AVRAHAM'S GOOD WEEK

A One-World book, in which goodness is so rare you might begin to feel asphyxiated by the very presence of Avraham Bogatir, who's a humble, wise, long-suffering vegetable farmer in post-WW II Palestine. When an adolescent with a revolver intrudes on his household one evening in 1947, Avraham just gives the boy a glass of milk with cocoa, shelters him from the authorities, and begins to teach him about cucumbers, tomatoes and justice to his Arab neighbors. During Avraham's Good Week (like in Genesis), he has many brushes with the occupying ""Brits"" as well as the boy's knee-jerk militant Zionist group--all somewhat exasperating for a patriarch of such saintly dimensions--before the boy takes his ungracious leave. Kardos contrasts the mundane human events in the lives of the Israeli villagers to the sphere of disruptive, cruel politics and makes a great virtue of lying down with the lions. Fiddling on the roof?