Shaltiel Abraavane died in the kitchen

Shaltiel Abravanel’s death in the kitchen is the stark culmination of a life made solitary by political exclusion, private estrangement, and the disappearance of his own written record. He dies during his familiar routine of reading the newspaper over coffee; what remains is the scene Atalia and Gershom Wald remember, a hidden resignation, and an archive deliberately reduced to fragments and flushed away.

The Last Years in the House

After the death of Mija, Abravanel lived with Atalia and Gershom Wald in a household defined by grief and silence. Atalia recalls the three of them as isolated together, like people shut inside a submarine. Wald, who liked to talk and needed conversation, had once argued with Abravanel over nearly everything; after Mija’s death, their disputes ceased. Atalia describes grief as having tied a knot in their throats. Abravanel could live with the silence, while Wald suffered under it.

The shared house did not make Abravanel less alone. His Arab friends had been left across the new borders or driven from their homes in Katamon, Abu Tor, and Baka; he had no Jewish friends left, because he was branded a traitor. Atalia says that he died hated and vilified, perhaps even despised by himself. Her account holds political condemnation and personal judgment together: she accepted some of his views and recognized his honesty, courage, and originality, but says she never truly loved him except perhaps when she was a little girl.

Atalia’s memories also show why the relationship between father and daughter remained strained. When she was four, Abravanel left her behind in a market shop after becoming absorbed in an argument with a priest, following the priest from the market toward Jaffa Street and on to the Street of the Ethiopians. He once hid all three pairs of his wife’s shoes to keep her from leaving the house for two weeks. After finding her laughing and drinking wine with a Greek friend of her father, he locked her in the attic. Atalia remembers him as solitary, inward, jealous, and fanatical, a man ill suited to family life; she says he never wanted to be a father and did not know how to be one.

The Political Defeat Behind the Isolation

The public record that Shmuel Ash finds in the newspaper Davar makes Abravanel’s estrangement legible as a political history. A notice dated June 18, 1947, reports that Abravanel asked to address the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine with an individual minority position on the conflict between Jews and Arabs. He wanted to offer an original route to peace. The leadership of the Jewish Agency rejected his request, insisting that it and the Zionist Executive must speak to the commission with one voice rather than present contradictory positions. Abravanel considered appearing independently, but ultimately submitted to majority discipline, perhaps after being warned that defiance would cost him his place in the leading institutions of Jewish society.

A second notice, dated December 21, 1947, reports that Abravanel had been removed from his posts in the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency leadership the previous day because of disagreements with colleagues. According to the newspaper, he believed the course chosen by David Ben-Gurion and others would lead inevitably to a bloody war between the two peoples, with no clear victor and the lives of 600,000 Jews in the Land of Israel at stake. He maintained that a historic compromise was still possible. The report identifies him as a lawyer and Arabist who had been at the top of both institutions for nearly nine years.

Atalia later corrects the apparent simplicity of the newspaper’s account: Abravanel did not simply resign. He was given twenty-four hours to submit a resignation letter or face formal, unanimous expulsion with dishonor from both institutions. He wrote a reasoned letter, but it was suppressed, and no newspaper would publish it. When Atalia went to the Zionist archive years later to find the letter or a copy, officials claimed that it had never existed. Shmuel’s search through the press likewise turns up no public debate by Abravanel and no appeal to either Jewish or Arab public opinion. The surviving public record establishes the outlines of his dissent while withholding the document that might have spoken in his own terms.

The institutional silence continues in the archive itself. A senior official tells Shmuel that the Zionist Executive records are available, but the Jewish Agency leadership’s secret meeting protocols remain classified for another forty years. The official’s answer makes the obstacle more than a missing paper: the crucial debates are sealed by rule, while the account of Abravanel’s position is left to newspaper fragments and retrospective testimony. In this way, the circumstances of his death belong to a wider pattern in which political defeat is followed by the disappearance or withholding of evidence.

Death at the Kitchen Table

After Mija’s death, Atalia and Abravanel’s relationship with Wald changed into a quiet, constrained coexistence. Wald countered Abravanel’s arguments, but the two no longer fought. The silence extended to Atalia as well, who says that she and the two men lived together with no one else. She worked for several hours each day at a real-estate office on Straus Street and cared for the men at home. Abravanel, whose daughter and son-in-law were part of the same household, was nonetheless emotionally separate from them.

His final routine was repetitive and solitary. Each afternoon, shortly after the seven o’clock news bulletin, he sat alone in the kitchen, drank coffee, and read the newspaper. One evening his head suddenly fell onto the cup and overturned it. The right lens of his glasses shattered against the table, as if a bullet had struck him in the eye. Coffee ran across the table, down his chest and legs, and onto the floor, soaking the newspaper. Atalia found him with his forehead and hair in the spreading coffee, his face against the flowered oilcloth. The ordinary ritual of reading ends not with a final declaration, but with the abrupt collapse of the reader over the page.

Wald’s recollection gives the death a related but not identical emphasis. Abravanel had been silent with him for years except for small courtesies, and Wald says that the old man was perhaps the loneliest and most hated man in Israel when he died. He remembers Abravanel bending over the table as though reaching to wipe a stain from the oilcloth, striking his forehead, and dying. The two accounts converge on the kitchen, the newspaper, the table, and the solitary collapse, while their differences reveal the mediation of memory: Atalia recalls the shattered lens and the coffee spreading over the body; Wald frames the fall as the ending of a life whose world had already collapsed.

Papers Destroyed, Memory Left Behind

After Abravanel’s death, Atalia searched his room, emptying drawers and looking through the cupboards for notes, articles, and manuscripts. She found nothing except his will. It left her the house, the plots of land in Talpiot, and his savings, and firmly asked her to allow Wald to continue living there for the rest of his life. The will is the one surviving paper that records an act of care: even in death, Abravanel made provision for the man with whom he had shared the house and years of silence.

The rest of the archive had vanished by design. Wald says Abravanel did not burn his papers. He tore them into tiny pieces and, over many days, flushed them down the toilet. Among what disappeared were valuable letters exchanged with prominent Arabs in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus. Atalia’s search found no notes or manuscripts; Wald searched the drawers, shelves, and books without success and found no sign of fire in the house or yard. The emptied room thus records not an accidental loss but an exhaustive destruction that denied later readers access to the written work and correspondence of a politically isolated man.

The novel’s account of Abravanel reaches the reader through unequal kinds of evidence. Shmuel finds brief notices hidden low on interior pages of Davar; institutional files are either classified or, in the case of the resignation letter, denied; and the household’s testimony comes from people who loved, opposed, or resented him in different ways. Even the final scene arrives through Atalia’s and Wald’s recollections rather than through Abravanel’s own words. His death closes the possibility of questioning him, while the missing papers make certainty harder: the person at the center of the history leaves almost no first-person record.

That absence sharpens the contradiction at the heart of Abravanel’s legacy. He had believed a historic compromise between Jews and Arabs remained possible, yet political institutions cast him out, his Arab friends were displaced across borders, and his Jewish community called him a traitor. He spent his final years withdrawing from the world he believed was moving toward catastrophe, then died alone over a newspaper in the house where his daughter and Wald also lived. The coffee-soaked page and the destroyed archive leave behind neither a vindication nor a full account, but the image of a dissenter whose absence becomes part of the evidence about what his society would not preserve.