Interview

Nomi Eve discusses how in her father's meticulous research of their family tree (connected all the way back to the House of David) inspired her family stories, and why she prefers to portray the history through the eyes of fiction.

Where did the idea come from to write The Family Orchard?
I can honestly say that I never actually "planned" to write this particular book. I simply needed to write certain family stories, and I didn't know how to write them. The way this book presented itself to me was as an answer to the questions in my heart and hands.

When I was fourteen, my father, Dr. Yehoshua Buch, began to lay out his family tree on the dining room table. The first family tree was written on big sheets of thin grey paper, but the paper wasn't big enough, so the edges were taped to other pieces. The trees were huge. I remember first looking at them and thinking that my father was crazy. After all, what fourteen-year-old cares about nine-hundred years and forty generations? There were many many rabbis in the trees. Sometimes my father would come home with pictures of the grandfather rabbis that he had found in the pages of the Encyclopedia Judaica. Invariably they had long white beards and pinched-in-faces. I had a hard time mustering much interest.

But then things changed. When I was twenty-four, I was trying to write a story about my family. By this time, my father's family tree had grown into a collection of detailed journals that he ...