Returning to the kibbutz of his childhood to attend his father's funeral, Avraham Balaban confronts his buried yet still intensely painful childhood memories. Comparing the kibbutz of today with that of his early years, the author weaves together two interrelated stories: a sensitive artist growing up in the intensely pragmatic world of Kibbutz Huldah and the rise and fall of a grand yet failed social experiment. As he moves through the seven days of sitting shivah for his father, Balaban experiences an expanding cycle of mourning for self, family, the kibbutz, and Israel itself. With a poet's keen voice, Balaban pens a poignant, frank portrait of the emotional damage wrought by the kibbutz educational system, which separated children from their parents, hoping to establish a new kind of family, a nonbiological family. Indeed, he realizes that he is mourning not the physical death of his father, but the much earlier death of the father-child bond. Only the unwavering love of his remarkable mother rescued him. Readers will see the kibbutz movement, and Israel in general, with new eyes after finishing this book. In the process of unearthing his earliest memories, Balaban meditates on the mechanism of memory and the forces that shape it. Thus, he examines the varied layers familial, societal, and national that establish individual identity. During the shivah, he discovers the tremendous power of words in shaping one's world, on the one hand, and their redemptive power on the other.

In Between God and Beast, Avraham Balaban argues that Oz's fiction has, from the outset, followed Jung's psychological theory. The major psychic processes that are depicted throughout Oz's prose are typically Jungian. For example, the treasure hunt, which is the deep structure of many of Oz's stories and novels, reflects the search for the "self" in which all the vying forces of one's psyche coexist peacefully. Oz uses many of the symbols of the treasure as well as of the self as they are presented by Jung. Many of the symbols examined in this study have never before been discussed in articles about Oz's writings.

Balaban also devotes a considerable portion of his study to the religious dimension of Oz's work as well as the impact of his personal life on his writings. Balaban reveals that from the beginning Oz's work has moved in two directions: it demonstrates an unceasing effort to delve ever deeper into the dark side of consciousness while heightening the contrast between the opposing elements vying within his protagonists; and it consistently attempts to bring those oppositions to peaceful coexistence and even to a fruitful mutual relationship.