My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner: A Family Memoir

A lighthearted tale of family ties, over-the-top housekeeping, and the sport of storytelling in the village of Meir Shalev’s birth, where his unforgettable Grandma Tonia lived in a constant state of battle with the family’s biggest enemy in their adoptive land: dirt.
 
Meir Shalev’s grandmother Tonia, who came to Palestine by boat from Russia in 1923, was never seen without a cleaning rag over her shoulder. She received visitors outdoors. She allowed only the most privileged guests to enter her spotless house. Hilarious and touching, Tonia and her regulations come richly to life in a narrative that circles around the arrival into their dusty agricultural midst of the big shiny American sweeper sent as a gift by Uncle Yeshayahu (he who had shockingly emigrated to the sinful capitalist heaven of Los Angeles!). The fate of the “svieeperrr”—hidden away for decades in a spotless -closed--off bathroom after its initial use—is a family mystery that Shalev determines to solve in this charming memoir of the obsessive but loving Tonia, the pioneers who gave his childhood its spirit of wonder, and the grit and humor of people building ever-new lives.