Atalia Abravanel and Mija Wald’s relationship

Atalia Abravanel and Mija Wald’s relationship is defined by a short marriage and Mija’s death in the 1948 war. Its aftermath does not end with the couple: Atalia remains in the household with Mija’s father, Gershom Wald, and her own father, Shaltiel Abravanel, while the loss exposes the intimate cost of the political and military convictions that shaped Mija’s decision to fight.

Marriage and family

Atalia tells Shmuel Ash that she and Mija were married for a year and a half. Mija was the only son of Gershom Wald; after his death, Wald became Atalia’s former father-in-law, and she his former daughter-in-law. The compact account of their marriage places Atalia’s bereavement within a family that has lost its only child and must continue living together in its absence.

The house itself retains the couple’s history. Gershom had moved into the home of Shaltiel Abravanel and Atalia several weeks after their wedding in 1946, when Mija and Atalia were living in the attic. The library where Shmuel later searches through old newspapers had been Shaltiel’s; the household’s rooms thus hold overlapping lives rather than a single, settled family arrangement.

War and Mija’s death

Mija died on April 2, 1948, on the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, near Sha'ar HaGai, during the fighting at Bab al-Wad. He was thirty-seven. As Atalia recounts it, he went with a convoy through a deep, winding ravine where Arab fighters fired from the surrounding hills. When the convoy encountered a stone barrier, some fighters left their armored trucks to clear it, while Mija and others climbed the slopes to attack the snipers with homemade grenades. The attack was repelled, and the convoy withdrew with some of its dead and wounded, not realizing until it neared Jerusalem that Mija was missing.

A search party found him the following morning. Atalia cannot establish exactly what happened during the night: he may have been left dying on the hillside, called for help, or tried to crawl toward the road; the attackers may instead have found him after his companions retreated. She says he was killed and his body mutilated, but the sequence of the violence remained unknown. The uncertainty does not lessen the loss; it becomes part of Atalia’s recurring nightly memory, a question she says was left to her imagination.

Family convictions and bereavement

Gershom’s account connects Mija’s enlistment to the opposed convictions of the two older men around him. Mija had lost a kidney to illness at age nine, and Atalia urged him not to go to war, mocking his impulse to run off to play soldiers. Shaltiel, too, made him promise not to fight. He opposed the war and urged young people on both sides to lay down their arms. Gershom, by contrast, had taught Mija to revere the defenders of Tel Hai, the night squads, the Jewish police, and the Maccabees; he says he helped make the voice calling Mija to battle.

Gershom therefore describes himself as having led his son to sacrifice. His grief unsettles the familiar public claim that the fallen did not die in vain. He recalls Shaltiel’s insistence that every death, in war or otherwise, is in vain, and admits that he can no longer repeat the consoling national phrase without difficulty. Mija’s death brings the political disagreement into the family not as an abstract debate but as an irreversible consequence.

A household after Mija

After Mija’s death, Atalia, Gershom, and Shaltiel lived together for about two years. Atalia describes the three of them as isolated, like people in a submarine. Gershom continued to dispute Shaltiel’s positions, but the two men never argued again: Mija’s death had silenced their contest. Atalia cared for them while also working several hours a day at a real-estate office on Straus Street.

Shaltiel died alone in the kitchen two years after Mija. His Arab friends had been separated from him by the new borders or driven from their homes, and he had been denounced as a traitor by former Jewish friends. Atalia found him after he collapsed over his coffee and newspaper. Mija’s absence thus precedes a second death in the same household, leaving Atalia and Gershom bound by bereavement and care. Years later, Atalia tells Shmuel that Wald is her former father-in-law and that she and the young man are going to the cinema; the ordinary outing sits against the history of a marriage and a loss that still shape the house around them.