Gershom Wald–Mija father-son relationship

Gershom Wald–Mija father-son relationship is a bond between a father who understands the necessity of armed self-defense and a son who prepares to fight, but cannot bring himself to imagine that his own child may be lost. Mija’s death in the Jerusalem mountains on April 2 turns that conflict from political argument into a private, enduring grief: Gershom survives his only son, carries the loss into years of sleeplessness, and retreats with his family into a house marked by mourning.

Father and son in a time of war

Gershom regards David Ben-Gurion as one of the greatest Jewish leaders, precisely because he believes Ben-Gurion understood that the Arabs would not willingly accept Jewish presence or share territory and power. In Gershom’s account, Ben-Gurion had concluded from conversations with Arab leaders in the 1930s that Jewish security could not depend on others handing it over or coming to their defense. Mija, too, knew the danger. He went out at night to practice with a weapon in the forest at Tel Arza, an action that makes the political argument immediate within the family: the son was preparing for a conflict his father could explain but could not bear to picture as a threat to him.

Gershom recalls the painful gap between what he knew in general and what he could acknowledge about Mija. He knew that Mija was no longer a boy: he was thirty-seven and nearly a professor. Yet Gershom says he did not know, did not suppose, and did not want to imagine that his son would be caught up in the tragedy. The repeated qualifications register a father’s resistance to applying a shared political reality to the person closest to him. Mija’s adulthood and preparedness do not make the prospect of his death emotionally imaginable to Gershom.

Mija’s death and the wound it leaves

Mija, Gershom’s only son, was killed in the Jerusalem mountains on the night of April 2, during the war of independence. Gershom later gives the loss its starkest form by repeating that his only son was killed. The repeated naming of Mija does not soften the fact into abstraction; it returns the conversation to the specific person and to the singularity of the bereavement. The date and place become the fixed coordinates of a loss that cannot be assimilated into a general account of war.

The death also changes Gershom’s relationship with Shaltiel Abravanel. In the weeks after the tragedy, Gershom imagines Shaltiel asking, quietly, whether any of it had been worth the cost. Shaltiel never actually asks him. The imagined question nevertheless wounds Gershom as if a knife were repeatedly driven into his throat. It gives their political disagreement a private consequence: Gershom cannot answer the question he attributes to Shaltiel, and the two men stop speaking about what had once divided them. Their silence does not amount to resolution; it marks the point at which shared political convictions and shared loss become impossible to discuss.

Silence, siege, and the family’s retreat

After Mija’s death, Gershom says that he and the others kept silent and that everything faded. Their remaining exchanges with Shaltiel were reduced to household arrangements, such as repairing roof tiles or buying an electric refrigerator. Political disagreement, once expressed in arguments about the future of Jews and Arabs, contracts into practical domestic talk. That narrowing makes the family’s loss visible through what can no longer be said between the men.

During the Jordanian siege of Jerusalem, the house’s thick stone walls protected its occupants from bullets and shells. Atalia was the one who sometimes went outside, queuing for kerosene and ice and using ration coupons to obtain food. The family’s isolation therefore had both an emotional and a physical setting: the house offered protection amid the siege, while its walls also enclosed people living with the consequences of Mija’s death. Gershom’s later account joins wartime shelter to the longer seclusion that grief imposed on the household.

Grief as an enduring present

Gershom says that for more than ten years he has not slept at night. Each night, in his recollection, Mija is killed again among the rocks on the slope of the pine forest. The loss is past in chronology but recurrent in experience: the remembered death returns as a nightly scene, so that the father’s grief is not a completed episode but a repetition that governs his present. Mija’s absence remains active in Gershom’s account of the family and of the war.

That recurrence also changes the meaning of the father-son relationship. Mija’s preparation with a weapon had once belonged to the shared knowledge that the family and the Jewish community might have to defend themselves. After his death, the same knowledge can no longer remain an argument about necessity alone. It has become the cost embodied by Gershom’s only child, and the grief that he cannot settle by deciding whether the cause was worth it. Mija’s death thus stands at the intersection of public history and private loss: the war is remembered not only as a struggle for survival, but as the event through which Gershom lost his son and entered a life of silence and recurring mourning.