Sailing in a Watermelon Peel

Three boys, Zvi, Giora and Uri, decide to spend a summer day in a hut set in a watermelon patch in one of the fields of a village in Eretz Israel. Zvi is the daringly imaginative one, Giora is known for his physical prowess and his colorful swearing and Uri, the narrator, is the perennial go-between, pulled in opposing directions by his two friends. In the course of the day’s adventures many tales are told – of their childhood and first loves, of adolescent anxieties and rebellion. Their accounts of contemporary events are interwoven with stories they have heard of the early days of their village, Petah Tikva, which was the first Jewish settlement to be established in modern Eretz Israel and of which Uri’s grandfather was one of the founders. One story focuses on the boys’ school principal who, they suspect, is none other than Hitler who managed to escape masquerading as a Jew. There is also a glimpse of the lives of the Arab boys working in Uri’s home who boast about their physical development to the three Jewish boys.

Orange groves and vineyards, cultivated fields and the people who work them are the backdrop to this story of boyhood days. Ben-Ezer paints the picture of a typical Jewish village in Eretz Israel in the 40s, of the people who established it and made it flourish, and the different ways of life that evolved there.