Novels propelled by longing require little in the way of plot. Much of Heatwave and Crazy Birds takes place squarely in a woman’s thoughts, turning over details of lonely days in the desert; of the habits of birds in a garden; of historical personages and dead family members who linger, as it were, with equal screen time. But Gabriela Avigur-Rotem’s use of commas and em-dashes where sentences typically achieve closure lends the woman’s inner life a quivering sense of urgency, and as the woman’s place in the world slowly emerges—Loya is the daughter of a Czech-born archaeologist who returns to Israel to inherit a house after years of self-imposed exile—that urgency extends to the story line, which eventually collapses in on itself with the intensity of a whodunit.

One of the wonderful things about this novel is the way it can be both compulsively observant and spatially expansive. Every once in a while it seems as though someone has slit the book’s tires, letting descriptions stream unimpeded out of depressurized paragraphs. These are often dark, unrequitable readings of the suburban landscape that recall Anne Sexton: a handbag “­vomits” its contents; a group of women with cosmetic masks looks frightening, “like the busts of six Roman emperors”; a keyhole is “like a little girl cut out of darkness.”

But Avigur-Rotem is at her best when she celebrates how the linguistic and cultural diversity of Jewish history, from all of its continents and millennia and milieus, inhabits the Israeli mind-share. For her, recollections, events, and utterances are rooted in a vision of the Jewish and Levantine past that, unlike the teleological narrative favored in popular Israeli myth, comes across whorled. Cab drivers are in conversation with the Canaanites, strawberry pickers with the prophets, cops with Slavs. A visit to the seaside finds it peopled by Phoenicians. A bird chirps in Spanish. “Hebrew sounds like Turkish, English like ancient Scottish,” she writes. While this multiplicity can be isolating to the narrator, the overall effect is that people speak in the unifying tongue of historical experience.

The novel’s characters help move this line of thinking along. Both a Holocaust survivor and a historian are able to recall that Baruch Goldstein, a West Bank settler who opened fire in a Hebron mosque in 1994, has the same name as someone who smuggled arms into the Vilna ghetto during World War II. A childhood scene at a...