Haifa is the family city Shmuel Ash leaves behind as he retreats into solitude in Jerusalem. In memories of a crowded childhood home and in his sister’s appeal that he return, Haifa stands for a practical alternative to his isolation: a place near his parents where he might work and renew old ties.

Family Home and Childhood

After the family’s barrack in Kiryat Mutzkin burned, they moved to a small apartment in a lane in Hadar HaCarmel. Its two rooms were tightly divided: the larger served as living room, dining room, and the parents’ bedroom, while the smaller belonged to Miri, five years older than Shmuel. His own bed stood in the passage between the kitchen and the lavatory. A brown-painted box at its head had to serve at once as wardrobe, desk, and bedside table.

The apartment’s crowded arrangement gives Haifa a particular place in Shmuel’s early life: it is not recalled as an expansive refuge but as a home organized around scarcity and shared space. At eleven, he was thin and stooped, with large, astonished eyes and perpetually bruised knees. The childhood setting is bound to the quiet, inward boy whose adult appearance—a wild mane and beard grown after military service—would later seem to him a way of hiding a face he felt ashamed of.

A City Remembered by His Sister

Miri’s recollection of a day trip from Haifa to Tel Aviv fixes Shmuel at eleven and herself at sixteen. Their parents gave them money and encouraged them to travel; their father praised Tel Aviv as more lively than Haifa and offered to arrange an overnight stay with their aunt Edith. The journey began from Hadar HaCarmel, with Shmuel following his sister to the station in khaki shorts and sandals, wearing a sun hat their mother had insisted he take and carrying his familiar pocketknife.

On the train, Miri tried to make him choose among the day’s possibilities: the zoo, the beach, a boat on the Yarkon, or the port. He answered each suggestion with assent, then said that the order made no difference. His attention turned instead to a lecture on Switzerland’s reserve-mobilization system, which Israel was copying. The episode makes Haifa the point of departure for a memory of Shmuel’s habitual reserve: even a day arranged as an invitation to pleasure cannot draw him out of his own thoughts.

The City as a Possible Return

Years later, Miri writes that she had hoped Shmuel would marry Yardena. During a visit to him in Jerusalem two years earlier, she had met Yardena in the room he rented in Tel Arza. She remembers Yardena as exuberant and almost childlike, playing the harmonica without knowing how, and drawing Shmuel out to cinemas, cafés, and visits with friends when he would otherwise study or go to bed early. Miri thought the two might suit one another and that Yardena could awaken a more liberated, pleasure-loving side of her brother.

When the relationship ends and Yardena returns to an old boyfriend and marries him, Miri sees Shmuel as having returned to his accustomed solitude. He has also abandoned his academic career just as he was close to completing a master’s degree with distinction. Her letter asks why he could not instead return to Haifa, find suitable work, stay near their parents, and make new connections or resume old ones, as Yardena has done. The city thus becomes more than a remembered birthplace: it is the concrete alternative Miri offers to a life narrowed by withdrawal.

Narrative Significance

Haifa is presented through domestic recollection and family address rather than through a broad description of the city. The small apartment, the passageway bed, and the brown box make the family’s limited space tangible; the later appeal to come home gives that childhood setting a new emotional force. Haifa remains a place Shmuel could return to, but the evidence leaves that possibility as his sister’s plea, not a decision he makes.