The National Library of Israel is where Shmuel Ash plans to pursue the unanswered questions surrounding Shaltiel Abravanel, Atalia’s father. The library stands at the point where Shmuel’s private curiosity about Atalia meets the public record of Zionist history; his decision to research there promises answers, but the novel leaves open whether facts can unlock another person’s secrets.

A destination for historical inquiry

Shmuel’s plan takes shape as he sits in his room at the Wald and Abravanel Residence, looking out through a deep window toward the courtyard. Among its objects he notices an old rainwater well, a reminder of the cisterns that helped Jerusalem’s Jewish residents survive the 1948 siege. That historical landscape turns his thoughts toward Shaltiel: had he still been among the leaders of the Jewish yishuv during the Arab invasion, or had David Ben-Gurion already driven him from the leadership? Why had he been expelled, what had he done afterward, and when had he died? Shmuel decides that he will spend several hours at the library investigating the story.

The library is thus introduced through questions rather than a physical portrait. The text gives no account of its rooms, collections, or institutional history; instead, it defines the place by the research Shmuel hopes to conduct there. The unresolved facts about Shaltiel’s political fall and later life give the visit its purpose.

The archive and Atalia’s secrets

Shmuel’s research is driven by more than historical interest. The narrative immediately unsettles his plan with the possibility that learning what happened might not bring him closer to Atalia, but cause her to retreat further into her shell of secrets. The library therefore represents both an avenue toward knowledge and a limit: evidence may establish what happened in public life without explaining what Atalia will choose to reveal about herself.

The connection between research and intimacy recurs when Atalia finds Shmuel bent over an old book he has borrowed from the library. She sits on the edge of his bed and asks what he is studying. The scene brings the institution’s historical work into their shared domestic space: Shmuel’s reading is no longer only a private investigation, because Atalia enters the room and takes an interest in it. The excerpt does not identify the book or specify what he discovers from it.

A setting for competing accounts of the past

The library’s research function resonates with the novel’s broader treatment of historical testimony. Shmuel’s abandoned work on Jesus draws on accounts that disagree or carry traces of later intervention: a passage attributed to Josephus is presented as possibly altered by Christian hands, while the account associated with Agapius describes Josephus as reporting the beliefs of Jesus’ followers rather than affirming them as fact. Other passages describe hostile Talmudic references later removed from most printed versions, and medieval Jewish works that differ in tone and argument. These are episodes of Shmuel’s historical inquiry, not descriptions of the library’s holdings; together, they establish why research in the novel involves weighing what sources say, how they were transmitted, and what fear or polemic may have shaped them.

That same problem of contested memory reaches beyond religious history. Shmuel later recounts Haifa’s violence and the mass departure of Arab residents in 1948, then wonders whether events had to unfold as they did. The National Library is not shown as resolving these disputes. Its narrative significance is more modest and more pointed: it is the place Shmuel chooses when he wants to test inherited accounts against historical evidence, while the questions of motive, responsibility, and personal disclosure remain open.