Ottoman rule

Ottoman rule appears not as a narrated period of political events but as a historical layer embedded in Jerusalem’s streets and buildings. A sundial dating from Ottoman rule and wells in Yemin Moshe connect the late-1950s city to an earlier urban past, while the novel’s divided streets and carefully bounded domestic spaces show how the present is organized by other kinds of boundaries.

Traces in the City

On a nighttime walk through Jerusalem, Shmuel Ash and Atalia Abravanel pass through the closed, deserted Mahane Yehuda market and emerge onto Jaffa Street. Atalia pauses by a sundial on a building, which has stood there since Ottoman rule. Its presence briefly brings the city’s distant history into the characters’ contemporary walk: the clock is an enduring urban object, a marker of time carried into a changed city.

The scene does not expand into a history of Ottoman government or identify the sundial’s maker or original purpose. Its significance is more modest and concrete: it locates a surviving historical trace within the ordinary geography of Jerusalem, encountered during a walk shaped by Atalia’s silence and Shmuel’s attention to her.

Yemin Moshe and Everyday Inheritance

In a description of Yemin Moshe in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Ottoman-era wells remain in the courtyards of its low stone houses. Each is covered by an iron lid. The wells belong to a poor neighborhood of shuttered houses and small courtyards, where old infrastructure persists amid the conditions of the novel’s present.

These details make historical continuity material rather than abstract: the past remains in objects and structures that residents live beside. The neighborhood is not presented as a preserved monument; its wells are part of the practical fabric of ordinary homes, while the houses and courtyards register the passage of time through continued use and changed circumstances.

Historical Time and Present Boundaries

The novel’s Ottoman references are brief, and they do not establish that the period itself is a principal subject of the narrative. Instead, they give depth to a city whose immediate landscape is also marked by newer political divisions. On another walk, Shmuel reads warnings at the barbed-wire boundary between Israeli and Jordanian Jerusalem; elsewhere the pair passes the mined no-man’s-land near the Old City walls. The old sundial and covered wells endure within a city whose present-day routes are constrained by borders and restricted spaces.

This contrast makes Ottoman rule one layer in Jerusalem’s accumulated history, not a simple explanation for its later divisions. The traces associated with it help establish the city’s temporal depth, while the characters’ movements reveal how historical space is continually occupied, divided, and experienced in the present.