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.
The book was never meant to be seen by anyone. It started as Caplin’s attempt to keep her grandmother alive on the page, weaving a real family story with the raw experience of loss. But the writing process took her somewhere she didn’t expect.
“I began writing the book almost in an unhealthy way to try to keep my grandmother alive. That was part of what I was actually trying to do. And through writing, I got to let her go because basically there came various points in the writing process that the plot had to move in a certain direction and the character just didn’t make sense together, and I had to let go of one or the other. The plot had to continue, so the character had to adapt,” she explained. “Through that I realised it actually wasn’t her. So the most surprising part of the writing process was that it helped me to let her go.”
After finishing the manuscript, Caplin’s husband again nudged her forward. She showed it to a handful of friends, entered The Australian Vogel Literary Award on a whim, and placed in the top three.
After two years of being told the timing wasn’t right, she parted ways with the agency and decided to do what she does best. She took her product to market.
“I decided at some point I was going to treat this book like anything else in terms of how I take it to market. That’s what I do,” she said. “So, I figured if I can do that with a tech product, I can do it with the book.”
And, it’s paying off. Some 86 per cent of her sales are now in the US, with readers she has never met discovering the book through Amazon, Goodreads and Facebook groups. Many have been moved by its themes of dementia, family and, above all, forgiveness.
“The most important component of it is about forgiveness without needing to whitewash and smooth over the rough edges. The rough edges are important and they exist in every relationship. But the time on earth is finite and spend it with people that you love.”
Now halfway through her second book, Caplin has a message for other Jewish writers feeling shut out by the publishing industry. Just keep going.
“I think every Jewish family has a story. Every family comes from somewhere, has gone through something. I think we’re going to come out with the most rich tapestry of Jewish stories ever.”
The Spoon and the Sea is available now