World War I

World War I is one of the historical reference points through which the novel considers how wars erase political worlds and reorder lives. It enters Shmuel Ash’s childhood imagination through postage stamps and vanished countries, then resurfaces in arguments about force, national survival, and the displacement of populations.

Childhood Fascination with Vanished Countries

As a boy, Shmuel collected stamps and liked to lecture his few friends about rare issues and the countries they came from. His particular fascination was with places that had ceased to exist: he spoke of Ubangi-Shari, Austria-Hungary, Bohemia and Moravia, and countries erased or absorbed amid successive invasions and the upheavals that followed World War I. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia exemplified the new countries that emerged in Europe after the war.

The stamps made political disappearance tangible to him. He could recount the wars and revolutions that had removed countries from the map, and imagined traveling to faraway places to join resistance fighters struggling against foreign rule. His childhood enthusiasm combined real historical names with invention: when he did not know something, he made it up. World War I therefore appears not as a sustained account of its battles, but as part of a boy’s developing sense that borders and states are made—and can be unmade—by violence.

War, Force, and the Limits of Survival

The novel’s later political conversations extend that concern from Europe’s vanished states to Israel and its Arab neighbors. Shmuel argues that Arabs had reason to resist the arrival of large numbers of outsiders who took land, towns, and inherited places of burial. Gershom Wald recounts that Shaltiel Abravanel had opposed establishing a Jewish state in 1948, proposing instead an arrangement shared by Jews and Arabs after the British departure. For that position, Abravanel was removed from the Zionist leadership; Wald says he himself had supported David Ben-Gurion’s hard realism rather than Abravanel’s proposals.

Wald distinguishes what military force can do from what it cannot. It can prevent immediate annihilation, he argues, but cannot turn an enemy into an ally, a fanatic into a moderate, or someone thirsting for revenge into a friend. In his formulation, force can avert disaster for a time; it cannot repair or resolve the conflict. This distinction gives the novel’s references to war a political as well as historical force: survival may be secured by arms, while the antagonism that produced the fighting remains.

The Contested Meaning of the 1948 War

Wald’s grief over his son Mija’s death makes the cost of war intimate. Mija had lost a kidney in childhood, but concealed this from the recruiting committee and enlisted in late 1947. Atalia urged him not to go, and Abravanel had made him promise not to fight. Wald, by contrast, had raised him amid heroic stories of Jewish defenders and fighters, and acknowledges that his own rhetoric of a holy war may have helped send his only son to battle. Mija was killed on April 2, 1948, at Bab al-Wad, on the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road.

The competing accounts of that war are not settled by the loss. Wald remembers the common claim that the fallen did not die in vain, but finds it increasingly hard to repeat. Abravanel’s contrary conviction—that all the dead, in war and in ordinary life, die in vain—has become a reproach he cannot silence. The novel sets public consolation against a father’s continuing bereavement, making the meaning assigned to wartime death itself part of the political dispute.

Shmuel, recalling what he believed as a thirteen-year-old in a youth movement, describes having seen Jews as the just minority and Arabs as the hostile majority. His memories of Haifa complicate that inherited picture: Arab merchants visited his father’s cartography office, and the families shared hospitality before attacks, reprisals, and street fighting broke out. In April 1948, tens of thousands of Arab residents fled Haifa by boat for Lebanon. Jewish leaders urged them to stay, but rumors of a planned massacre, sharpened by the killings at Deir Yassin, fed their panic; elsewhere, Shmuel acknowledges, Arabs were killed and expelled rather than asked to remain.

Historical Precedent and Unresolved Consequences

Shmuel’s account places Haifa’s flight alongside population displacements between Greece and Turkey, India and Pakistan, Poland and Germany, and Czechoslovakia and Germany. Wald’s defense of the war as unavoidable confronts Shmuel’s question about whether what happened had to happen. The comparison frames displacement as a recurring consequence of wars fought between populations, without making that recurrence erase the particular choices, fear, and violence in Haifa.

Abravanel had anticipated that declaring an independent Jewish state after the British Mandate would bring a bloody war with the Arab world and perhaps the wider Muslim world. He feared that even Jewish military victories would intensify Arab fear and prolong conflict across generations. His alternative—an international mandate or a provisional government under American supervision, followed by a pause in immigration and time for Arabs to come to terms with the Jewish presence—was rejected as the movement moved toward statehood. The novel’s references to World War I and the later wars thus converge on a question of historical recurrence: borders and political arrangements may change, but the force that produces them cannot by itself reconcile those who must live with their consequences.