Boaz Gideon

Boaz Gideon’s movement from family estrangement to communal life at the neglected Zikhron estate changes the meaning of his inheritance: the old family property becomes a home he repairs and a place where he cares for Alexander Gideon. His reserve toward his father persists, but his practical attention gives their relationship a form of closeness that neither man easily expresses in conversation.

Identity and Background

Boaz is Ilana Sommo’s son and Michel Sommo’s stepson. His relations with Michel and Ilana had deteriorated to the point that he had refused for several years to visit them in Jerusalem. He was also on probation from May 1975, and a later report notes a new police record that appears to have been closed through intervention. The evidence places him in conflict with family and authorities, but does not attribute his later work at the estate to any single cause.

The Sommo household’s dealings with Alexander’s wealth form part of Boaz’s family context. A request to Alexander sought money both for household needs and to provide for the future of the son and the little girl, alongside a separate contribution toward Alkalai House in Hebron. In Ilana’s account, Michel increasingly treated Alexander’s money and property as resources that might pass to him, Ilana, or Boaz, and linked their use to religious and political work. These plans make Boaz’s future a subject of adult negotiation before his life at the estate offers a different, communal way of inhabiting the family property.

The Move to the Zikhron Estate

When Michel returned from Paris, he learned that Ilana had taken Yifat to stay with Boaz in an abandoned building between Zikhron Yaakov and Binyamina. Alexander, Ilana’s first husband, had arrived there shortly before Michel’s return. Ilana declined to leave with the friends and relatives who came to speak to her, and Michel’s family considered filing a complaint over Yifat’s removal. In the account of this upheaval, Boaz’s home is no longer the Jerusalem household from which he had long stayed away; it is the neglected property where his mother and young half-sister have come to live.

The estate is legally still registered in Alexander’s name, but Alexander states that it belongs to Boaz. The distinction between official title and the property’s actual place in Boaz’s life is central to his return there: the house is both an inheritance and the setting of his own labor. Rather than appearing as a finished refuge, it is mostly abandoned, with fig and mulberry branches growing through windows and the old gardens overrun. Boaz’s presence turns the property into a lived-in place again.

Work and Communal Life

Boaz’s daily work is physical and sustained. He clears roots and branches, removes rocks, carries baskets of stones, digs, moves manure, and mixes cement and gravel to lay a new floor over iron rods he has fitted together. At times he rests in a hammock high in an old eucalyptus tree, reading or watching the clouds. His labor does not merely maintain the house; it gradually makes usable space within a neglected estate.

The property also becomes home to a small commune whose members sing and work together. Alexander hears them around the garden bonfire and in the kitchen, and notices the mouth organ, cooking smoke, and a peacock moving among pigeons in the passages and staircases. Boaz occupies a position among them as first among equals, not as a formal leader. Alexander imagines that Boaz may sometimes be alone on the roof with his telescope, or out at sea on a small raft he carries to the coast. The raft is made without nails, and recalls a model boat Alexander once taught him to build from balsa and string when he was a child. That remembered lesson connects their distant past to Boaz’s independent life without resolving the silence between them.

Boaz’s practical care extends to Alexander after his return. When Alexander asks for a table for his Baby Hermes typewriter, Boaz makes one from packing boxes and eucalyptus branches, adding a slanted footrest; he also obtains an electric fan. Elsewhere he has arranged a bedside rope to ring tin mugs near Yifat’s bed, so assistance can be summoned if needed. Such objects show his care in the form he most readily offers: useful work, quietly completed.

Relationships and Caregiving

Boaz’s relationship with Alexander is marked by a striking contrast. Alexander wants to join him on the roof and look at the stars, but the rope ladder is beyond his strength, and Boaz mostly avoids conversation beyond brief greetings and practical questions. Their limited speech does not mean that Boaz is indifferent. He repairs the room, makes the furniture, and attends to Alexander’s needs while maintaining a guarded distance.

As Alexander’s illness advances, Boaz’s care becomes part of the household’s daily structure. He fits shutters, replaces a windowpane, puts a lambskin rug in the toilet, buys medicines in Zikhron, and brings fresh mint each day. He does these things in tense silence, speaking little beyond greetings. At night, after the commune’s members have said goodnight from a distance, Boaz bends down, lifts Alexander carefully, carries him upstairs to the attic room, and lays him on the bed before quietly leaving. Ilana then takes over the night’s care. Boaz’s role is neither reconciliation through conversation nor an announced change of feeling; it is repeated, attentive action.

Change and Narrative Significance

At the estate, Boaz is at once estranged son, heir, builder, and caretaker. His communal household stands apart from Michel’s expectations that Alexander’s wealth might finance land schemes and family ambitions. Boaz instead restores the property through his own labor and sustains a small shared life there. The contrast does not make him a political spokesman: the evidence gives him no stated program, only the concrete work and arrangements through which he lives.

His care for Alexander also alters the emotional weight of their inherited connection. Alexander can recognize Boaz’s workmanship and attentiveness, yet remains unable to rely on easy conversation or a conventional father-son intimacy. Boaz’s silence is therefore both a boundary and the setting for his acts of care. By the time Alexander depends on him to be carried to bed, the neglected estate has become more than property: it is the place Boaz has rebuilt into a household, and where his relationship with his father is sustained through service rather than explanation.