Atalía's mother left home to go to Alexandria

Atalia Abravanel’s mother’s departure for Alexandria is the rupture that recasts the family home: the Greek merchant she follows leaves Atalia alone with Shaltiel Abravanel, whose grief hardens into withdrawal and a one-sided relationship with his daughter. Recalled by Atalia as she speaks to Shmuel Ash, the episode binds an intimate abandonment to the dark, closed room in which her father thereafter confines himself and delivers speeches.

The departure for Alexandria

When Atalia was ten, her mother left while Shaltiel was in Beirut and Atalia was away on a school excursion. She packed early and went to Alexandria to seek a Greek merchant who frequently visited the house. The man was middle-aged and, in Atalia’s childhood understanding, seemed interested chiefly in Shaltiel: he spent hours conversing with him, sometimes in Greek, and the two would sit up late smoking and reading poetry. Atalia’s mother and daughter appeared peripheral to those long exchanges.

The merchant was nevertheless attentive in small, memorable ways. He kissed Atalia’s mother’s hand, sometimes brought her perfume, and gave Atalia baquelite dolls dressed in muslin, with buttons that made them cry or laugh. When he went to the kitchen for coffee, he would talk with Atalia’s mother in French, sometimes making her laugh. Atalia noticed her mother’s hand resting on his shoulder and remembered the bottle of wine he brought in winter. These details gradually revise the child’s assumption that the visitor’s interest lay only with her father.

Her mother left no spoken explanation to Atalia in the scene itself, but did leave a letter in the kitchen. It said that she had no choice and that people were always at the mercy of forces acting on them as they wished. Atalia later says she cannot, and does not want to, remember the other feelings in the letter. The departure thus remains both an event she can recount concretely and an emotional account she refuses to recover.

The room after the household breaks

After his wife left, Shaltiel turned the upstairs room into what Atalia calls his personal penal colony. He summoned his daughter to sit opposite him at the desk, never beside him, and addressed her in speeches. He did not ask about her schoolwork, friends, whereabouts, health, sleep, or whether she missed her mother. His failure to inquire was not simply a lack of practical provision: if Atalia asked for money, he gave it immediately, and if she became ill, he called a doctor or asked Sara de Toledo to help in the house. What he withheld was ordinary attention and shared life.

He did not take Atalia to his appointments or invite her to the cinema or a café, tell her stories, or go shopping with her. He failed to notice when she bought new clothes on her own. When a friend visited, he shut himself in his room. The pattern left Atalia to move through childhood largely outside her father’s awareness, even while he retained the power to summon her for formal talks.

Atalia once left home herself without a note and spent five or six nights at a friend’s house. On her return, Shaltiel asked calmly where she had been the previous day, apparently without noticing the longer absence. The episode echoes her mother’s leaving but inverts its scale: Atalia’s disappearance briefly repeats the act of departure, while her father’s response exposes how little he had been attending to her.

A birthday gift and a political lecture

When Atalia reminded Shaltiel that she would turn fifteen the following Monday, he turned to the shelves with his back to her and searched among the books. He gave her a translated selection of Jewish poetry produced in Arab countries, inscribed for his dear Atalia with the hope that it would finally clarify where they lived. Then he seated her opposite him on the sofa, with the desk separating them, and lectured at length about the golden age that had once existed between Muslims and Jews.

The gift offers a form of recognition, but one delivered through Shaltiel’s characteristic distance: instead of asking what his daughter wants or marking her birthday through shared celebration, he gives her a book and turns the occasion into instruction. Atalia says only thank you, takes the book to her room, and closes the door. The lecture’s subject—the past coexistence of Muslims and Jews—also makes the family scene a vehicle for Shaltiel’s convictions, while the desk and the closed door preserve the emotional separation between father and daughter.

Atalia’s later recollection

Atalia tells this history while Shmuel is staying in the house and recovering from an injured foot. She offers to let him remain for a few more days, until he is well enough to leave, and says he can leave a note on the kitchen table so she can help him pack the things upstairs and downstairs. The practical offer leads into her description of Shaltiel’s room as a place that feels right only when empty, dark, and shut, with his photograph seeming to speak to the walls. Since childhood, she has thought of it as a hermit’s cell or a prison.

Her story also turns back toward Shmuel. Atalia observes that he, too, seems not to want his parents and is, like her, a kind of private investigator; she adds that he hardly ever asks her anything. The comparison gives her account a present-tense edge: recounting her mother’s departure and Shaltiel’s silence, she recognizes a version of that silence in the young man listening to her. The memory does not resolve the old abandonment, but it makes the family room’s history newly legible as part of the distance between the people living in it now.