Tal Arza is the Jerusalem neighborhood where Shmuel Ash rents a room during a period of cascading personal reversals. After his parents can no longer support him, he begins packing his belongings without knowing where he will go; when he accepts work as a companion, he leaves the rented room and moves to the courtyard house that becomes his new home.

A rented room amid financial collapse

Shmuel’s connection to Tal Arza begins as his family’s means of supporting him disappear. His father loses an appeal after years of legal disputes with a former business partner in Haifa, and Shmuel’s parents have to stop sending the monthly allowance that had sustained him since he began university. In the rented room in Tal Arza, he gathers three or four used cardboard boxes from behind the garbage-bin shed and fills them haphazardly with books, clothes, and other belongings. He has not yet decided where to go; the boxes register a life being dismantled before a destination is in view.

Departure for the courtyard house

The move follows a wider interruption in Shmuel’s life: his research has stalled, his university studies have stopped, and Yardena has married her former boyfriend. He accepts a modestly paid position in the house on Rabbi Elbaz Lane, where he will spend several hours a day keeping company with the disabled Gershom Wald and have the rest of his time free. Two days later, he leaves Tal Arza and transfers his possessions to the courtyard house shaded by a fig tree and grape arbor.

The move makes the change tangible. This time Shmuel packs five cardboard boxes and an old kitbag, carrying his clothes, books, typewriter, a record player and a stack of records, along with rolled posters depicting Christ dying in his mother’s arms and the heroes of the Cuban popular revolution. The room in Tal Arza is left behind; the objects he carries forward give the new household a visible imprint of the interests and images that had accompanied him there.