Hadar Hacamel

Hadar Hacarmel is the Haifa neighborhood where Shmuel Ash grew up after his family moved there from Kiryat Mutzkin when he was two. In his account of childhood, its small rented apartment and dark hallway become more than a domestic setting: they hold the memories of a family displaced by fire and of a boy who learned to spend long hours alone.

Setting and the family’s move

Shmuel first names Haifa and Hadar Hacarmel when asked where his parents live. Later, describing his childhood, he corrects and complicates the account: he was born in Kiryat Mutzkin, and his family moved to Hadar Hacarmel when he was two. The move was not simply a choice. The family’s barrack in Kiryat Mutzkin burned down, and they had to leave for a rented apartment in the neighborhood.

The fire remained bound to Shmuel’s earliest recollection, though he could not tell how much was memory and how much had been shaped by stories his parents and sister repeated over the years. The narrative’s uncertainty makes the neighborhood the first stable place in a childhood whose beginning is already partly reconstructed: Hadar Hacarmel is where the family settled after the fire, while the lost barrack persists as a blurred origin.

The apartment and everyday hardship

The family’s apartment in Hadar Hacarmel had two narrow rooms and a kitchen. Smoke from the stove and small heater blackened the kitchen ceiling. The compressed rooms register the practical limits of the household, which had little space to spare as the children grew.

When Shmuel’s sister Miri turned twelve, the family moved his bed out of the room they had shared and into the hallway. There, he would lie on his back for hours, gazing at cobwebs above a wardrobe. The hallway was dark, and its lack of privacy made it impossible to invite friends; Shmuel added that he had hardly any friends anyway. The apartment’s narrowness thus shaped both his daily life and his isolation: a passage meant for moving through became the place where he spent long stretches alone.

Work, memory, and narrative significance

After the move, Shmuel’s father began working at the Government Mapping Office. A few years later he opened a private cartography and aerial-photography business with Laszlo Vermesh, a Hungarian colleague. The family’s life in Hadar Hacarmel therefore sits alongside the father’s professional work, but the account remains anchored in the modest apartment and the constraints of its rooms.

Shmuel recounts these memories to Atalia in a hesitant, digressive rush. He begins with the fire, veers into stories about his father and grandfather, and recognizes that one story keeps drawing others into it until the original subject blurs. Hadar Hacarmel is consequently presented not through detached description but through the structure of recollection: a childhood home that gathers family history, material hardship, and the loneliness of the boy in the hallway.