Chaim Lerner’s death begins as an apparent suicide and becomes a concealed, accidental killing in self-defense: he fell from his third-story balcony after Michal shoved him away during an assault. The police ruled suicide, and the narrative initially weighs that explanation against the physical scene and the accounts of his final days. The eventual reconstruction changes the meaning of the fall without making it deliberate murder: Michal’s attempt to stop Chaim’s attack sent him into a railing he could not recover from, while Zehava concealed what had happened.

The Fall and the First Account

The body was found on a spring evening on the cobblestones beside Jeremiah Street, only a few feet from Chaim’s bus stop. He lay motionless with blood coming from his head. The police called the death suicide. Its starkness gives the official explanation immediate force, but the physical arrangement of the balcony makes that conclusion difficult to settle. Chaim would have had to climb over a dark metal railing installed by him and Zehava Lerner twenty years earlier to protect their toddler, Yoav Lerner. Eight months before his death, a failed knee operation had left him with a serious physical limitation. The balcony was three stories above the ground, a height that could cause a fatal fall but did not guarantee one.

The railing becomes the investigation’s central object. Years later, Hannah examines it in the Lerner home: four rusting bars, set several inches apart. She reasons that Chaim’s injured knee made climbing over it impossible, then argues that his short stature and the height of the bars made an accidental fall impossible too. Her conclusion is murder. Judah Loeb does not immediately accept her certainty; looking at the railing, he sees a challenge, not an insurmountable barrier. The physical evidence therefore generates competing explanations before it supplies a resolution.

Suicide, Doubt, and the Final Week

The case against suicide initially rests on the absence of a note, the mechanics of the fall, and the testimony of people who saw Chaim in his final week. He had seemed cheerful and engaged. He whistled Yiddish folk songs, joked, and shared affectionate dinners with Zehava. He took pride in Michal beating him at chess, a game he had taught her, and spoke eagerly with Yoav about a film project. These encounters make the official verdict seem at odds with the man his family and acquaintances remember.

That contrast does not prove he was not suicidal. Judah recognizes that many people who intend to die appear relieved or unusually cheerful once they have made the decision. Chaim had also written that writing distorts the truth between an action, reflection on it, and its eventual description; the absence of a farewell note cannot, by itself, settle what he intended. The story further complicates the picture with accounts from Chaim’s closest relatives: behind the genial professor and optimistic theologian were dark, bitter periods, sometimes lasting months. Zehava recalled subtle signs of a familiar decline in the week he died, including a grin held too long, a tremor in his left hand, and eyes opened unusually wide. The evidence does not make the suicide theory impossible; it makes outward cheerfulness an unreliable measure of his state.

His writing also resists a simple portrait of a man driven toward death by despair. Chaim had described the distorted ethics of survival in Auschwitz, including the difference between stealing to live and stealing without giving back. His later book, Our Imperfect God, offered a life-affirming theology to readers who could no longer believe in God. These works complicate, but do not disprove, the suicide explanation. The narrative holds together the public writer’s wit and faith, his private depressive episodes, and the unresolved circumstances of his death rather than treating any one of them as conclusive.

The Historical Guilt Entangled with the Case

Chaim’s death is also interpreted through the history his family carries. Yoav’s account links his father’s suicide to the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, where Israeli soldiers heard gunfire, commands, and screams, and later saw that hundreds of civilians had been killed. Yoav distinguishes between the Phalangists who committed the killings and the Israeli forces who did not intervene. He objects to accounts that either falsely attributed the massacre directly to Israeli soldiers or blurred the moral distinction between carrying it out and standing by.

In a separate account of his service, Yoav describes firing twice from a halftrack after hearing his commander order return fire. He says he believed he was shooting at armed fighters; the targets were two ten-year-old boys. This disclosure is placed beside the family’s uncertainty about Chaim’s death, but it does not establish that the massacre or Yoav’s actions caused Chaim to die. Indeed, Yoav rejects the easy journalistic theory that his father killed himself because of Sabra and Shatila. The narrative’s scrutiny of moral responsibility—who acted, who failed to act, and who later rewrites the sequence—echoes the scrutiny of the balcony fall without making the two events equivalent.

Michal’s Account and Zehava’s Concealment

The concealed circumstances emerge in stages. At the balcony, Hannah’s conclusion that Chaim was murdered is initially presented as an inference from the railing. Much later, Michal tells Judah that Zehava had forbidden her to disclose what happened, especially to him. Michal’s own conviction that Chaim would never have killed himself rests on her memory of his commitment to survival: his physical pain and nightmares had become fuel for continuing to live. Yet this conviction is not the same as knowing the manner of his death. Judah eventually tells her that he knows Zehava was responsible for the concealment and that Michal was the person who pushed Chaim.

Michal recounts the encounter that preceded the fall. Zehava was in her office taking a phone call, while Michal waited on the living-room sofa and drank Golani wine. Chaim appeared, took the bottle, and drank about half of it; she also smelled alcohol on his breath, perhaps gin. He apologized for his behavior and asked her to join him on the balcony for a private conversation. She accepted, tired of their repeated conflict and believing he meant to apologize.

Once the balcony door closed, Chaim attacked her. He pulled her into an embrace, kissed her, and touched her breast. Michal shoved him away with her right arm. He grabbed her left hand to steady himself and twisted it out of its socket. In pain, she pushed him hard in the chest. Chaim stumbled backward into the railing. For an instant, he balanced on its top bar, looked at her, and reached out. Michal hesitated; then he toppled over, struck his head, and died. The fall was neither a planned suicide nor an accidental trip over an intact barrier: it followed a physical struggle in which Michal acted to stop an assault, and Chaim’s injured hip and knee helped leave him unable to regain his balance.

The Clue, the Cover Story, and the Meaning of the Verdict

Judah’s later explanation of how he identified Michal as the person involved turns on a small bodily detail, not on the official ruling. The night he left Israel, he had visited to say goodbye to Chaim and learned that the body had been found beneath the balcony. Michal rushed to embrace him, but used only one arm; he noticed that she winced. She explained that her left arm had been injured. Five minutes after the fall, Zehava had maneuvered it back into its socket using a skill she remembered from early motherhood. By the time police arrived, Michal’s arm appeared fine. This one-armed embrace, initially read by Judah as an ordinary gesture between friends, becomes evidence of the struggle.

Zehava’s role was protective and costly. Rather than tell the police that Michal had pushed Chaim while defending herself, she concealed Michal’s involvement and represented herself as responsible. She feared that the authorities would not believe Michal, given Chaim’s infirmity and Michal’s greater strength. Even an acquittal, she believed, would leave Michal known as the woman who killed the celebrated Holocaust survivor. Zehava’s decision also protected her own political ambitions, which she described as serving her country as well as herself. Her actions preserved the public suicide story while transferring the danger of exposure onto herself.

The death’s eventual explanation resolves the mystery of who caused the fall but preserves a distinction between killing and murder. Michal acknowledges that she killed Chaim, and the account identifies her act as self-defense against sexual assault. The police verdict, the family’s silence, and the first apparent confession had made the event look like suicide or intentional homicide; the final account instead reveals a fatal consequence of resistance, followed by Zehava’s deliberate cover-up. The balcony thus remains both a literal boundary between life and death and the site where competing stories about Chaim—survivor, writer, husband, abuser, and supposed suicide—are forced into contact.