Alderna leaves Shumuel and marries her former lover again

Yardena abandons Shmuel and marries her former boyfriend in a rupture that deepens Shmuel Ash’s isolation and helps precipitate his withdrawal from university life. The separation is never fully explained: the novel gives its aftermath in Shmuel’s loneliness, his sister’s unanswered questions, and his own blunt account of what happened, leaving the relationship’s precise cause unresolved.

The separation and its immediate aftermath

Shmuel later recalls that he once wandered alone through the streets at night after Yardena left him and went away. Atalia already knows the name of the man she married, Nesher Shereshevski, and identifies him as an expert in collecting rainwater. Her response is not mockery: she speaks of him with sadness and something close to affection, and Shmuel presses her arm slightly in thanks. That exchange gives the loss a quiet, intimate presence. Rather than recounting a confrontation or a final parting scene, the narrative shows the wound continuing into Shmuel’s later nights and shaping how he receives another person’s kindness.

The separation is also registered in Shmuel’s private thoughts. After Atalia invites him to join her on a pre-dawn walk, he turns over what her attention might mean and fears that questions about her father or husband could anger her and drive her away. His thoughts circle around the possibility of being left at a distance, then abruptly give way to a rush of joy. For the first time in months, he feels that the sharp pain of Yardena’s abandonment and marriage has eased. The sudden relief does not undo the breakup; it shows how much of his emotional life has been organized around it, and how an unexpected moment of closeness can temporarily loosen its hold.

The account from his sister

In a letter from Rome, Shmuel’s sister connects the breakup to the broader collapse of his circumstances. Their father has lost a lawsuit and the family business, Gaviota, has gone bankrupt. Shmuel has stopped writing regularly; in the last two months, he has sent only two very brief letters, mentioning that he has left university, found work and accommodation in an old Jerusalem house, and that Yardena has married. His sister observes that he never uses the word loneliness, yet senses it in every word he writes.

Her memory of meeting Yardena in Shmuel’s rented room in Tel Arza gives their pairing a vivid contrast. Shmuel was inclined to study and wanted to sleep by nine; Yardena was cheerful, noisy, and almost childlike, playing the harmonica without knowing how and drawing him out to cinemas, cafés, and visits with friends. His sister had thought they fitted together despite their differences. She hoped Yardena might gradually bring out a freer, more life-loving side of her brother. That hope makes the marriage to the former boyfriend more than a change of partner in the sister’s account: it marks the failure of the future she imagined for Shmuel.

Questions without an answer

The letter asks why the couple separated, but does not settle the matter. Shmuel’s sister wonders whether they fought, whether he was unfaithful, whether Yardena wanted them to live together or marry, or whether Shmuel himself chose to end the relationship and return to his habitual solitude. She also asks whether Yardena left her studies. These remain questions, not revelations. The narrative preserves the gap between the sister’s wish to understand and Shmuel’s reticence, rather than supplying a definitive cause for the breakup.

The sister’s concern turns from Yardena to the life Shmuel has chosen after losing her. If he has abandoned his academic career just as he was nearing the end of a master’s degree with excellent marks, she asks, why not return to Haifa, find suitable work, and reconnect with family or old acquaintances, as Yardena has done? Her proposed alternatives underline the narrowing effect of the separation: to her, Shmuel has gone back to an island of his own making, while he has instead taken a low-paid position in a Jerusalem household and become preoccupied with solitary study and thought.

Shmuel’s explanation and the breakup’s significance

When asked whether he came to the house because he wanted solitude, Shmuel gives a compact account of several pressures converging. He says he came because his girlfriend left him and married her previous boyfriend, because his father lost the lawsuit and was ruined, and because he could no longer afford to support his studies. He adds that he had already been stalled for months on the work he had begun writing. The breakup is therefore one cause among several, but it belongs to the same chain of losses that has disrupted his education and displaced him from his former life.

Even while describing these circumstances, Shmuel turns to the unfinished subject absorbing him: how the world and the Jews might have been different had they not rejected Jesus. He is thinking about the man who handed Jesus over to the Romans for thirty pieces of silver, and argues that the sum was small, merely the price of an ordinary slave. His movement from the intimate fact of Yardena’s departure to a historical and religious question is characteristic of the distance his sister has noticed: when asked about himself, he often shifts into a lecture. The separation thus matters not only as heartbreak but as part of the retreat into work and abstraction that follows it, even as the subject of his writing offers him a way to reconsider betrayal, loyalty, and what people believe a decisive choice is worth.