I’m reading a new novel by an Israeli author that has nothing to do with the war in Gaza, or any current crisis for that matter.

I can’t tell if I feel relieved or guilty. With a world in turmoil, how much permission can I give myself to tune out — if tuning out is even possible?

Iddo Gefen’s “Mrs. Lilienblum’s Cloud Factory” is set in a village on the lip of a crater deep in the Negev Desert — far from the bright lights of Tel Aviv and even Beersheba. When the family matriarch invents a machine that creates custom rain clouds, her family sees a way out of their thwarted lives in an Israeli backwater. With the help of an eccentric local investor, they expand mom’s home workshop into a full-fledged R&D lab and attract the interest of a famous venture capitalist. The subplots include a missing hiker, a budding romance and even a touch of larceny.

The book is both a family drama and a gentle satire of Israel’s high-tech sector. One reviewer praised its “spir­it­ed whim­sy.” And “although it’s not set far from the Gaza border,” as Haaretz notes in a profile of the author, the novel “unfolds far from war-related headlines.”

“Summer reading” is big business. One camp holds that the ideal “beach read” is fat and frothy, heavy on plot and action and light on whatever it is that makes a novel “literary.” Others like to take on

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