Boaz Leaves Telamim School and Is Arrested in Tel Aviv

Boaz Brandstetter’s departure from Telamim Agricultural High School and arrest in Tel Aviv expose the distance between adults’ attempts to manage his future and his refusal to accept their terms. After years of disciplinary trouble and a threatened expulsion, he leaves school, is detained on suspicion of handling stolen goods, and is bailed out through Michel Sommo’s intervention. The money comes from Alexander Gideon, but the decisive encounter is between Boaz and Michel: their uneasy exchange leads to a job chosen by Boaz himself.

Background and the threatened expulsion

Two years before the crisis, at the beginning of 1974, Boaz had been placed at Telamim Agricultural High School through the influence of Michel’s brother. The family paid the fees and respected Boaz’s request that they not visit him. In the two years that followed, they received no postcards from him, only repeated alarms from the headmistress: he was violent, had fought with the night watchman and injured him, disappeared at night, acquired a police record, and was placed on probation. The school described him as a monster and warned that he would have to leave.

The crisis comes to a head after Boaz, then described by his mother as sixteen, assaults a woman teacher. The school initially gives Ilana Sommo few details. Her subsequent account clarifies that Boaz had made a sick joke, the teacher slapped him, and he struck her twice in return. Ilana goes to the school, but Boaz refuses to see her and sends a contemptuous message whose target she cannot determine: it may refer to the teacher or to Ilana herself. She pleads for time to make other arrangements, and the school postpones expulsion for a fortnight.

Ilana sees no obvious alternative placement. His record and the probation officer’s involvement, she fears, will prevent another vocational school from taking him. Michel offers to have Boaz stay with them, although he and Ilana and their young daughter live in only one and a half rooms and are still paying their mortgage. Ilana doubts Boaz would accept: he loathes her and Alexander Gideon, the man whose paternity he contests. Her letter to Gideon is thus both a practical appeal and a record of a family conflict in which no available adult solution has Boaz’s consent.

Leaving school and arrest

Alexander Gideon responds to Ilana’s appeal by contacting an acquaintance in Israel. The headmistress then informs him that the expulsion is cancelled and Boaz’s record will carry only a warning. Gideon also offers a check for two thousand dollars, payable in Israeli pounds, as hardship assistance, with written conditions that it be treated as a gift rather than an admission of obligation and that no further appeals follow. The intervention changes Boaz’s official school outcome, but it does not bring him back into school.

In her letter dated 27 February 1976, Ilana reports that Boaz has left and taken work in Tel Aviv’s central market with a wholesale greengrocer related to Michel. A later investigator’s report supplies a more exact chronology: Boaz voluntarily left Telamim on 19 February, citing general unsuitability and longstanding disciplinary problems; two days later, on 21 February, he was arrested at Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station in connection with dealing in stolen property. The report records two previous similar-offense records and juvenile probation dating from May 1975. It also gives his birth year as 1960 and says he was not yet sixteen, distinguishing its administrative account from the age stated in Ilana’s letter.

The arrest brings Boaz to custody at Abu Kabir. Ilana and Michel learn that he is being held for possession of stolen goods, and Michel uses his contacts, including a friend of his brother in a senior position in the Tel Aviv police, to reach the probation officer. After complications, Boaz is released on bail on 22 February, with Michel standing surety. The investigator describes the release as apparently involving internal connivance within the police; Ilana’s account instead emphasizes the personal intervention that made it possible.

Michel’s intervention and Boaz’s terms

Michel goes to Abu Kabir without Ilana. A police contact arranges for him and Boaz to speak alone in an office. Michel does not approach Boaz as a disciplinarian demanding an apology or obedience. He acknowledges the insults Boaz uses against him, points out that the two could trade abuse without resolving anything, and asks him to work out what he wants from life. Boaz answers that he wants nothing, especially not more people asking him to define his desires.

When Boaz threatens that he might murder someone and run away, Michel refuses to turn the exchange into a contest of authority. He tells Boaz that he is neither his mother nor his father, makes clear that he does not care about the boy’s performance, and gives him a brief choice about accepting bail. Boaz then challenges the contradiction between Michel’s apparent indifference and his journey from Jerusalem to secure his release. Michel answers with humor, and Boaz agrees to leave. The encounter does not dissolve their antagonism; it makes room for a decision that is Boaz’s rather than an adult’s prescription.

Boaz asks to work, earn money, and avoid dependence on anyone. Michel agrees on the spot and arranges the greengrocer’s job without consulting Ilana. They go together to a newly opened kosher Chinese restaurant in Tel Aviv and then to a film; Ilana remarks that an observer might have taken Boaz for the father and Michel for the son. The image reverses their usual positions without erasing the hostility between them. Michel has secured the release, but the work answers Boaz’s stated wish for self-reliance.

Money, work, and the aftermath

The bail and subsequent arrangements draw on Gideon’s money. Ilana acknowledges that using it for bail was not what Gideon intended, but explains that the household has little money: Michel is a nonqualified French teacher in a religious state school, and mortgage payments leave barely enough for the family. Crucially, Boaz does not know whose money secured his release. Ilana believes he would have rejected it, along with the probation officer and Michel, had he known. The assistance therefore changes his circumstances without becoming a favor he must consciously accept from Gideon.

After his release, Boaz works for Michel’s relative in the wholesale vegetable market on Carlebach Street. He stays at the Planetarium in Ramat Aviv by invitation from one of the people in charge, where he is described in the investigator’s report as a volunteer night watchman. Ilana says he is attracted not to the stars but to the telescopes and optics. The report adds that he seems socially isolated, physically large and exceptionally strong, and that the market job may contravene the law on employing minors. These details keep the new arrangement from reading as a simple rescue: Boaz has work and a place to stay, but his legal and social vulnerability remains.

Ilana tells Gideon what happened with Michel’s consent, explaining that his money obliges them to account for its use. Her account makes the episode more than a school disciplinary incident or police case. Gideon can cancel an expulsion and provide funds, but Boaz’s departure shows that formal intervention cannot make him accept the future others have prepared for him. Michel’s response works differently: by listening to Boaz’s demand to work, he helps turn flight into a precarious first step toward independence.