Riga is the city from which Shmuel Ash’s father emigrated to Palestine, bringing with him a background in cartography and a family history marked by migration and political violence. It also returns in his letter to Shmuel as the setting for a childhood memory that helps explain his discomfort with Shmuel’s study of Jesus from a Jewish perspective.

Family Origins and Migration

Shmuel recounts that his father came from Riga and studied at its Institute of Cartography before emigrating in 1932. At about twenty-two, his father left with Shmuel’s grandfather, Antek, who was over forty-five. The father later built a barrack with his own hands; the family lived there until it burned when Shmuel was two, prompting their move to a rented flat in Haifa. Riga therefore enters the family story not as a present-day setting but as the point of departure for a chain of migration, precarious housing, and inherited memories.

Shmuel’s account also reaches back to his grandfather’s work after arriving in Palestine. The British admitted Antek to their police force because he was an expert in forging documents. He was later killed by members of the resistance who believed he was a traitor, unaware that he had forged documents for them as well. The story’s winding return from Antek to the burning barrack illustrates how Riga is embedded in a family history whose episodes overlap and complicate one another.

Riga and the Memory of Jesus

In a letter, Shmuel’s father recalls that Jews in his native Riga would avert their eyes when passing an image of Christ. He sets that inherited or communal response against Shmuel’s view that Jesus was of Jewish flesh and blood, a position the father finds difficult to accept. His objection is shaped by the suffering and persecution carried out by enemies in Jesus’s name, which makes Shmuel’s chosen subject seem to him like a crossing to the other side of a barricade.

The father nevertheless says he respects Shmuel’s decision, even though he does not understand its purpose. Riga thus marks a contrast between the father’s caution, formed by memories of hostility associated with Christian tradition, and the son’s willingness to examine Jesus as part of Jewish history. The place gives the disagreement a personal dimension: Shmuel’s research is not merely an academic choice but a departure from the response his father remembers from his hometown.

A Recalled City, Not a Present Setting

Riga is mentioned briefly, through family recollection and the father’s letter, rather than through a narrated visit. Its significance rests on what those references carry: the father’s education and emigration, the family’s passage into a new life, and a generational disagreement over how to approach Jesus. The city remains a remembered point of origin whose meaning unfolds in the stories told about it.