جمعة مشمشية
Apricot Season
Ahmad Agbaria

The novel Apricot Season revives the mythology of the fruit of Paradise, with its short season and the longing for it. This is an imaginary biography about human beings and nature, in a place where nature is an inseparable part of the culture. The plot moves between the past and the present, and this motion brings us into the inner world of its protagonist, Tarek, to the depths of his consciousness, to the memories of his childhood in Umm al-Fahm, but also lays out the changes the place underwent in recent decades—changes that are revealed clearly to him when he returns there after a lengthy absence. The village has grown, but like many other Palestinian villages, officially listed as cities, it has become a jumbled space lacking any urban centers or infrastructure, made up of large, unintelligible areas. Agbaria’s book offers a nostalgic journey that subverts the nostalgia principle and situates itself in the blurry space between utopia and dystopia. 

Apricot Season is the first novel ever written about Umm al-Fahm, and it is interwoven with the history of the country and the mythological strata of the place in the past hundred years. 

 “This special novel is based on two fundamentally contradictory moves. The first is an act of lamentation for the past that no longer exists, and the second is an act of resistance to that lamentation.” (Dr. Aida Fahmawi-Watad)  

Translation: Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani | Editing: Wa’el Aboud and Dafna Rosenblit 

Epilogue: Aida Fahmawi-Watad and Hannan Hever 

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