Alexander A. Gideon

Alexander A. Gideon is a political-science professor whose correspondence with Ilana exposes the distance between his public authority and his private incapacity. Across their letters, he appears first through her imagined account of his reactions, then through his own defensive reply, and finally through a brief admission about Boaz: he had not known how to take responsibility for the boy. That admission does not resolve their estrangement, but it gives it a more complicated shape than either accusation or denial alone.

Identity and Introduction

The book identifies him as Dr. Alexander A. Gideon, a member of the Political Science Department at Midwest University. A later address associates him with 16 Hampstead Heath Lane in London. These formal details place an academic title and an international life beside the intimate history unfolding in his letters; the correspondence, rather than a continuous account of his daily life, is the principal evidence for his character here.

A letter dated February 5, 1976, from Ilana in Jerusalem begins after seven years of silence. It addresses him as a man whose curiosity might overcome his hatred, but that opening is Ilana’s provocation, not an objective report of his response. She imagines him reading with clenched jaws, then crumpling the letter and throwing it onto a fire. The scene establishes how she understands their bond: even his imagined refusal becomes part of the exchange she is trying to restart.

The Long Silence and Ilana’s Appeal

Ilana writes because Boaz has been expelled from a vocational school after a conflict with a teacher. In her account, the school has given her only a fortnight to make other arrangements. Boaz will not move into the cramped home she shares with Michel-Henri Sommo and their baby, and other vocational schools are unlikely to accept him because of his police record and probation officer. Ilana therefore turns to Alexander despite believing that he may not read her letter or answer it.

Her appeal is sharpened by the unresolved question of Boaz’s paternity. Ilana anticipates that Alexander might rely on his lawyer, Manfred Zakheim, to send a formal response reiterating that he denies being Boaz’s father and that the blood test was inconclusive. She also recalls that she had opposed a tissue test. The divorce, as she describes it, released Alexander from responsibility toward both her and Boaz. Her letter thus asks for help while simultaneously rehearsing the legal and emotional reasons she expects him to refuse.

Ilana later says that the information in her first two February letters was accurate, but that she had used it to draw him into contact. She had already believed Michel would rescue Boaz, and that he would do so without Alexander’s money. This distinction matters: her factual account of the crisis and her declared motive for writing are not the same thing. The letters function both as requests and as a deliberate test of whether Alexander can be made to engage.

Money, Influence, and the Limits of Action

In Ilana’s severe portrait, Alexander’s power rests on a checkbook and on access to influential people. She says that he could call Manfred Zakheim, government ministers, or generals from his former circle, and that those contacts could in turn ask him for help with their sons’ university placements or sabbaticals. She contrasts this reach with what she sees as an inability to begin practical action himself. Her comparison is an accusation made in the course of a fraught exchange, not a neutral biography, but it identifies a recurring conflict: whether wealth and influence amount to care when they do not take the form of direct responsibility.

Ilana also connects his academic subject to his personal manner. She refers to his book, The Desperate Violence: A Study in Comparative Fanaticism, and describes his despair as frozen and Arctic. The contrast is pointed: he studies fanaticism and political violence, while she portrays him as emotionally immobile in the private crisis before him. Her letter even imagines him reducing her to a specimen. The language turns the professor’s analytic authority into part of their conflict, suggesting that classification can become a substitute for participation.

His Reply and His Admission

Alexander’s later letter answers Ilana’s question about why he divorced her seven and a half years earlier. He refuses her invitation to meet, while allowing the possibility of seeing her in dreams, and comments on her efforts to write without lying. His response keeps the exchange alive even as it withholds an ordinary meeting: he accepts further correspondence, but frames it through suspicion, mockery, and a charged awareness of her desire for renewed contact.

A separate private statement, sent by hand of Manfred Zakheim, gives a more inward answer about Boaz. Alexander says that he could not, and did not want to, take the boy away with him because he did not know what to do with him. He feared that accepting a test would lead to a court order placing Boaz with him, and wonders what Boaz would have become had he grown up in his care. The statement makes his earlier distance more than a simple question of legal denial: it records a failure of confidence and willingness, while leaving the consequences of that failure unresolved.

Character and Narrative Role

Alexander is presented through competing versions of himself. Ilana’s letters cast him as a man who answers need with money, influence, silence, or disdain; his own words confirm that he felt unprepared to raise Boaz, but do not erase her account of his prolonged absence. The unresolved blood test and his denial of paternity further prevent the father-son relationship from settling into certainty. His private admission supplies vulnerability without turning it into an easy absolution.

The epistolary structure makes that uncertainty central. Ilana repeatedly anticipates what Alexander will think before he answers, while Alexander’s reply treats her words as both a challenge and an invitation to continue. Readers encounter neither a detached account of their marriage nor a definitive judgment of either correspondent; instead, character emerges through the gap between what one person expects, what the other admits, and what remains unanswered. Alexander’s decisive significance lies in that gap: he has the means to intervene in Boaz’s life, yet his own account exposes how little those means have taught him about care.