It begins as the narrator, the young Jewish child of a widowed doctor, is summoned with his mother to the summer home and orange groves of a grateful Arab patient, who is called “the grandmother.” The narrator loses a swimming match to the 19-year-old Abdul-Karim, a member of “the grandmother’s” family, and proclaims that when he grows up he will win. The swimming race becomes a kind of metaphor for relations between the land’s Jews and Arabs, which painfully disintegrate before our eyes. The tale finishes in 1948, in the same orange grove in which it began.
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