One summer in the life of an almost seven-year-old girl, in a young kibbutz in the south of the country. A kibbutz without a tree and without shade, whose founders, pioneers from South America, who immigrated to Israel in 1949, established it on light loess land, very close to the Gaza Strip and the city of Ashkelon, which was then called Majdal-Ashkelon by everyone.
The girl named "Rishona", being the first girl of the kibbutz, is curious, opinionated and independent. Due to these qualities and due to her rich imagination, which is nourished by reading books for her age and not her age, and due to the complex social reality in which she lives, she is caught up in the case of an alleged escape attempt and theft, and her efforts to get out of the case only complicate her more.
The novel Until You Know How to Write Love, which contains details from the life of the writer Gabriela Avigor-Rotem, is presented to us through the mind and language of the first girl. It creates for us a reality influenced by the heroes of children's literature and the puzzling sentences of friends, a high and fugitive transition of translated books and the wrong and confused one of the children and the members of the kibbutz. And also from the blinding light of the summer and the nightmares of the night in the children's home and the multitude of experiences of Perula.
For the first time, one experiences jealousy, embarrassment, insult, competitiveness, feelings of guilt, and discovers that love sometimes passes like a butterfly from flower to flower, and it will probably take time before you know how to write love.
Gabriela Avigor-Rotem, who has long earned a reputation as a fine writer who works wonders in the Hebrew language, here, for the first time in her rich literary career, confronts her childhood, which is also the childhood of the State of Israel. The children's home in her fictional kibbutz is a habitat for both the kibbutz children, whose parents live there separately from them, and also for "outside children"; Children who came to the kibbutz reluctantly, from broken families, from different places and backgrounds, and one of them, with a crown of thorns adorning his head, falls victim to misunderstandings and prejudices.
