Book excerpt: A beautifully crafted story of a Jewish family, reaching back five generations. Using births, deaths and family legends, here are stories of how people meet and fall in love, of family secrets and tragedies, of sex and marriage. Yochanan and his wife Esther who lived happily despite Esther's long-time affair with the local baker; Avra who has a penchant for stealing (and returning) who marries Shimon, an immigrant from Russia; Miriam, a child of Eastern Europe who sews her family's futures into her cloth. Shyly sexy and funny, always rooted in the domestic and the familiar, this is an enchanting, complex novel which draws on the voices of many generations from far and wide, reaching across the Diaspora - Israel, Europe and America.