Funeral at noon

the long version

In a small Israeli village in the 1950s, a young housewife, childless and bored, forms a curious bond with her neighbor's ten-year-old son. The two take long walks through an orchard to an abandoned Arab village, now used as a training ground by the Israeli army. In this haunting landscape they encounter a lone soldier, and the woman moving to break out of her closed existence, sets in motion a series of events that will lead to tragedy. Yeshayahu Koren lures the reader into a web of mystery in which the simple becomes the complex, and what seems on the surface to be a quietly told tale of a woman's restless domestic existence becomes a saga of an entire village whose members are shaken by surprising repercussions.