Abu Tor is the location of the old flat in which Ilana remembers a family life shared with Alexander A. Gideon and their young son, Boaz. In her recollection, the rocky yard and pine trees frame a household divided between the parents’ strained silence and the purposeful quiet of father and son at work together.

Setting and Domestic Life

The family lived in an old flat in Abu Tor, with a rocky yard and pine trees. Ilana recalls rainy winter weekends there, when she and Alexander remained in bed late, exhausted by the strain of their nights together. Boaz, by contrast, had already risen and dressed himself—sometimes with his shirt buttoned incorrectly and his socks mismatched—and settled at Alexander’s desk beneath its lamp.

The flat’s routines gathered the three around breakfast. Boaz laid the table for them, while his parents avoided each other’s eyes. He acted as an intermediary, prompting one parent to pour coffee for the other or pass the cream cheese. The ordinary requests made visible how the child helped sustain contact between two adults who struggled to communicate directly.

Boaz and Alexander at the Desk

At the desk, Boaz drew instrument panels for spaceships and images of airplanes crashing, and sometimes cut neat cards to help with Alexander’s doctorate or work for the Armored Corps. In another recurring task, father and son sorted and pasted pictures from Geographical Magazine. Boaz anticipated what Alexander needed, passing scissors, paste, or a penknife before being asked; Alexander sometimes rested a hand on the boy’s hair and got glue on it.

These remembered scenes make Abu Tor more than a former address: the flat holds evidence of a close, practiced father-son bond. Ilana describes their work as nearly silent, but distinguishes its shared concentration from the silence between herself and Alexander. The child’s ease at his father’s desk thus stands beside the parents’ avoidance, revealing two different forms of quiet within the same home.

Place in the Recollection

The Abu Tor scenes belong to Ilana’s recollection of roughly ten years earlier, when the family still lived in the old flat and Alexander’s later house in Yefe Nof had not yet been completed. The memory is built from concrete domestic details—the breakfast table, the desk, the cut-out cards—rather than from a general account of the marriage. Through those details, Abu Tor becomes a setting in which familial closeness and marital estrangement coexist, and in which Boaz repeatedly bridges the distance between his parents.