Socialist Revolution Ideal

The socialist revolutionary ideal in the novel is neither simply defended nor discarded: it is an aspiration to social justice that survives, in altered and contested form, the exposure of Stalinist terror. Its meaning is tested in a small socialist-renewal circle, in Shmuel Ash’s conversations with Gershom Wald, and in the contrast between revolutionary promises of equality and the exclusions those promises can produce. The novel gives the ideal a second, international dimension through Shaltiel Abravanel’s dissenting vision of a shared Jewish-Arab home, a proposal condemned as betrayal precisely because it challenges the national consensus.

The study circle and its fracture

The socialist-renewal circle gathers every Wednesday at eight in a low-ceilinged, blackened café in the back streets of Yegia Kapaim. The setting is only approximately proletarian: artisans, plumbers, electricians, painters, and printers sometimes meet there to play backgammon, but they do not ordinarily join the circle’s table. The members nonetheless treat the café as a place of contact with working people. A worker might call out a comment from two tables away; a group member might cross over to ask a backgammon player for a light. The modest gestures matter because the circle’s politics rests not just on doctrine, but on its imagined connection to ordinary labor.

That connection does not prevent a crisis within the group. After sustained objections, nearly all its members accept the condemnation of Stalin’s terror expressed at the Soviet Communist Party’s twentieth congress. A more intransigent faction then demands that they reconsider not only their loyalty to Stalin but the foundations of the dictatorship of the proletariat as Lenin conceived it. Two members go further, drawing on the young Marx to challenge the armored doctrine of the mature Marx. When Shmuel tries to stop the group’s disintegration, four of its six members announce a split and the creation of an independent cell. Both women in the group are among the four, a loss that makes the split, in Shmuel’s view, more than a procedural dispute: without them, the circle has lost something essential.

Shmuel’s political and personal isolation

The rupture in the circle coincides with a wider upheaval in the socialist movement after the revelations about Stalin’s regime. Shmuel tells Gershom Wald that his friends have moved away from him—or, more accurately, that he has moved away from them—and that controversy has opened between them. He tries to turn Wald’s questions about love and loneliness aside by recounting the circle’s history and then considering what Stalin has left to his successors, including Malenkov, Molotov, Bulganin, and Khrushchev. His digression is also an attempt to preserve a distinction between an idea and the institution that claims to embody it: he asks whether the Soviet party’s corruption requires the abandonment of social justice, just as the Inquisition’s actions should not, in his analogy, settle the judgment of Jesus.

Wald’s response brings the abstract argument back to the people it leaves outside its promised future. He imagines a revolutionary world of honest, simple, productive, strong, equal, and upright people, then places himself beyond its right to exist: a disabled man who eats without working and, in his own bitter formulation, makes everything uglier with jokes. He also suggests that Atalia would be unnecessary to this purified world, since she is a solitary widow who does not devote herself to repairing the world. His sarcasm exposes the violence concealed in an ideal of universal transformation when its vision of the future has no place for people deemed unproductive or politically insufficient.

Shmuel’s commitments are further strained by circumstances outside the circle. His father loses an appeal in a long legal fight with an old business partner, and his parents can no longer send the monthly allowance that has supported him at university. In his rented room in Tel Arza, Shmuel gathers used cardboard boxes from behind the garbage bins and begins packing books, clothes, and other belongings without knowing where he will go. He also wanders through rainy streets and stands staring at the iron gate of the building where Yardena no longer lives. These losses accompany his political isolation: the ideal of collective change remains alive as an argument, but his own immediate world is shrinking.

Revolution, faith, and the question of betrayal

In conversation with Wald, Shmuel refuses the idea that disillusionment with Stalinism must mean surrendering the hope of social justice. His comparison with Jesus makes the argument deliberately broader than party politics: an institution’s crimes do not automatically disprove the teaching it has appropriated. The comparison does not erase the history of those crimes; instead, it insists that ideals and their political custodians be judged separately. For Shmuel, abandoning the ideal because the party has betrayed it would allow the betrayal to define what justice can mean.

The word traitor becomes the pressure point in this debate. When the subject of Abravanel’s political dissent arises, Wald says bluntly that Abravanel was a traitor. Shmuel later refuses to accept the label as a neutral description. He argues that people who dare to change are repeatedly called traitors by those frightened of change, and he recalls figures from different histories who were condemned for taking positions ahead of their time. The examples range from Jeremiah and Elisha Ben Abuyah to Abraham Lincoln and the German officers who attempted to kill Hitler; the label does not make their acts equivalent, but shows how accusations of disloyalty can enforce the boundaries of an accepted order.

Wald extends the discussion from political dissent to the inherited religious accusation against Jews. He recalls a train journey to Warsaw as a young student, when a nun saw his Hebrew newspaper and reproached him as a Jew for what Christians believed Jews had done to Jesus. His memory shows how the image of Judas can turn a story of betrayal into a collective stigma. He encourages Shmuel to finish his research on Jesus in the eyes of the Jews and imagines a further study of Judas in Jewish eyes. The exchange links Shmuel’s question about political ideals to the older problem of how communities assign guilt, and how a person or group can be made to bear the burden of a betrayal attributed to them.

Abravanel’s alternative and its cost

Abravanel’s political vision gives the socialist ideal a concrete national test. He believed Jews had a legitimate aspiration to build a home in the land, but concluded that it had to be shared with Arabs. His position grew out of a long change in understanding: he began to doubt in the 1920s that Jewish settlement could proceed without dispossessing others, and in the 1930s saw the two peoples moving toward a bloody collision. For years he maintained institutional discipline, occasionally calling for dialogue and against violence, but his appeals met indifference. In the 1940s he began voicing dissent in meetings of the Jewish Agency and the Zionist Executive Committee.

In 1947, Abravanel opposed both the United Nations partition plan and Israel’s independence, believing that a historic compromise between the peoples might still be possible. His colleagues gave him two hours to choose between resignation and expulsion. A contemporary newspaper account reports that he would not explain his removal to its journalist, but records his warning that the chosen course led toward a bloody war whose victor was uncertain, placing the lives of six hundred thousand Jews in the land at stake. The same report describes him as a lawyer and Arabist who had spent nearly nine years at the top of the two institutions. His dissent therefore came not from an outsider with no political standing, but from a former insider who believed that the movement’s pursuit of a state was closing off the possibility of a shared future.

Shmuel challenges the justification that political necessity makes the choice self-evident. He criticizes Ben-Gurion for leading a nationalist state while scattering biblical language about restoration and the fulfillment of prophecy, and warns that without peace the Arabs may eventually defeat Israel. The argument does not resolve the conflict between security and coexistence. Instead, it places that unresolved conflict alongside the socialist circle’s own fracture: both reveal how quickly a project that claims justice can identify dissent as betrayal and treat an alternative as impossible.

A compromised ideal, not an extinguished one

The novel does not present the socialist ideal as untouched by history. Stalin’s terror and the party’s corruption make it impossible for Shmuel simply to repeat inherited doctrine; the members who challenge the dictatorship of the proletariat insist that the foundations themselves be examined. At the same time, the breakup of the circle does not settle whether social justice has become meaningless. Shmuel’s analogy with Jesus preserves the question of whether a teaching can outlive the institution that has betrayed it, while Wald’s image of the disabled man excluded from the revolutionary future asks what kind of justice that teaching would actually deliver.

Abravanel’s fate gives that question a political and personal consequence. After resigning, he falls silent, convinced that he has no interlocutor. His former Arab friends are separated from him by new borders or driven from their homes; Jewish friends have abandoned him as a traitor. After Mija’s death, the household’s surviving members—Abravanel, Gershom Wald, and Atalia—live together in a silence that ends their arguments. Abravanel dies alone in the kitchen, his coffee spilling across the newspaper and table. His isolation does not prove his political position right, but it makes visible the price exacted when dissent is reduced to disloyalty. Across the circle, Shmuel’s religious analogy, and Abravanel’s proposal of a shared home, the ideal persists not as a program secured by power, but as a demand to keep asking whom a proclaimed future excludes.