“I don’t think the story is intended to combat the practice of human sacrifice, but rather to demonstrate how the obedience of the Bible’s most obedient believer may lead into the darkest of alleys,” he wrote.
A favorite of Mr. Shalev’s readers was a comic work of nonfiction, the affectionate memoir “My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner” (2011). It tells the story of the author’s maternal grandmother, a plucky socialist pioneer who receives a General Electric model (or “svieeperrr,” as she calls it) from a flourishing American relative, then locks it away, afraid it will get dirty from the ubiquitous dust in her village.
“Everyone had a grandmother like that,” Ms. Harris said.
Mr. Shalev’s grandmother was a lively storyteller, abounding in tales of the old days on the moshav, an Israeli cooperative farming community. It was she who had inspired him to write “The Blue Mountain.”
Meir Shalev was born on July 29, 1948, the same year Israel became an independent country, in Nahalal, the country’s first moshav. Nahalal was notable for its circular design, with individual plots of land radiating out like the spokes of a wheel, and for its European exiles, like the family of the illustrious general Moshe Dayan.
The Shalevs were a literary family. His father, Yitzhak, was a published poet; his mother, Batya (Ben-Barak) Shalev, was a high school literature teacher. An uncle, Mordechai Shalev, was a literary critic; a cousin, Zeruya Shalev, is also an acclaimed writer.
Mr. Shalev recalled in an interview with The Jerusalem Post in 2007 that his mother “made sure I read only good literature, like Mark Twain, Sholem Aleichem, Charles Dickens.”
