Atalia Abravanel

Atalia Abravanel is the daughter of Shaltiel Abravanel, whose opposition to the political course leading to Israeli independence made him a public outcast, and the widow of Mija Wald, Gershom Wald’s only son. Living with her former father-in-law, she becomes both the keeper of her father’s concealed history and a forceful critic of the national triumph that cost her family Mija. Her composure is not detachment: beneath it lie bereavement, anger, and a long, difficult inheritance of political dissent.

Identity and Introduction

Atalia first comes into view in the house she shares with Gershom Wald. A note on the door, written in the same precise feminine hand as the advertisement for a companion, sets her name beside Wald’s with a conspicuous space between them. The pairing signals a shared household, but not an uncomplicated family relation. She is Wald’s former daughter-in-law, connected to him through the son they have both lost.

When she appears in the library through a concealed entrance behind a curtain of beads, her arrival changes the room at once: she switches on the lights, and the shadows withdraw behind the books. She is about forty-five, tall, and dressed in a plain light-colored ankle-length dress and a red sweater, with long dark hair and large wooden earrings. Her deliberate bearing conveys an awareness of her femininity; she regards Shmuel Ash without smiling, with curiosity and a hint of challenge, while leaving open the possibility that she might smile. The scent of violets mingled with the clean, starchy smell of freshly pressed clothes accompanies her. The scene introduces a woman who controls her welcome rather than offering it automatically.

Shmuel’s first questions about the Abravanel name reach toward its public history. He recalls that Shaltiel Abravanel had belonged to the leadership of the Jewish Agency and the Zionist Executive, and asks whether he was the dissenter opposed to the state’s founding or to David Ben-Gurion’s line. Atalia does not answer immediately. Instead, she leads Shmuel upstairs to his assigned attic room and stands across the stairway, physically blocking his retreat. A brief, pained smile crosses her face and vanishes. Her silence makes the family history palpable before she chooses to tell it.

Marriage, Bereavement, and the Household

Atalia tells Shmuel that she was married to Mija for a year and a half. Mija was Gershom Wald’s only son; he died in the war, leaving her a widow and Wald her former father-in-law. She states the facts with measured delicacy, then turns abruptly to the immediate plan: she and Shmuel are going to see a French thriller starring Jean Gabin at the Orion cinema. The pivot does not erase the loss; it places an ordinary evening beside it, as if grief need not prevent the next appointment.

Mija’s absence governs the relationships inside the house. Atalia notices when Shmuel and Wald have been talking about him, and says so without making it a question. She has heard Wald talk at great length for days, weeks, and months, arguing and lecturing while, in her judgment, saying little. If Shmuel has somehow helped Wald finally say something about his son, she does not ask him to apologize. The conversation suggests both her familiarity with Wald’s habits and her guarded willingness to let another person approach the family’s pain.

The past also remains materially present in the rooms. Atalia keeps Shaltiel’s room locked; Wald says that the three men who previously lodged in the attic never managed to see it, though each desired Atalia in his own way and waited for a miracle. After Shaltiel’s death she searched his room for notes, articles, and manuscripts, but found nothing except his will. Years later, she opened the room for Shmuel when his injury meant he could not climb to the attic. The room is not merely a private space: its locked door holds the boundary between the household’s present and a history Atalia has inherited and selectively disclosed.

Political Dissent and Its Record

Shmuel’s questions about Shaltiel lead him to search the old issues of Davar at the National Library. In a June 1947 issue, he finds a short report that Shaltiel had asked to present an individual position on the Jewish-Arab conflict to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. The Jewish Agency leadership rejected his request, insisting that its representatives and the Zionist Executive speak with one voice. Shaltiel considered appearing independently but ultimately submitted to the majority’s discipline, perhaps under the threat that he would be excluded from the principal institutions of Jewish society.

A second report, dated December 21, 1947, says Shaltiel had been removed from his positions the previous day because of disagreements with colleagues. He declined to explain his dismissal to the reporter. The paper nevertheless conveyed his view that the course chosen by Ben-Gurion and others risked a bloody war between the two peoples, with the lives of six hundred thousand Jews in the Land of Israel at stake, while a historical compromise remained possible. It also identified him as a prominent lawyer and Arabist who had served near the top of the two institutions for almost nine years. These brief public notices establish the documentary outline of his dissent, but they do not preserve the full argument or its personal cost.

Atalia’s account supplies what the newspaper record cannot. Shaltiel had believed in a Jewish home in the Land of Israel, but came to believe it must be shared by Jews and Arabs. He gradually broke with colleagues who treated calls for dialogue and opposition to violence with indifference. In 1947 he spoke against the UN partition plan and Israeli independence; some called him a traitor or thought he had lost his reason. Atalia recalls that he was given two hours to choose between resignation and expulsion. Afterward he maintained complete silence toward the public, convinced that no one would listen, especially as war approached and each side understood defeat as an existential threat.

The records themselves remain incomplete. Shmuel learns that the Zionist Executive’s public proceedings can be found in the Zionist archive, but the secret protocols of the Jewish Agency leadership are classified for another forty years. He is told to return then. Atalia, meanwhile, had been sent to seek Shaltiel’s resignation letter or a copy, only to be told at the archive that no such letter had ever existed. Her father’s case thus survives through scattered press reports, recollection, and a missing document: institutional secrecy and denial shape not only what can be known, but who gets to define the dissenter.

Anger, Loss, and the Meaning of Betrayal

Atalia’s grief becomes explicit when she speaks of Mija’s death and the price of the state. She recalls that Mija had been a mathematician who published on mathematical logic and seemed destined to become the youngest professor in the history of the Hebrew University. Instead, she says, he ran enthusiastically with the crowd into the slaughter. She accuses the state-seeking generation of spilling innocent blood, sacrificing an entire generation, expelling hundreds of thousands of Arabs, and sending ships of survivors of Hitler straight from the docks to the battlefields. Her indictment is personal as well as political: the ideals of flags, uniforms, currency, and national independence are measured against a son who did not come home.

She describes Shaltiel’s later life as a long isolation. After Mija died, he, Wald, and Atalia lived together for about two years, alone as if sealed in a submarine. Shaltiel’s Arab friends were across the new borders or had been driven from their homes in Katamon, Abu Tor, and Baka; he had no Jewish friends left, because he was branded a traitor. Wald used to contradict him, but after Mija’s death the arguments stopped. The loss knotted their throats and silenced the household. Atalia cared for both men while working several hours a day at a real-estate office on Straus Street.

Her account brings that political and familial loneliness to its starkest image. Shaltiel’s ordinary evening ritual was to sit alone in the kitchen, drink coffee, and read the newspaper. One evening, after the seven o’clock news, his head fell onto the cup and overturned it. The glass lens of his spectacles broke; coffee spread across the table, his chest, his legs, and the floor. Atalia found him with his forehead and hair in the spill, as if he had simply fallen asleep at the kitchen table. He had died alone, in the room where the household’s routines continued around the silences left by war and expulsion.

Atalia does not idealize her father even as she recognizes his honesty, courage, and originality. She says she never truly loved him except perhaps when she was a small child: he did not know how to be a father or husband, and she never called him Dad, only Abravanel. Her memories include his leaving her behind in the Mahane Yehuda market when she was four because he became absorbed in an argument with a priest, and his once hiding her mother’s three pairs of shoes to keep her from leaving home. This intimate record complicates the political portrait. Shaltiel’s opposition may have been brave, but it did not make him an attentive parent or an easy person to love.

Inheritance, Silence, and Narrative Role

After Shaltiel’s death, Atalia searched through his cupboards and drawers for papers and found none beyond his will, which left her the house, land in Talpiot, and his savings, and asked her to let Wald remain there for the rest of his life. She believes Shaltiel tore his writings into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet over many days. His valuable correspondence with prominent Arabs in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus disappeared with the manuscripts. The will endured where the political archive did not: it gave Atalia a practical responsibility toward Wald even as her father’s arguments were erased.

Wald recalls that Shaltiel’s withdrawal was not simply self-punishment but a refusal directed at the world. He stopped going beyond the courtyard, would not answer letters or approach the telephone, and spoke little about the state, the war, or the displacement of Arabs. Once, he predicted that the new order would last at most a few years or two or three generations. In the courtyard he moved a chair across the paving stones to follow the shade of the fig tree; after lunch he rested, then read and wrote until evening. Yet, according to Atalia and Wald, the papers he produced were repeatedly destroyed. The household became a place where men wrote and annihilated their writing, while Atalia alone said she wrote nothing beyond instructions for Bella.

Atalia’s disclosures make her more than a witness to Shaltiel’s politics. She mediates between the terse evidence in public newspapers and the private memory of a divided family, offering neither a simple vindication of her father nor an easy reconciliation with the national story. Her account binds the labels of traitor and patriot to their human consequences: a lost career, broken friendships, a dead son, and a household whose survivors stopped arguing. Against the language of political victory, she preserves the details that official records leave out—and the bitterness of knowing that preserving them cannot restore what was lost.