After the Holidays

After the Holidays is the story of a family in a small farming community in Palestine during the British Mandate. The village is set among fragrant orange groves and shady tree-lined streets where hypocrisy is traded as freely as gossip. The local population includes the pompous teacher who will never write his poem, the slow overseer who rapes a Bedouin child as an expression of his own powerlessness, and the members of the Weiss family, the main characters in the book, bizarre people who feed off each other’s psychopathology. The tale depicts the gradual disintegration of the entire family, and comes to a head when one of the daughters, Batsheva, takes a young Arab worker as her lover.