Lehi

Lehi enters the story not through a description of its operations but through the unsettled lives of people who belonged to it. Hiram Nehoshtan is a former member who has struggled to find his place since the establishment of the State; the organization’s legacy thus appears as both a political history and a continuing personal predicament, carried into a dispute over an old loan.

Former members and the post-statehood aftermath

Atalia describes Hiram as an obscure poet who had belonged to Lehi. Since the State was established about ten years earlier, he has been unable to find his place, like many others who came out of the organization. He works variously as a tour guide, translator, and author of self-published booklets. His unsettled livelihood makes the afterlife of underground politics tangible: the former fighter has become a man whose daily circumstances include precarious work and a contested obligation to a comrade from the resistance.

That obligation is a loan from Iliya Schvartzbaum, a construction contractor who had been Hiram’s fellow resistance member. Hiram denies that the loan ever existed and refuses to repay it. Because the money was lent without collateral or a signed contract, on the basis of a friendly handshake between comrades-in-arms, proving the agreement is difficult. Atalia’s agency has spent weeks trying different approaches to persuade Hiram to pay. The intimate trust implied by their shared past has left no documentary trace, so the old fellowship now complicates the attempt to establish what happened.

The café appointment and competing memories

Atalia tells Shmuel that there is a witness: Ester Levi, a young accountant who was present at the Atara Café when Schvartzbaum handed Hiram the money. Hiram seems to have forgotten her, but Atalia says she remembers with exactness who said what, even after ten years or more. She hopes Ester will attend the meeting, turning the effort to collect the debt into a test of memory as well as evidence. Atalia also recounts that, during the Lehi resistance, Ester was said to have hidden hand grenades in her brassiere; the detail belongs to the history told about her, while her present role is that of a witness whose recollection may settle the dispute.

Shmuel questions whether the loan may have been invented, since no contract exists. Atalia answers that it did happen and that Ester was there. The disagreement makes the organization’s legacy less a settled heroic narrative than a conflict among surviving accounts: a handshake, a remembered transfer of cash, Hiram’s denial, and a witness’s unusually durable memory. At the café, Hiram recognizes Shmuel from meetings of the circle for socialist renewal. He criticizes that circle’s socialism as partly Bolshevik and partly Cuban, then describes himself as a Hebrew socialist and distances himself from Jews. Shmuel, uncertain how to define his connection to Atalia, calls himself her friend, then revises this to acquaintance or neighbor. The encounter places former political identities beside the awkward negotiations of the present.

Armed struggle and the rejected alternative

The memories associated with Lehi sit within a wider argument about war and national purpose. Gershom Wald recalls that Shaltiel Abravanel opposed the 1948 war and believed young people on both sides should lay down their arms and refuse to fight. Even after violence and road blockades began in autumn 1947, Abravanel continued visiting Arab friends to argue for another course. Some neighbors called him a friend of the Arabs, a Muslim devotee, or a traitor; he nevertheless continued to call himself a Zionist, distinguishing his position from nationalism and identifying himself as a follower of Ahad Haam. His long-standing relationships with Muslim and Christian Arabs and his knowledge of Arabic grounded that alternative in sustained contact, not merely abstract dissent.

Wald also remembers his own part in the opposing consensus. He had argued that the war was sacred and that the young should fight; Mija, his only son, went to war after being formed by the same public language of duty. Wald recalls that teachers, classmates, and the country as a whole repeated the idea that a voice had called and the young had answered. In retrospect, he includes himself among those who helped summon Mija to battle. His grief therefore connects the rhetoric of collective sacrifice to the family loss it helped make possible.

The contrast becomes sharper in Wald’s account of Shaltiel’s political conflict with David Ben-Gurion. Shaltiel saw Ben-Gurion’s leadership as messianic and feared it would produce an unending bloodshed among Jews, Arabs, and others. Wald, by contrast, regards Ben-Gurion as a far-sighted leader who understood that the Arabs would not willingly share land and power and that Jews could not rely on outside rescue. He recalls Mija practicing with a weapon in the Tel Arza forest, a concrete sign of the preparedness that Wald says he and others understood to be necessary. Yet his later silence with Shaltiel reflects the unresolved human cost of that disagreement: after Mija’s death, they spoke only occasionally about household repairs and purchases.

Political ideals and the language of redemption

The arguments surrounding Lehi’s former members belong to a novel-wide scrutiny of political movements that promise salvation. Wald rejects the hope of redeeming the world, observing that faiths and revolutions alike may promise goodness yet become violent when they acquire power. His conclusion is not a defense of the world as it is, which he describes as full of suffering, but a refusal to trust projects that claim they can perfect it without bloodshed. The distinction helps frame the book’s competing responses to political violence: Abravanel’s refusal of war, Ben-Gurion’s insistence on self-reliance, and the former Lehi member’s uncertain life after the struggle.

Lehi is consequently present as a historical affiliation whose consequences persist beyond the period of resistance. Its former members carry different political identities into the new State, while comradeship itself can become the disputed basis of a debt. Set beside the conflict over Mija’s enlistment and the estrangement between Wald and Abravanel, Hiram’s meeting at the café gives that history an unspectacular but revealing form: the past survives in memories, arguments, and obligations that no longer fit neatly within a heroic account of revolution.