From the Shabbat table to the bookshelf
Perth-raised, Israel-based Rachel Caplin turned a beloved family story and the loss of her grandmother into her debut novel, The Spoon and the Sea.
When Rachel Caplin lost her grandmother to dementia in 2018, she did what many of us do with grief. She talked about it. A lot. So much, in fact, that her husband eventually suggested she write it all down instead.
“My husband actually was the one who said, why don’t you write? I think that part of it was him saying, ‘please stop talking about all of these stories constantly’,” Caplin laughs.
What began as a deeply personal exercise in processing loss became The Spoon and the Sea, a debut novel based on a true story that had been told around her family’s Shabbat table for years.
Caplin, who was born and raised in Perth and moved to Israel in 2015, works in tech by day. Writing, she says, was never part of the plan.
“Everyone in Israel that I’ve known now for years, when I put out a book, said, ‘wow, you can write, you wrote a book’. And everyone I grew up with in Australia said, ‘finally you wrote a book’,” she told The AJN.
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