Givat Ram is the Jerusalem district of the National Library, where Shmuel Ash searches the newspaper archive for evidence about Shaltiel Abravanel. In the quiet reading room, an overlooked report in Davar reveals that Abravanel tried to present an independent proposal for peace between Jews and Arabs to a United Nations commission, a discovery that connects the library’s records to the political and personal silences at the heart of the novel.

The Library and Shmuel’s Visit

On a Tuesday morning when the rain briefly relents, Shmuel travels by bus from Keren Kayemet Street to the National Library in Givat Ram. He leaves his fox-headed cane in his room, takes a seat in the newspaper reading room, and asks for nine monthly volumes of Davar covering June 1947 through February 1948. Alongside the bound newspapers he lays out several sheets of paper and a pen borrowed from Gershom Wald’s desk, then works methodically through the issues, page after page.

The research scene is painstaking rather than dramatic: after about half an hour, Shmuel finds a small notice near the bottom of an inside page. Its placement mirrors the obscurity of the history he is trying to recover. The library gives him not a full account but a fragment, and the fragment is enough to disclose what official accounts and public memory have left out.

The Report on Abravanel

The notice says that on June 18, 1947, Abravanel asked to appear before the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, which had been sent to investigate the future of Palestine. As a member of the Zionist Executive and the leadership of the Jewish Agency, he wanted to offer a minority position—indeed, an individual one—on the conflict between Jews and Arabs, and to propose an original route to peace.

The Jewish Agency’s leadership rejected his request. It argued that the Agency and the Zionist Executive had to speak before the committee with one voice, rather than several. The detail explains how Abravanel’s dissent was constrained not only by opposition to his ideas but by an institutional demand for a single public position. Shmuel’s discovery in the newspaper archive thus gives documentary form to a political exclusion whose consequences reach well beyond the library.

A Place of Recovery

Givat Ram’s significance lies in this act of reading: Shmuel reconstructs a hidden episode from old newspapers, turning an archival notice into evidence of Abravanel’s attempt to resist the course of division and war. The library is not presented as a setting for public debate but as a place where an individual can patiently recover a voice that was denied a hearing. Its quiet, ordered work contrasts with the escalating conflict recorded in the same period’s papers and with the force of the institutional silence that followed Abravanel’s request.