Every family has its attic, its storehouse, or genizah as it's named in Hebrew, where the past is documented through papers, artefacts, and memories. You don't even have to have physical space; a genizah can be the memories and the stories of the family that have been passed down. It's whatever form the repository of the family's history comes in.

In Tamar Yellin's first novel The Genizah At The House Of Shepher, the collection in question is a musty hole in the rafters of the Shepher family's last home in Jerusalem. Miraculously, in amongst mouldering newspapers and notebooks, a treasure has been unearthed. A heretofore-unknown Codex of the Torah has come to light and with it arrives the possibility of reversing the family's seemingly perpetual decline in fortunes.

The history of the Torah (the Old Testament in the King James version of the Christian Bible) is like that of any ancient document: it was copied by hand from the original over the early part of its life. Very few codices from those times are the same. Here a character changed for another, or a word order is different here and there.

While in a language like English that may not seem to make much difference, with biblical Hebrew changing a few characters could change the meaning of a whole chapter. Or at the very least a verse, which can have serious implications to biblical scholars, especially when you consider that rabbinical scholars will spend their lives debating and dissecting the various meanings and connotations of words in a specific chapter of the text.

According to Jewish myth, the Torah existed for 947 generations before the creation of the world, and when God created the world He used it as His blueprint and guide; for what better tool to use to create and imperfect and cryptic world than an imperfect and cryptic Torah? According to Ms. Yellin's recounting, some scholars believe that at the end of time Elijah will return and sort out all the textual difficulties.

Until then there will be lots for religious scholars to debate to their hearts' content. This seems like an ideal circumstance, since it appears there is nothing more that endearing to the heart of a rabbinical scholar then arguing the minute points of textual interpretation of the Torah with their fellows.

Don't worry, this is pertinent to the story. Shulamit Shepher's father had left Israel in the 1930s to live in England, where he proceeded to marry an English Jewish woman and raise two children. While her brother Reuben fled the family to escape the oppressive depression of his father and the suffocating love of his mother, Shulamit followed in the footsteps of her grandfather and great-grandfather in becoming a biblical scholar.

However, unlike her forefathers it's not her faith that motivates her study of the holy books, rather a sense of duty and the need for a vocation. Still this does nothing to lessen her love for her work, or the texts that she reads and recites to her students. For it is also her means to connect to her family and its history, as the texts are filled with reminders for her of the stories about her great-grandfather, and her grandfather, his only son.