When they found her, after having disappeared for three days, Sarai Lilienblum was sitting inside the “world’s largest crater” wearing her burgundy housecoat, sipping a martini. Nobody knew how she got there. And of course, Sarai wouldn’t tell. A robotics teacher and an inveterate tinkerer, the truth is Mrs. Lilienblum used her absence to create a cloud- making machine employing a red vacuum cleaner. The contraption would suck up desert sand and more astonishingly create clouds that produced rain.
The story opens in the backwater of Southern Israel, in a desert, inside a village known as The Cliff. Here, Boaz Lilienblum and son Eli struggle to eke out a living running a tourist lodge. Wife Sarai Lilienblum spends her spare time inventing things, which she often displays on her front lawn. Lovingly perceived to be a little batty Sarai’s son believe his mom is “a few fries short of a Happy Meal.” None of Mrs. Lilienblum gadgets have ever amounted to anything. The lodge stays afloat with the help of thrill-seeking volunteers, the so called “McMurphy tourists” drawn to the lodge in search of a mysterious hiker purportedly lost in the desert a decade ago. The tourists delude themselves he is alive. The McMurphy volunteers keep the lodge running- but barely. Business is not great!
Naomi, the eldest daughter left The Cliff community at fourteen to study at a boarding school in Jerusalem to prepare for a high tech life. Now she returns home amid family chaos, deeply concerned over her mother’s mental acuity, exacerbated by her mother’s mysterious disappearance and latest invention— a cloud-making factory.
To everyone’s amazement, a video of Mrs. Lilienblum whereabouts blows up the internet. Tamara, a reporter sent to cover the story, shares the strange video with Eli and Naomi. They watch in amazement seeing their mother, sitting in the midst of a nearby crater, holding a red vacuum cleaner sucking up desert sand… a cloud over her head producing raindrops falling on her palm. Thousands of investors offer millions to buy Mrs. Lilienblum idea. Rain in the desert? Could that real?
Investors offer the Cliff community -- the self-named Cloudies--- 153 days to recreate Mrs. Lilienblum’s invention. The Cloudies eagerly aspire to attract billionaire Ben Gould, and convince him Mrs. Lilienblum’s machine can produce rain from sand. Will her cloud factory make the desert bloom?
A debut novel by the talented Iddo Gefen, Mrs. Lilienblum’s Cloud Factory is a howling satire, a hilarious spoof that ricochets off the Israeli startup culture and its frenetic tourist industry. A neurocognitive researcher diagnosing Parkinson’s disease, winner of the Sammy Rohr prize for Jewish literature for his fantastic short story anthology, Jerusalem Beach, author Iddo Gefen has outdone himself in the zany, madcap, implausible adventure that could only be conceived in the greatest startup “invention nation,” Israel.
