Ilana and Alec’s entanglement after their divorce

Ilana and Alec’s entanglement after their divorce is sustained by the very distance meant to end it. In letters to Alexander Gideon, Ilana depicts seven years of silence as an active force in their relationship, then admits that her appeals concerning Boaz were also attempts to bring Alexander back into contact. He, in turn, describes their bond as something neither has escaped. The correspondence makes their separation less a clean break than a continuing contest over who can reach, injure, or release the other.

Letters and the return from silence

Ilana’s February letters gave Alexander accurate information about Boaz’s troubles, but she later distinguishes the accuracy of those details from the purpose behind sending them. She expected Michel Sommo, not Alexander, to rescue Boaz, and believed Michel would act properly even without Alexander’s money. Her letters therefore served a double purpose: they communicated a real concern about Boaz while concealing the deeper reason for writing. Ilana eventually names that reason as a wish to place herself once more in Alexander’s hands and to make him answer her.

The silence between them had lasted seven years. Ilana says that she tried to withstand it by filling the life of her new home with noise, but that she gave in during the eighth year. Her image of Alexander’s effect on her is not of an abrupt rupture but of a slow, continuing injury: his silence and contempt, she believes, work over time. The letters break that silence without resolving its cause. They expose how much of her apparent appeal for help was a test of whether Alexander would respond, and how much of her anger depended on the response she had already imagined he would make.

Ilana also acknowledges that the appeal was a trap, while presenting that admission as only part of the truth. She says she wanted Alexander to send her a bill, as though a financial obligation could give shape to the longing between them. Her writing shifts repeatedly between accusation, invitation, and self-reproach. The letter does not offer a stable account of motive: it stages Ilana discovering and revising her own explanations as she addresses the absent Alexander.

Longing, injury, and self-deception

Ilana’s account holds hatred and desire together rather than treating either as the opposite of the other. She describes herself as yielding to Alexander even while resenting that response, and imagines their connection through the opposing forces of fire and ice. Her desire is not presented as a path to reconciliation. Instead, it makes his refusal to visit consequential: she had not truly expected him to come, yet his distance still wounds her because it confirms the familiar pattern between them.

That pattern is bound up with her suspicion that Alexander can answer emotional demands only through money, influence, or silence. She mocks his reliance on his checkbook and on calls to powerful acquaintances, arguing that he would not know how to begin helping Boaz directly. Yet his eventual financial intervention unsettles her precisely because it exceeds the response she had predicted. She is surprised when he sends a large check through Manfred Zakheim to Michel. The unexpected gift becomes another turn in their struggle: it helps her family, but it also gives Alexander a way to enter a household and a life from which he is otherwise absent.

Ilana makes the contradiction explicit by admitting that she is deceiving Michel as she had deceived Alexander during their marriage. She distinguishes her earlier deceptions from the present one by claiming that even then her attention was ultimately directed toward Alexander. This is her own explanation, not an impartial account of the marriage; the letters show her trying to make a history of betrayal intelligible as a form of attachment. Her self-description as a liar and her insistence that Alexander cannot deceive her leave the reader with a relationship built on mutual suspicion, where candor itself arrives as another maneuver.

Michel Sommo, Boaz, and the money between them

Ilana’s marriage to Michel does not dissolve her attachment to Alexander. She describes Michel as a loving and intimate presence in her life, while continuing to call Alexander her husband in the enduring, emotional sense. She imagines Michel accompanying her to a future marriage ceremony with Alexander, a striking formulation that gives the current marriage a place inside, rather than outside, the old bond. Her account does not make Michel a mere obstacle: she presents him as someone she cherishes, even as she admits to concealing things from him.

Boaz is the practical reason the former spouses resume communication, but their correspondence quickly exceeds the question of his welfare. Ilana says that Michel was the person she expected to help Boaz, and Alexander later recognizes that Michel has repeatedly come to Boaz’s rescue. Alexander’s money reaches the family through Michel, who plans improvements to their flat and purchases for the household. Ilana lists ordinary benefits for herself and the children, including a washing machine, a stereo, a bicycle for Yifat, and a telescope for Boaz. The specific purchases make the check more than an abstract gesture: it changes the family’s immediate circumstances while reopening an old channel of dependence and response.

The check does not buy Alexander freedom from Ilana’s attention. Manfred Zakheim warns Michel that two people can play the same game, and Ilana takes up that warning as a message to Alexander: money will not end their connection or turn the past into a new beginning. Her gratitude is real, but it coexists with defiance. The household can use the money even as Ilana refuses to accept it as payment for silence or release.

A reciprocal bond that survives separation

A letter dated June 13, 1976, revisits the divorce trial and the long-held fear surrounding Boaz’s paternity. Ilana says that if Alexander had made clear at the trial that he was not using her admission of adultery to take Boaz from her, she would have had no reason to oppose a paternity test; in her view, the test would then have been unnecessary. She regrets the suffering that could have been spared by a brief explanation. The passage recasts the divorce as a history not only of accusation but also of things left unsaid, with silence allowing fear to harden into conflict.

Ilana also acknowledges what she had not understood about Alexander’s actions: that he had relinquished his claim to Boaz in order to spare him and had intended to donate a kidney to him. She believes that Alexander could send her letters to Michel, yet that something in him restrains the hatred that might prompt such retaliation. This recognition complicates her earlier portrait of a man governed by contempt and financial power. It does not erase the injury she attributes to him; it adds evidence of care that his silence had concealed from her.

Alexander’s own letter answers the entanglement from the other side. He refuses Ilana’s appeal for a visit, except perhaps in dreams, while interpreting her request as another expression of desire. He recalls that he divorced her seven and a half years earlier, but says that even when he shares a bed with someone else, his thoughts return to Ilana. He also describes their attachment as reciprocal: if Ilana is a demon to him, he is her bottle, and neither has managed to escape the other. Their accounts are not identical, and neither can be treated as a final explanation of the relationship. Together, however, they show how divorce, new partners, parental concern, money, and silence keep renewing a bond that both characters describe as painful and persistent.