Atalia Abravanel and Gershom Wald’s relationship

Atalia Abravanel and Gershom Wald’s relationship is at once familial, domestic, and guarded: she is the widow of Wald’s only son, Mija, and remains in the older man’s household as his former daughter-in-law and caretaker. Mija’s death leaves the two of them alone together, but their intimacy is governed by routines, boundaries, and a political disagreement inherited from the past.

Family Bond and Loss

Atalia explains her connection to Wald through the marriage that ended in bereavement. She was married to Mija for a year and a half; Mija was Gershom Wald’s only son, and he died in the war. In her restrained account, the loss belongs to both survivors: after Mija’s death, she and Wald were left alone. The relationship is therefore not merely a link by marriage that has expired. It is a continuing bond shaped by their shared grief and by the absence of the person who had made them daughter-in-law and father-in-law.

Atalia names the change in their status plainly. Wald is her former father-in-law, and she was once his daughter-in-law. The precise language marks a real alteration in family position without suggesting that the tie has disappeared. When she tells Shmuel about her marriage and Mija’s death, she immediately returns to the present and says that she and Shmuel are going to a French suspense film starring Jean Gabin at the Orion cinema. The shift does not erase the loss; it shows how firmly the past remains part of Atalia’s life even as ordinary plans continue around it.

A Household Organized Around Wald

The domestic arrangement makes Atalia’s continuing connection to Wald visible in practical detail. When Shmuel moves into the house, she lays out his duties and the household’s routine. Wald is nocturnal, usually sleeping until noon after staying awake through the night. Shmuel is to spend the evenings, from five until ten or eleven, talking with him in the library; at four-thirty he must fill the kerosene heater and light it, feed the aquarium fish, and bring Wald his meal at seven. He should remind Wald to take his medicine at ten and leave a thermos of hot tea on the desk before departing around eleven.

Atalia describes Wald as someone who talks because he cannot bear even a minute of silence and who comes alive when contradicted. She compares him to an old dog that welcomes a stranger as an excuse to bark, and sometimes to nip, though only in play. The image gives Shmuel a way to understand the argumentative evenings that form part of Wald’s daily life. It also shows Atalia’s familiarity with Wald’s habits: she knows how conversation, opposition, food, medicine, and company fit into the hours of his day.

Her instructions reach beyond the paid work and disclose the strain of living with Wald’s nights. He may dictate or argue with himself, talk for hours by telephone with old enemies, or cry. Sometimes he calls out to people who are no longer there and pleads with them; Atalia warns Shmuel not to go to him, but simply to turn over and keep sleeping. She insists that these nocturnal cries fall outside the job’s defined hours. Her rules protect the boundaries of the household and of her own role, even as they reveal that Wald’s distress is a familiar presence within it.

Care, Authority, and Distance

Atalia acts as the person who translates Wald’s needs into instructions for the new lodger. She explains what to do if he refuses his meal, where the food and household supplies are kept, and how the work of cooking and laundry is organized. A neighbor, Sara de Toledo, brings Wald a vegetarian lunch and leaves an evening porridge on the electric hotplate as part of a paid arrangement; the porridge may also be enough for Shmuel. The care surrounding Wald is divided among household routines and paid help, while Atalia oversees the arrangement and defines what Shmuel is responsible for.

That authority is paired with explicit limits on access to her. Atalia tells Shmuel not to come looking for her, ever; if a problem arises, he is to leave a note on the kitchen table, and she will meet his needs in time. The house, she says, seems to make its residents lonely, but she has nothing to offer anyone who comes to her out of loneliness. She also requires secrecy: Shmuel must not disclose details about the household or his work, and must not bring guests. These rules establish a carefully managed domestic distance. Atalia will keep Wald’s household functioning, but she refuses to turn that practical responsibility into unrestricted emotional availability.

The distinction is especially telling because Atalia is the one who makes the house’s arrangements legible to Shmuel. She directs the work, supplies the keys, explains Wald’s habits, and determines where a new resident may and may not cross. Her care is neither sentimental nor absent: it is expressed through close knowledge and sustained attention, but also through limits that keep private life from becoming a new lodger’s refuge.

Political Inheritance and Divergent Judgments

The relationship also sits within a political history that connects Atalia’s family to Wald’s past. In conversation with Shmuel about Arab hostility, Wald acknowledges that Shaltiel Abravanel, Atalia’s father, tried in 1948 to persuade David Ben-Gurion that Jews and Arabs could reach an agreement as the British departed. Abravanel proposed a joint Jewish-Arab condominium on the condition that the idea of a Jewish state be relinquished. For this position he was expelled from the Zionist Executive Committee and the leadership of the Jewish Agency, which Wald describes as the unofficial Jewish government at the end of the British Mandate.

Wald does not present himself as having shared his former relative’s position. He admits that he sided with Ben-Gurion’s uncompromising realism rather than with what he calls Abravanel’s unfounded ideas. His account sets his own judgment against the political convictions of Atalia’s father, making their family connection part of a larger disagreement over statehood, coexistence, and the price of political realism. The conflict is not resolved in the household; it survives as an inheritance that Wald can recount and assess, while Atalia’s history makes the rejected proposal personally consequential.

The Shape of an Ongoing Tie

The novel presents Atalia and Wald’s relationship through two complementary forms of disclosure. Atalia’s direct explanation to Shmuel identifies the family bond and its wound: a brief marriage, a son lost in war, and two bereaved survivors. Her domestic briefing, meanwhile, gives that bond its everyday shape through Wald’s medication, meals, sleepless nights, arguments, and cries. The political recollection adds another layer, locating Atalia’s father within a debate in which Wald chose the opposing side.

Together, these details make the relationship neither simple reconciliation nor mere cohabitation. Atalia remains connected to Wald through Mija’s memory and through the work of sustaining his household, but she maintains strict boundaries around her private self. Wald, for his part, is both the bereaved father left with her and a witness who remembers why her father was cast out of political leadership. Their shared life is thus marked by care and loss, proximity and reserve, and a family history whose deepest disagreement remains present without being settled.