Shmuel Ash’s asthma

Shmuel Ash’s asthma is a persistent bodily constraint, not a single crisis: it interrupts travel, work, and courtship, and makes breath itself a recurring measure of exertion and vulnerability. Its attacks derail his attendance at Yardena’s wedding, accompany his anxious pursuit of Atalia, and recur in the ordinary routines of his life in Jerusalem. Inhalers and oxygen offer practical relief, while the illness also brings him into contact with the care of others and with Gershom Wald’s own physical dependence.

Identity and daily experience

Shmuel is about twenty-five, a large, bearded, shy and emotional socialist whose asthma is part of his physical condition from the outset. The account associates it with his tendency to tire quickly, alongside a possibly enlarged heart. His body is described with comic particularity: thick shoulders, neck, and fingers, a mass of unruly hair and beard, and an appearance of being perpetually overheated. Yet his skin carries the delicate scent of baby powder rather than the sour smell his appearance might suggest. His asthma sits within this close attention to a body that is both conspicuous and vulnerable.

The condition is woven into the small habits of his days. In the kitchen, when Atalia is usually absent, his morning sadness turns into asthmatic wheezing, and he takes two puffs from the inhaler he keeps in his pocket. The inhaler is not an emergency object stored away for rare use; it is carried on his person and reached for as symptoms arise. The routine places illness alongside his watchfulness for Atalia and his uncertain attempts to fill the morning.

Attacks and interrupted plans

In early December, Shmuel decides to leave Jerusalem after a romantic disappointment and a stalled research project, while his father’s financial ruin makes finding employment especially urgent. Before he can simply depart on his own terms, the morning of Yardena’s wedding brings a severe asthma attack. He drags himself to a clinic, where an inhaler and allergy pills fail to help; when his condition worsens, he is transferred to Bikur Holim Hospital.

The attack keeps him in emergency care for the entire wedding. Through the wedding night, he continues drawing oxygen from a mask, and the next day he decides to leave Jerusalem without delay. The episode gives his departure a bodily urgency alongside its emotional and financial causes: the plan to go is already in place, but the attack turns a hoped-for journey into a hospital stay and makes the decision to leave immediate.

Asthma also shapes his efforts to meet Atalia. After she agrees to go to a film and a restaurant with him, his excitement makes breathing difficult; he takes two deep inhalations from his pocket inhaler while standing at the window. Later, in the small restaurant, he again notices that breathing has become difficult and takes two or three inhalations before feeling better. The same device thus accompanies both an ordinary outing and the heightened anticipation of being with a woman whose feelings toward him remain uncertain.

Exertion, place, and limits

His work and obligations repeatedly require him to measure ambition against breath. One afternoon, after reading issues of Davar at the library, Shmuel remembers that he must return to Gershom Wald’s house by five. He runs for the bus, has an asthma attack, stops to inhale deeply several times, and reaches the stop less than a minute after the bus has left. He takes the next bus, then runs from it toward the house, arriving at five twenty, sweaty and breathless, to apologize for being late. The episode links a physical limit to a concrete consequence: his effort to fulfill his duties makes him miss the bus and arrive behind schedule.

On a nighttime walk with Atalia, he follows her up the steep path toward Mount Zion, beside the mined no-man’s-land between Israeli and Jordanian Jerusalem. She is more agile, and the widening distance between them makes him fear losing her in the dark near enemy machine-gun positions. The climb exhausts him and leaves him short of breath; he worries an attack may follow, though it does not. Here the narrative distinguishes breathlessness caused by exertion from an actual asthma episode, while showing how the possibility of an attack shadows his movement through a dangerous landscape.

Later, when Shmuel comes home after two in the morning, he takes two puffs from his inhaler before sleep even though he is breathing comfortably. He anticipates that an attack may soon come. The moment extends the condition beyond acute symptoms: asthma also involves vigilance and preparation, a body whose next difficulty cannot be timed with certainty.

Care and relationships

The novel places Shmuel’s own illness beside Gershom Wald’s degenerative disability and, later, a serious winter flu. When Wald becomes feverish, Atalia instructs Shmuel to change his sweat-soaked pajamas, give him tea with honey and lemon by the spoonful, add a little brandy, help with a bedpan, and wipe his forehead. She warns him that caring for Wald means touching him and that comfort cannot be the measure of his duty. Shmuel enters the old man’s bedroom for the first time, reads from Jeremiah, attends to his coughing, and gives him warm tea. At first he has to overcome his expectation that touching Wald’s twisted, sinewy body will disgust him; instead, he finds it warm and firm, and leaves his fingertips on Wald’s wrinkled skin for longer than necessary while changing his shirt.

That care is not a simple exchange in which Shmuel’s asthma is cured or overcome. Rather, the novel gives bodily dependence a place in their relationship: Shmuel knows the vulnerability of needing an inhaler, while his care for Wald requires practical attention to another person’s breathing, fever, and immobility. When he buys Wald an electric humidifier to ease his breathing, he also buys himself a new inhaler, along with kerosene and cheap medicinal brandy. The errand puts the two respiratory needs side by side, without making them identical.

Recurrence and narrative significance

Asthma recurs at thresholds where Shmuel tries to act: leaving Jerusalem, keeping an appointment, running for a bus, walking uphill, or settling down for the night. It repeatedly imposes pauses and adjustments—stop, inhale, wait for the next bus, continue more slowly—rather than removing him from the story altogether. That pattern keeps his plans in contact with the capacities of his body, and gives ordinary movement a variable cost.

The condition also provides a physical counterpoint to Shmuel’s emotional intensity. His eyes fill readily with tears, new ideas can excite him at once, and his feelings for Atalia make him so elated that he reaches for his inhaler. The narrative does not reduce that emotional life to illness; instead, both his feelings and his breathing can become difficult to contain. Asthma is therefore neither merely a medical label nor a decorative metaphor: it is a recurring experience with practical consequences, carried in a pocket inhaler, felt on steep climbs, and made especially tangible in the shared work of caring for a sick person.