THE .
FRAGILE
MISTRESS
"A Tender
and Bittersweet Coming of Age Story, in Pre-1967 Israel and Palestine".
Growing up fast in a fractured
land
A young woman is thrown into the complex tensions of pre-1967 Israel
and Palestine when her family relocates from the US. She grows up fast,
overcoming an overly intense relationship with her mother, and emerging into a
womanhood shaped by the boundary-less spaces of a lost geography and people.
It's summer, 1963...
Fourteen year old Liana travels to Jerusalem, accompanied by her older sister and larger than life mother. The trip takes her from a sheltered life in an East Coast suburb to the hot, bustling and thoroughly confusing landscape of the Middle East, where Jewish and Arab cultures exist side by side in an uneasy truce. She soon drifts away from her colorful family and their over the top relatives, and starts a furtive, increasingly passionate, secret relationship with the runaway son of an American diplomat. Together they abscond to neighboring Palestine, where they hide in an abandoned monastery, while a frantic search for the two missing youngsters gets under way on the other side of an increasingly hostile border. Liana is helped by Miri, an old friend of her mother's from the days of the British occupation, who now lives in a camp on the Jordanian side. When Liana is finally tracked down by her family, she is whisked out of the country and brought back to the US, never to see, or hear from, the first love in her life, the American diplomat's son, again.
It's the time of the Cold War, and the story takes us back to a long forgotten past, to members of the 1940's Haganah and Jewish underground, once working side by side with their neighbors against a British occupying force, now finding themselves displaced amidst the chaotic and complex tensions of an emerging state just beginning to modernize and expand.
The deeply sensual story explores the young girl's troubled sexual experiences, as well as the young country's growing pains, on both sides of the increasingly hostile borders.
