Stalin era

The Stalin era enters the novel less as a distant chronology than as a crisis of political faith. The exposure of Stalin’s terror divides Shmuel Ash’s socialist circle, forcing its members to ask whether the corruption of a regime invalidates the ideals it claimed to serve. Through that dispute, the era becomes a measure of how political movements respond to evidence of their own violence—and of the price paid by those who refuse to stop at condemnation of a single ruler.

The Crisis in Shmuel’s Socialist Circle

The circle for socialist renewal met on Wednesday evenings in a soot-blackened, low-ceilinged café in the back lanes of the Yegia Kapaim neighborhood. Its members regarded the café as more or less proletarian: artisans, plumbers, electricians, painters, and printers played backgammon there, though they did not generally sit at the group’s table. The occasional exchange across the room offered a modest connection to working people, but the circle remained a distinct political gathering within the café.

After sustained objections, almost all the members accepted the position expressed at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union concerning Stalin’s terror regime. Agreement on that condemnation did not settle the argument. A determined minority demanded that the group reconsider not only its allegiance to Stalin but its attitude toward the foundations of the dictatorship of the proletariat as Lenin had conceived it. Two members went further, using the ideas of the young Marx to question the armored doctrine of the mature Marx.

Shmuel tried to prevent the group’s disintegration, but four of its six members announced a split and the formation of an independent cell. Both women in the circle were among the four dissenters; the narrative stresses that without them the group had little meaning to Shmuel. The schism therefore registered as both an ideological rupture and a personal loss. The political shock left him more isolated precisely when he was trying to hold the movement together.

Ideals After Stalin

When Shmuel later explains the split to Gershom Wald, he says that the socialist movement had been badly shaken by the discovery of the Soviet regime’s aberrations. He acknowledges that the dispute had widened the distance between himself and his friends, or, more exactly, that he had withdrawn from them. Yet he resists the conclusion that the failure of Soviet communism must bury social justice as an ideal. He compares that conclusion to judging Jesus negatively because the Inquisition had claimed to act in his name.

The comparison reveals the problem at the center of Shmuel’s response to the Stalin era: a cause may be corrupted by those who rule in its name, but separating the ideal from the historical institution that represents it is not straightforward. His questions preserve the possibility of justice while refusing to excuse the Soviet Party’s corruption. At the same time, the group’s split shows that not everyone believes the distinction can be maintained without re-examining the system’s foundations.

Gershom’s later account of daily life in the house gives the Soviet crisis a quieter echo. At set hours he listens to news bulletins on his small radio, reads Davar, and explains the political background to Shmuel; among the subjects he discusses is the return of David Ben-Gurion’s coalition, whether or not the Marxist-Zionist party joins it. These regular briefings place ideological argument beside the recurring routines of the household, making politics part of the young man’s daily education rather than a closed episode in his past.

Dissent and the Name of Traitor

The novel places the circle’s crisis alongside the political isolation of Shaltiel Abravanel. A report in Davar dated December 21, 1947, records that Abravanel had been removed from his positions in the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency leadership after disagreements with colleagues. The report says he declined to explain his dismissal to the journalist, but summarizes his view: the course chosen by David Ben-Gurion and others risked a bloody war whose outcome was uncertain and placed the lives of six hundred thousand Jews in the Land of Israel at stake. Abravanel believed a historical compromise between the two peoples might still be possible.

Atalia later recounts how Abravanel’s dissent developed. He continued to believe that Jews had a legitimate aspiration to build a home in the Land of Israel, but concluded that it must be shared with Arabs. In the 1940s he sometimes voiced opposition in meetings of the Jewish Agency leadership and the Zionist Executive. In 1947, when he opposed both the United Nations partition plan and Israel’s independence, colleagues called him a traitor; he was given two hours to choose between resignation and expulsion. After resigning, he fell silent in public, convinced that he had no interlocutor.

Shmuel’s reflections make “traitor” a recurring political designation rather than a settled description of conduct. He invokes figures across history who were condemned for challenging the accepted course, and argues that those willing to change are called traitors by people who fear change. Abravanel’s opposition to partition thus stands beside the socialist circle’s attempt to reckon with Stalinism: both episodes expose the strain between loyalty to a political cause and resistance to the course taken by its institutions.

The Era’s Personal Afterlife

For Shmuel, the Stalin-era crisis coincides with several forms of separation. He has abandoned his research project on Jesus in Jewish eyes after discovering that its central insight had already appeared in a footnote by his teacher, Gustav Yom-Tov Eisenschloss. Around the same time, his father loses an appeal in a business dispute in Haifa, and Shmuel’s parents can no longer send him the monthly allowance that supported his studies. He packs books, clothes, and other belongings into used cardboard boxes without knowing where he will go. The collapse of his circle, his academic project, and his financial support converges into a broader retreat from the future he had imagined.

The novel does not treat these experiences as equivalent to state terror; rather, the political rupture forms part of the pressures through which Shmuel’s attachments and convictions are tested. His account to Gershom makes clear that the circle’s disagreement has separated him from friends, while the later discussions of Abravanel show how political dissent can harden into public disgrace and private silence. The Stalin era’s significance lies in this lasting question: when a movement’s rulers betray its professed ideals, whether faith in those ideals can survive without becoming another form of denial.