Rome is the setting of Miri’s letter to her brother Shmuel, a city she has lived in for three and a half years without feeling she has seen much of it. For her, it is chiefly a place of study and work: she studies medicine, assists in a pharmacy, and works nights at a telegraph office to pay for her education and modest living expenses. From that demanding routine she writes toward Jerusalem, trying to reach a brother whose brief letters conceal, in her view, a profound loneliness.

Miri’s life in the city

Miri describes a Rome of limited leisure and narrow means. Even a light snowfall disappoints her because it melts before reaching the roads, pavements, and monuments; she has not yet seen the city under snow. She rarely walks around, spending her days studying or in the laboratory, her afternoons at the pharmacy, and four hours each night at the telegraph office. The earnings from both jobs barely cover university costs, a room shared with a nervous Belgian student, and simple meals of bread, milk, vegetables, pasta or rice, and coffee.

Her account of the city expands through the weekends she spends with Emilio and his ten-year-old daughter, Sonia. Emilio, a divorced man who translates Spanish literature into Italian, lives across Rome from Miri’s university and workplaces. She visits on Saturday afternoons and stays until Sunday evening. Though she cannot join them daily, she is close to Sonia, who calls her Mari and seems more attached to her than to her own mother, who lives in Bologna and has little contact with her. Miri describes herself as a point of connection between Emilio and Sonia, while her packed schedule keeps that domestic life confined largely to weekends.

A city measured by work and attachment

Miri’s weekends with Emilio and Sonia provide the clearest counterpoint to the city’s routine of labor. On Sundays she rises at four in the morning to prepare food for the week; afterward, the three may visit a nearby park, take a short boat ride on the river, or travel by bus out of the city for a picnic in a pine wood among old ruins. These outings are modest and occasional, set against the study, laboratory practice, and two jobs that structure most of her time.

Emilio knows that Miri is short of money and working too much, and understands why her parents have stopped paying for her studies. Although his translation work brings in little, he has repeatedly offered her financial help. She has refused each time and has sometimes become angry, though she admits she does not understand her own reaction. His generosity nevertheless matters to her; she regards it as an especially attractive quality in a man. The offer reveals both the practical strain of her life in Rome and the limits she places on accepting assistance from someone close to her.

Rome as a vantage point on Shmuel

The letter makes Rome a vantage point from which Miri tries to interpret Shmuel’s withdrawal in Jerusalem. She knows that their father’s legal defeat against his former business partner led to the collapse of the family company and the end of parental support for their studies. Shmuel’s brief letters say that he has left university and found work and accommodation in an old Jerusalem house; they also mention Yardena’s marriage. Miri observes that he never names loneliness, though she reads it in the letters. She recalls his childhood absorption in stamp collecting and solitary hours on the roof, and says that attempts to draw him into conversation often turn into lectures about Ben-Gurion or the Crusades.

Miri urges Shmuel to find work and return to his studies, imagining him as an academic, researcher, educator, or professor. She regards his departure from university as a disappointment to their parents and to herself, and wonders whether the family bankruptcy alone explains it. Her appeal is sharpened by a memory of their childhood trip to Tel Aviv: when she asked what he wanted, he answered that he wanted to know what it all meant. Looking back from Rome, she suggests that he might stop pursuing an answer to truth and begin living his life. The city thus frames not only her own constrained independence but also her effort to call her brother back from self-imposed isolation.