Hadar HaCarmel is the Haifa neighborhood where Shmuel Ash’s family moves after their barracks in Kiryat Mutzkin is destroyed by fire. The family’s cramped apartment, and the childhood Shmuel spends in it, make the neighborhood a point of origin defined by limited space and modest circumstances; a later recollection of his rented room in Jerusalem’s Tel Arza neighborhood extends that geography into his adult life.

The family apartment

The family’s move to a small apartment on a narrow street in Hadar HaCarmel follows the fire at their barracks in Kiryat Mutzkin. The new home has two rooms: the larger serves as living room, dining room, and the parents’ bedroom, while Shmuel’s sister Miri, five years older than he is, occupies the smaller one. Shmuel sleeps in the passage between the entrance to the tiny kitchen and the bathroom.

His bed’s head is beside a brown-painted box that performs several jobs at once: wardrobe, homework desk, and bedside table. The arrangement makes the apartment’s shortage of space tangible. Shmuel has no room of his own; ordinary childhood activities are fitted into a single piece of furniture and a passageway.

Shmuel’s childhood

At eleven, Shmuel is thin and slightly stooped, with large, astonished eyes, spindly legs, and perpetually bruised knees. The recollection later contrasts this child’s slightness with the unruly hair and heavy beard he grows after completing military service. He dislikes both the beard and the childish-looking face beneath it, and sees the beard as concealing something about himself of which a man ought to be ashamed.

His childhood circle consists of three or four friends, described as among the most timid boys in the class; one is a recent arrival from Romania and another stutters slightly. Shmuel enjoys showing them his extensive stamp collection and explaining the stamps’ value, especially that of rare examples, as well as the countries they come from. He is talkative and eager to display what he knows, but finds it difficult to listen for more than a few sentences when his friends speak.

The stamps that especially attract him come from countries that no longer exist, including Ubangi-Shari, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Bohemia and Moravia. He lectures his friends about the wars and revolutions that erased such countries from the map, including invasions by the Nazis and then Stalin, and territories absorbed into new states. The collection gives his childhood conversation an unusually historical cast: vanished countries become objects he can hold, classify, and explain.

A later room in Jerusalem

Hadar HaCarmel is also part of the background to a later account by Yardena. Two years before writing, she visits Shmuel in the rented room he has in Tel Arza, Jerusalem. Her memory shifts the focus from the family apartment to the adult Shmuel’s private living space, while preserving the contrast between his inward, solitary habits and the lively company Yardena brings.

When Shmuel studies, Yardena sits opposite him and tries to play the harmonica despite not knowing how. He is tired by nine in the evening and wants to go to bed; she pushes him out to cinemas, cafés, and visits with mutual friends. Yardena had thought that, over time, she might draw out a freer, more life-loving, even hedonistic side of him. Her account makes the childhood home in Hadar HaCarmel part of a broader portrait of a man who remains difficult to draw out of his shell even in adulthood.