Judas
SynopsisPlot
Jerusalem, 1959. Shmuel Ash, a biblical scholar, is adrift in his young life when he finds work as a caregiver for a brilliant but cantankerous old man named Gershom Wald. There is, however, a third, mysterious presence in his new home. Atalia Abarbanel, the daughter of a deceased Zionist leader, a beautiful woman in her forties, entrances young Shmuel even as she keeps him at a distance. Piece by piece, the old Jerusalem stone house, haunted by tragic history and now home to the three misfits and their intricate relationship, reveals its secrets.
Story
About this book
Set in Jerusalem in 1959, Judas follows Shmuel Ash, a young biblical scholar whose life has lost direction. He takes a job caring for Gershom Wald, an elderly, sharp-tongued intellectual living in an old stone house in the city. The arrangement brings Shmuel into close quarters with Atalia Abarbanel, a woman in her forties whose late father was a prominent figure in the Zionist movement. Atalia is guarded and distant, yet Shmuel finds himself drawn to her.
The novel is structured around the overlapping currents of personal longing and political memory. Shmuel's academic interest in the figure of Judas Iscariot runs alongside the household's buried grief and the still-raw divisions within Israeli society over the founding of the state. Wald and Atalia each carry different versions of that history, and their conversations with Shmuel pull the narrative between intimacy and argument.
Amos Oz sets the story within a single winter, using the confined space of the house and the cold Jerusalem weather to keep his three characters close together. The book received the International Literature Prize. It was Oz's first full-length novel after A Tale of Love and Darkness.
