The boundary between Israeli- and Jordanian-controlled Jerusalem is more than a line on a map: it is a dangerous, guarded presence that repeatedly redirects movement and limits what can be reached or seen. In the winter of 1959–1960, its walls, barriers, warning signs, and mined no-man’s-land intrude on Shmuel Ash’s wandering and on his journeys with Atalia, while a divided city remains the unresolved political geography behind the novel’s intimate lives.

A divided city in the winter setting

The story opens in a Jerusalem still marked by the war that divided the city a decade earlier. The boundary is part of the ordinary urban landscape, not a distant military abstraction: old buildings retain signs of the fighting, and the division separates neighborhoods and places that remain visible from those that have become inaccessible. The physical line also supplies the novel’s recurring image of proximity without access—one can approach the other side, look toward it, or remember what lies there, but crossing is dangerous and restricted.

That division makes the city’s edges particularly consequential. Near the western outskirts, the road by the last house in Rabbi Elbaz Alley gives way to stony ground and fields extending toward the remains of Sheikh Badr. The rural margin is close to the city, yet the nearby boundary turns such closeness into exposure and separation. The novel places domestic life, city streets, and militarized terrain in the same compressed geography.

Barriers, warnings, and restricted movement

During his aimless walks, Shmuel repeatedly approaches the concrete wall dividing Israeli Jerusalem from Jordanian Jerusalem. He nearly runs into it while wandering through unfamiliar winter neighborhoods, his attention and direction compromised by his despondency. The wall is not merely an image in the distance: it abruptly ends a route and forces him to register the boundary as an obstacle in his path.

The warnings on the rusted coils of barbed wire spell out the danger in stark terms: stop, frontier, mines, no-man’s-land, and exposure to enemy snipers. Shmuel reads them distractedly, as though choosing from a menu, a striking contrast between the lethal implications of the signs and his detached state. The notices make the frontier legible while also showing that knowledge does not make it traversable: they identify the hazards without offering a safe passage through them.

The boundary also shapes the limits of the visible city. Shmuel notices high stone walls topped with broken glass and, at times, barbed wire; behind them he imagines monasteries, orphanages, or military installations, without knowing what is actually concealed. Passing the wall around the leprosarium in Talbiya, he wonders what life is like inside and compares it with his own seclusion in the attic at the city’s edge. The comparison draws a line between political enclosure and private isolation without making them identical.

The frontier in Shmuel’s movements and memory

Shmuel’s wandering brings him close to the dividing wall at moments when his own life feels directionless. He has left university after romantic disappointment and a stalled research project, and his father’s financial ruin has made him seek work. In that unsettled period, he walks for hours through rain-soaked streets, sometimes nearing the wall before turning back. The political frontier gives his private disorientation a concrete geography: his movement continues, but the city’s limits repeatedly stop it.

The boundary also enters his dream of Stalin. In the dream, Shmuel stands at an observation post on the roof of the Dormition Abbey on Mount Zion and points out the corner of the Western Wall, trapped on the Jordanian side of the frontier. The episode joins the divided city to Shmuel’s unresolved religious and political questions: he cannot explain to Stalin why the Jews rejected Jesus, and Stalin calls him Judas. The dream does not resolve either the boundary or the question; it instead folds the inaccessible landmark into Shmuel’s anxious attempt to explain a history he cannot reconcile.

A dangerous edge on the route to Mount Zion

The frontier becomes immediate again when Shmuel accompanies Atalia toward Mount Zion. They pass rusted barbed wire along the approach at the foot of the Old City walls, where it marks a mined no-man’s-land between the Israeli and Jordanian parts of Jerusalem. Mount Zion itself is described as an Israeli projection surrounded on three sides by Jordanian territory. The route therefore carries the pair through a landscape whose geography makes the political division unmistakable.

Their ascent is physically demanding, and the distance between them grows as Atalia climbs more quickly. Shmuel fears losing sight of her and getting lost in terrain close to no-man’s-land and exposed to enemy machine-gun positions. The frontier governs not only where they can go but how they experience the journey: his effort to keep up with Atalia is shadowed by the danger of straying toward a militarized edge. The scene makes political separation part of an intimate walk without turning the two forms of distance into the same thing.

Narrative significance

Across these episodes, the dividing zone works through interruptions: the wall stops Shmuel’s wandering, the signs mark routes as perilous, and the borderland restricts the view from within a city full of enclosed spaces. The frontier’s physical infrastructure—concrete, barbed wire, mines, and exposed ground—gives material form to Jerusalem’s division and to the limits placed on movement and knowledge.

Its recurring presence also links public conflict to private life without reducing one to the other. Shmuel’s isolation and his uncertainty about history are his own, yet the divided city surrounds both with visible boundaries and unreachable places. The frontier remains a condition of the novel’s setting: continually encountered, never simply overcome, and closely connected to the city’s unresolved political and religious questions.