Chesed Sephardi / Avraham B. Yehoshua Ir Mozes, a film director, arrives in Santiago de Compostela in Spain with Ruth, his veteran actress, for a retrospective held there in honor of his films. On the wall above their bed in the hotel he discovers a reproduction of an unfamiliar painting, in which a young woman is breastfeeding an elderly prisoner. Moses is not aware of the long European tradition of "Roman grace", but in his opinion the painting realizes a bold scene conceived by his screenwriter, Trigano, which was meant to take place in their seventh joint film, over thirty years ago. The scene was canceled in the middle of filming because of the commotion caused by Ruth, who refused to perform it. How and why was the painting hung in their room now? The cancellation of the scene at the time led to a final rift between Moses and Trigno, the screenwriter of all his first films, and even caused the severance of the relationship between Trigno and Ruth, his childhood sweetheart in the town of Pituach in the Negev. Since that rupture, Ruth is "imposed" on Moses, as a duty and as a guilt. The "retrospective" - ??for which, for unknown, suspicious reasons, only early films of Moses were chosen and dubbed into Spanish, the result of his collaboration with Trigno - does not end in Spain, and the painting "Roman Grace" will return and establish the continuation of the novel. The return of Moses and Ruth to Israel will involve a physical and mental wandering in the past, which will eventually lead to correction, atonement and reconciliation. The irony that hovers over the novel, and the comic dialogues and situations that fill it, create a chilling and amusing climate of "comedy", but beyond it, a poignant soul-searching of Moses with himself gradually develops, as he gradually sheds his shells. Joshua's bold imagination, in full bloom, rains upon us here new amazing scenes, until the end, where "Roman kindness" is exchanged for "Spanish kindness".
