devices, like a toothbrush with built-in dental floss. With her husband, Boaz, and 22-year-old son, Eli, who's fitfully contemplating the next stage of his life, she lives in a replica of a Swiss ski village that features a never-used ski slope, high atop the world's largest erosion crater in Israel's Negev Desert. For years, Boaz has battled sometimes crushing debt to operate a lodge and visitors center that boasts, among other things, a museum catering to tourists in search of a mysterious Irish hiker, Robert McMurphy, who disappeared in the desert more than a decade earlier.
Hannah Bialika, widow of a wealthy local businessman, pledges $4 million to fund the manufacture of a working cloud machine; billionaire Ben Gould offers no less than five times that sum if the Lilienblums' startup, Cloudies, is able to produce rain on an entire town in four months. Eli and his hard-driving sister, Naomi, who quits her job with a technology company and returns from her home in Tel Aviv, scramble to produce the required device with their mother. In that quest, they're assisted by an assortment of misfit employees, like Paulina, the village's dry cleaner, who possesses "basically, tons of motivation, but no relevant experience or background." A scheme to keep the company afloat financially and some startling revelations about McMurphy add intrigue to the story of whether the Lilienblums will be able to finish the job in time to reap the promised financial rewards.
Gefen, winner of the 2023 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for his short story collection, Jerusalem Beach, deftly balances smart and sometimes hilarious scenes in his warmhearted exploration of one family's tangled dynamics wrapped in a sharp satire of technology startup culture. The climactic, highly public demonstration of Sarai's cloud-making machine is a comic masterpiece. But it's only one of the novel's many savvy moments that reveal its undeniable humanity and make it such a delight. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: In this deft and wise comedy, an eccentric inventor creates a device that turns desert sand into rain, igniting a sensation in the high-tech world and a crisis for her family.