Mrs. Lilienblum’s Cloud Factory

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.

Iddo Gefen was born in 1992 in Tel Aviv and is currently based in NYC. He is an author and a Ph.D. student in cognitive psychology at Columbia University and the Zuckerman Institute for Neuroscience, researching the relationship between narrative understanding, human memory, and decision-making. His first book, Jerusalem Beach, was the recipient of the 2023 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

Translator Bio: Born in Israel in 1983, Daniella Zamir is a literary translator of contemporary Israeli fiction. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in literature from Tel Aviv University, and her master’s degree in creative writing from City University in London. She currently lives in Tel Aviv with her husband and daughter.