Shu Mu Er Interrupted University Studies

Shmuel Ash’s interruption of his university studies is both a practical consequence of family bankruptcy and a deliberate retreat from a life he had seemed close to completing. His sister Miri regards it as a self-inflicted abandonment of his promise; Shmuel connects it to heartbreak, isolation, and a research project that has stopped moving, while continuing to search for meaning beyond the university.

Identity and Background

Before leaving his studies, Shmuel was close to completing a master’s degree with excellent marks. Miri had imagined him continuing as an academic: researcher, educator, professor, perhaps eventually a distinguished scholar. His departure therefore appeared to her not as a temporary adjustment but as the destruction of a future he had spent years building. She wonders whether their father’s bankruptcy alone could explain why he had thrown that future away.

The decision took place amid a family financial collapse. Their father had lost a lawsuit, and the family business, Gaviota, had gone bankrupt. Miri, writing from Rome, was supporting herself through medical studies with two jobs, and understood that their parents could no longer pay for Shmuel’s education. His brief letters said he had left university and found work and lodgings in an old Jerusalem house, but offered little explanation of what the change meant to him.

Withdrawal and Its Causes

Miri reads the interruption through a pattern she believes began in childhood. Shmuel had been an inward, solitary boy, absorbed in stamp collecting or alone on a rooftop, and he habitually evaded personal conversation by turning to subjects such as David Ben-Gurion or the Crusades. She had hoped Yardena might draw him out of what she calls his shell. Instead, Yardena returned to a former boyfriend and married him, leaving Shmuel alone again.

The siblings’ remembered trip to Tel Aviv gives that solitude an earlier, more searching form. When Shmuel was eleven and Miri sixteen, their parents gave them money and permission to stay overnight with an aunt if they wished. They spent the day walking in the heat, drinking soda, eating ice cream, and entering a French black-and-white film already in progress; they returned to Haifa well before the last bus. When Miri asked what he wanted, Shmuel answered that he wanted to find out what it all meant. For Miri, the memory links his youthful search for meaning to the withdrawal she now sees as self-punishment.

The practical consequences of leaving university are plain in Miri’s account: Shmuel has given up his studies, moved to Jerusalem, and taken work and lodging in a household where he serves an older disabled man. She imagines him living in a dark, deteriorating basement and spending much of the day on errands, though she recognizes that this picture may be wrong. She urges him to seek translation work or private students, and considers his brief assurance that he is well an evasion rather than an answer.

Miri’s Appeal and Shmuel’s Explanation

Miri’s letter is at once affectionate, angry, and anxious. She says his abandonment of university has disappointed her, their parents, and herself; she even imagines interrupting her own medical studies to travel to Israel, find him work, and make him resume his education. Her offer to help is not abstract: she knows the family’s loss has ended the support that once made his studies possible, and sees that he has so far lost only a semester, which she believes could still be recovered.

Her concern is sharpened by comparison with her own life in Rome. She describes a crowded, precarious routine of study, laboratory work, pharmacy shifts, and night work at a telegraph office, with barely enough money for tuition, shared accommodation, and simple meals. A friend, Emilio, offers her financial help, but she repeatedly refuses it and becomes angry with him, despite admiring his generosity. That contradiction makes her questions to Shmuel more personal: she wonders whether he, too, is refusing help or turning hardship into a form of isolation.

When Shmuel later explains why he came to live in the Jerusalem house, he gives several causes rather than a single one. Yardena had left him and married her former boyfriend; his father’s defeat in court and the resulting bankruptcy made continued financial support for university impossible; and for months he had been stalled on the work he had begun writing. The interruption thus follows both external losses and an intellectual impasse. It is not presented as a clean decision to abandon thought: Shmuel says he still cannot stop wondering what the world and the Jews might have been like if they had not rejected Jesus.

Work, Research, and the Meaning of Betrayal

The university departure does not end Shmuel’s intellectual life. He continues to read and investigate, including through old issues of Davar. In a December 1947 report, he finds that Shaltiel Abravanel was removed from senior positions in the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency after disagreements with his colleagues. The report associates Abravanel’s dissent with the fear that the chosen political course would lead to a bloody war and with the possibility of a historical compromise between the two peoples. This discovery belongs to the historical research Shmuel pursues outside his interrupted academic career, and gives his reading a political subject as well as a personal one.

Shmuel’s own account of his research centers on Judas Iscariot and the rejection of Jesus. He questions whether thirty pieces of silver could plausibly explain Judas’s role, noting that the sum was small, roughly the price of an ordinary slave, especially for a rich man said to own land and estates in Kerioth. He offers to read Atalia Abravanel passages from his drafts about Jesus and the Jews. His study has stalled, but the subject has not released him: intellectual inquiry persists as an unfinished pursuit rather than a university credential.

The interruption also becomes part of Shmuel’s reflections on betrayal. He argues that people who dare to change are often branded traitors by those who fear change, invoking figures condemned for dissent and connecting that accusation to Shaltiel Abravanel’s political isolation. He admits that his parents and sister accuse him of betraying the family by leaving his studies, but suggests the estrangement began earlier, in childhood, when he dreamed of having different parents. The word therefore joins the private rupture of his education to the larger history he is studying: leaving university is at once a family wound and one more instance of being judged against other people’s expectations.

Relationships and Unresolved Direction

Miri’s letter reveals how little Shmuel communicates about the decision. His short messages report that he is well, has work, and spends his remaining time reading and wandering Jerusalem; she asks him to write a real letter and tell her what happened. Her questions about whether he and Yardena fought, whether she wanted to live together, or whether he chose to return to solitude remain questions, not established explanations. What she knows is the outcome: the relationship ended, Yardena married someone else, and Shmuel withdrew from the academic path she had hoped would give his life direction.

Atalia, by contrast, hears Shmuel place the interruption within a wider accumulation of disappointments. He does not claim to have resolved his search for meaning, nor to have stopped writing. The university’s absence from his life is consequently neither a completed rejection of intellectual work nor a return to the future Miri wants for him. It leaves him in an unsettled position: economically constrained, emotionally isolated, and still drawn to questions that his abandoned studies had once given a formal home.