Ilana Sommo

Ilana Sommo’s letters make her a divided center of the novel’s family conflicts: she is Michel Sommo’s wife, Boaz Brandstetter’s mother, Yifat’s mother, and the former wife of Alexander Gideon, whose illness draws her back into his life. Her return to Gideon’s childhood home does not produce a simple reunion. Instead, she tries to sustain several incompatible attachments at once, moving between anger, care, longing, and a growing sense that Michel may never come back to her.

Identity and Background

Ilana’s history with Alexander, as he recounts it in a letter to Michel, begins with their marriage in September 1959. He says that she chose the marriage more than he did, and that she decided to have Boaz after she became pregnant; Alexander had told her from the start that he did not consider himself suited to fatherhood. He describes their life together as increasingly painful for her and says that he delayed their separation through weakness of character. They separated in September 1968, and he characterizes their divorce as vicious, with his own conduct shaped by hatred and vindictiveness. He then left Israel and severed contact.

Ilana’s later marriage to Michel gives her a family life that appears in her letters through ordinary acts of attention as well as conflict. In a night-time letter to Alexander, she describes waking Michel to watch the news, bending to untie his shoelaces, and putting him to bed. She recalls his political complaints about Yitzhak Rabin and his affectionate conviction that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. After he falls asleep, she reads Alexander’s letter. Her account places domestic tenderness beside the emotional force of the correspondence she has kept hidden in her handbag all day.

Letters, Anger, and Renewed Contact

Ilana’s communications are not neutral reports: they are attempts to manage distance, challenge, and solicit a response. In a note to Manfred Zakheim, she tells him she will no longer meet him and insists that Alexander must send his letters to her directly by mail. She is repelled by Zakheim and regards a deal he hinted at concerning Alexander’s inheritance as the final breach. She also says that Zakheim witnessed her earlier misfortune but never understood it, unlike Alexander, Michel, and perhaps Boaz. Her refusal to deal through Zakheim is therefore both practical and personal: she rejects the intermediary while asserting that he remains outside the family’s knowledge of what happened.

In a later letter to Alexander, Ilana again objects to receiving his messages through Zakheim. She mocks Alexander’s delayed wedding plans and the qualities he once seemed to possess, but the letter’s sharpness gives way as she describes reading his words. The images and arguments in his writing distress her, and she has to stop, hide the letter, and return to it later. She recalls the Jerusalem night around her—the household quiet, the distant sounds beyond it—and sets that scene against the emotional chill she associates with Alexander’s account. Her letter ends in deliberate uncertainty: she says she will not repeat her earlier suicide attempts and tells him to wait without knowing what she will do next. The uncertainty is part of the message’s pressure, not a resolved declaration of what follows.

When writing about her departure for Zikhron, Ilana presents herself as having abandoned revenge and wanting closeness with Alexander again. She imagines caring for him as a wife and companion, and recalls his intense work at his desk and their shared correspondence as attempts to decipher their lives. She also revises the meaning of suffering: in another early-morning letter, she tells him that happiness remains possible and describes suffering not as its opposite but as a difficult path toward it. These appeals express hope, but do not establish that she and Alexander have resumed a conventional marriage.

Zikhron and the Divided Family

On August 9, 1976, writing from Chicago to Alexander, Ilana recounts setting out for Haifa to visit his father in a sanatorium on Mount Carmel, then changing course at Hadera and taking a bus to Zikhron. She does not know how Boaz will receive her or what she will say if he rejects her. At the property she finds the old house deteriorated: the iron gate is chained, weeds and thistles grow through the gravel, the roof has collapsed, and bougainvillea rises from inside the building. The visit begins in hesitation before a home that is at once her son’s place and the setting for renewed contact with Alexander.

Ilana goes to Zikhron with Yifat while Michel is away in Paris. In a brief message, she tells Michel that she had to leave, says she will try to observe the Sabbath and eat kosher food, and asks him not to cut short his trip. She also sends Boaz’s affectionate greetings and tells Michel not to worry. The message’s conciliatory tone contrasts with the scale of the decision: she has taken their young daughter to stay with Boaz at the abandoned building, and she is not yet returning to her husband.

Zakheim’s account of the family’s response presents the move as a public scandal. He reports that Michel returned from Paris to find Ilana and Yifat staying with Boaz, and that Alexander had also arrived shortly before. According to Zakheim, Michel and his relatives were shocked; a group went to the house to speak with Ilana, but she refused to see them. Zakheim then describes a plan for Michel to make a formal complaint over Ilana taking Yifat without his consent. This is Zakheim’s account of the dispute, not Ilana’s own description, and it shows how her decision becomes entangled with family reputation and a custody conflict.

Alexander answers Michel’s suspicions in a letter of his own. He says that Ilana chose to stay temporarily to look after him before his hospital treatment, and that she would return to Michel afterward. He also discloses that he has advanced kidney cancer, that it has spread in his abdomen after two operations, and that he has returned to Israel because his life is nearing its end. He states that he did not ask Ilana to stay but saw no reason to send her away, and describes their present relationship as outside the conventional pattern of husband and wife. His account gives her presence a practical cause—his illness and her nursing—without extinguishing the emotional history that makes Michel distrust the situation.

Caregiving and Life in the House

At the Zikhron property, Ilana enters the routine of Boaz’s commune rather than remaining only a visitor. She describes Boaz wrapped in a lambskin cape, sitting and sewing sacks, while other members gather around a kitchen fire. Before writing to Michel, she peels potatoes, churns butter, and pickles gherkins with garlic and parsley. She is dressed in a borrowed embroidered Bedouin garment and a checked headscarf, and goes barefoot with the others. Her work is specific and ordinary: she helps maintain a shared household in a house that is otherwise still largely abandoned.

Her description also keeps Michel present through imagined family routines. Writing from the room where she and Yifat first stayed, she imagines Michel caring for their daughter—bathing and dressing her, helping with a model airplane, and putting her to bed. The domestic details sharpen the separation: Ilana is not with them, and she does not know whether Michel has handed Yifat to relatives or begun a new life. She addresses him as both cruel and pitiable, then admits that the silence leaves her unable to know what he is doing. Her letter makes the household she left feel vivid without pretending that she can still participate in it.

As Alexander’s condition worsens, Ilana moves into his room to care for him at night. He wakes in panic and mumbles orders; she rises from a mattress at the foot of his bed, gives him an herbal drink and pills, and holds his hand until he sleeps again. In the morning she shaves him, combs his remaining hair, dresses him, ties his shoes, and feeds him soft food. These repeated acts make her a caregiver in practice, while her questions to Michel show that she still imagines herself accountable to him and still wants him to understand or forgive her. Care for Alexander does not settle her marriage to Michel; it intensifies the conflict between obligation, attachment, and guilt.

Conflict, Longing, and Unresolved Ending

Ilana’s care is not presented as unbroken gentleness. After Alexander goes onto the balcony in the rain without her permission, she says she loses control, strikes him, and then lies beside him, kisses him, and strokes him until he dozes. She interprets his smile and his remark about the rain helping the fields as part of the disturbing contrast between his frailty and her anger. The episode exposes a volatile mixture of protectiveness, frustration, and intimacy. It does not make her conduct harmless; rather, it shows how the intensity of their shared life can turn care into conflict and then abruptly back into tenderness.

At the same time, Ilana’s letters continue to turn toward Michel. She longs for his presence and asks whether he will come and bring Yifat to Zikhron. She describes the repaired fish pool, now holding carp, and a fountain that answers the rain only by dripping; these details accompany her insistence that the place is quiet and pleasant, but she also says she has no hope that Michel will read her letter. She expects him to destroy it once he recognizes her handwriting. The final image is therefore not reconciliation but waiting and anticipated rejection: Ilana remains with Alexander in the house, caring for him while still directing her appeal toward the husband from whom she is separated.

Narrative Role and Significance

Ilana’s story is carried chiefly through letters, notes, and messages, so readers encounter her through acts of address. She can mock Alexander, plead with him, challenge Zakheim, reassure Michel, and imagine a domestic life from which she is absent. These different forms of self-presentation do not cancel one another; their contradictions are the substance of her predicament. The letters also limit what can be known. Zakheim’s report frames her departure as dishonor and a custody crisis, while Alexander’s letter explains her stay as temporary nursing. Ilana’s own messages reveal both the emotional history and the daily labor those accounts leave out.

Her movement to Zikhron brings the novel’s divided relationships into one household: Boaz and Yifat are there, Alexander is gravely ill, and Michel remains an absent addressee whose return she still hopes for. Ilana is not simply choosing one family over another. She tries to preserve care for Alexander, connection with her children, and the possibility of Michel’s forgiveness, even as the consequences of leaving deepen their separation. The ending leaves that effort unsettled: she remains in the house and continues to write, but no response from Michel or final decision about their marriage is established.