Mahane Yehuda Market is both a concrete Jerusalem landmark and a point of return in Shmuel’s movements through the city. It appears first as a closed, deserted market on a nighttime walk with Atalia, then as the setting of a childhood memory she tells about her father, and later as part of Shmuel’s solitary passage through Jerusalem.

Setting and Atmosphere

On the nighttime walk, Shmuel and Atalia cross Agripas Street and pass through Mahane Yehuda Market after its stalls have closed. The place is empty, but not lifeless: smells of fruit, rubbish, overripe vegetables, the butcher’s stalls, spices, and decay rise from the dark stalls. The market’s sensory presence gives the walk a vivid material counterpoint to the pair’s long silences and unspoken tension.

Atalia’s Childhood Memory

The market enters Atalia’s account of her father as the place where, when she was four, he left her behind. He had become absorbed in an argument with a priest; to continue it, he accompanied the priest from the market toward Jaffa Street and on to the Street of the Ethiopians, forgetting the child. The episode makes the market a landmark in a family memory that reveals her father’s intense absorption in argument and his failure to attend to ordinary parental responsibilities.

Shmuel’s Later Passage

On another journey through Jerusalem, Shmuel crosses Mahane Yehuda Market before continuing through Mekor Baruch. From there he reaches the alley in the Yegia Kapaim neighborhood where the proletarian café associated with his former socialist circle stands. The market thus falls within a route that carries him from streets marked by religious and political slogans toward a place bound to his earlier intellectual and political life.

Narrative Significance

The market’s appearances connect distinct layers of the novel without turning it into a static backdrop. In the nighttime scene it is closed and deserted, its dark stalls lingering through smell; in Atalia’s recollection it marks a childhood abandonment; in Shmuel’s later walk it belongs to a larger cityscape crossed on the way to a former meeting place. These returns give the location personal and historical resonance through the different journeys and memories attached to it.