cover image A Season of Stones: Living in a Palestinian Village

A Season of Stones: Living in a Palestinian Village

Helen Winternitz. Atlantic Monthly Press, $21.95 (303pp) ISBN 978-0-87113-514-8

Intrepid American journalist Winternitz ( East Along the Equator ) writes compellingly of her experiences during a year (1988) spent with families in the ancient West Bank village of Nahalin. Although some accused her of being a spy, she was accepted by the women whose dangers and daily hardships she shared as, with growing dread, she watched and recorded, the mounting tension between the Israeli military and intifada resisters. Confiscation of the villagers' land for subsidized Israeli settlements was accompanied by arrests and torture of members of a family she had come to know intimately, and whom she visited in prison camp as their ``relative.'' With curfews imposed, schools closed and travel restricted, frustrated teenagers joined the intifada and were among the casualties in an unprovoked, village-wide raid by border police during Ramadan. Overnight, once-remote Nahalin became front-page news around the world as a symbol of the Palestinian struggle for freedom. As Winternitz was leaving, her friends begged her to write ``that we want peace.'' (Nov.)