Madeleine Yifat Sommo

Madeleine Yifat Sommo is the young daughter of Ilana Sommo and Michel Sommo, and a child whose everyday games become a point of contact among adults divided by marriage, custody, and old grievances. Her story is told chiefly through other people’s letters and recollections: she is cared for, argued over, and remembered, but also shown initiating her own small exchanges, inventions, and attachments. Between the Jerusalem home and the commune at Alexander Gideon’s seaside estate, she makes family life visible in its most ordinary details—and in the conflict surrounding them.

Identity and family circumstances

Yifat is identified as Michel and Ilana’s daughter. Michel’s letter to Alexander insists that Alexander has no rights, responsibilities, or claims over her under religious or state law, and demands that she be returned. That assertion is part of a wider struggle over her place in the family: the adults’ relationships have changed, Ilana is living with Alexander, and Michel has begun divorce proceedings. Yifat’s own position is therefore described through claims made about her, even as the narrative gives her a distinct presence through her play and her dealings with the people around her.

Her name appears in a particularly intimate domestic moment when Alexander reports that she came into his room and tapped it out on his Baby Hermes typewriter. The act is modest, but it makes her more than the object of the adults’ correspondence: she enters their rooms, occupies their attention, and leaves a mark in their routines.

Life between households and the custody dispute

In Jerusalem, Michel gradually finds a way toward Boaz Brandstetter, and Yifat becomes part of their emerging connection. During a weekend visit, Ilana watches her tiny husband and her giant son compete throughout the day for the little girl’s favor. After the Sabbath, Michel makes a meal for the family and arranges a babysitter so the adults can go to a cinema showing. Yifat is not merely present at the reconciliation between Michel and Boaz; her attention gives the two men a shared focus, and she appears to enjoy their contest. In another playful reversal, she tries to put Michel’s slippers on Boaz’s feet.

The arrangement is unstable. In a letter delivered before the Sabbath, Michel gives Alexander approximately thirty hours to consider his demand and says that friends will come on Sunday morning to fetch Yifat, politely or by other means. He presents the demand as one concerning his daughter alone, setting aside the more complicated question of Ilana’s status. Later, Michel sends his brother-in-law to take Yifat to him and writes that he has initiated divorce proceedings. Ilana’s sister and brother-in-law urge Ilana to seek a lawyer and insist on her right to know what has happened to her daughter and to see her, rather than simply surrendering her.

Alexander’s response is not to send Yifat away immediately. He asks Michel to let both Ilana and the child stay longer, offering to spend the remaining short time entertaining Yifat. The exchange makes her movements between households a matter of negotiation, while the adults’ messages alternately frame her as a daughter to be returned, a child to be protected, and a person whose company matters in the present.

Play, curiosity, and the commune

At the seaside estate, Yifat approaches Alexander with the resourcefulness of a child inventing her own forms of care. While the commune is asleep, she sits on the edge of his bed, concocts a medicine from kerosene and mulberry leaves, and gives him a dead grasshopper in a plastic bag. In return, she asks for and receives three paper boats; the two then have a short conversation about the nature of water. On another visit to his room, she supplies a cup containing half a dozen ants and invites him to dance. Alexander declines because of his illness and his inability to dance, but records the encounter as part of his growing esteem for Michel and his family.

Her play continues through the landscape around the house. She waters the vegetable beds twice a day with a watering can bought for her in town. Alexander imagines making her a shadow-monster theater with his fingers on the wall, and expects their conversations to range over fire, water, and what lizards dream about. In turn, she makes him medicines from mud, soapy water, and pine cones. Later, she treats Alexander’s electric shaver as a telephone—there is no telephone at the commune—and uses it to make half-hour reports to Michel in Jerusalem about her relationships with the goats, geese, and peacock. Boaz has also found her a tortoise. These episodes give her an active place in the commune’s life: she observes its animals, recruits its adults into games, and turns ordinary objects into instruments for communication.

Care and remembered family life

The accounts of Yifat’s earlier life also show Michel’s attentiveness as a father. When she develops a slight ear infection, he notices her fever before taking her to nursery, cancels a meeting with the deputy minister of defense that he had awaited for almost two months, and takes her to a clinic. He waits for the doctor, obtains antibiotics and ear drops, prepares soup and mashed potatoes, and later calls a private doctor when her temperature rises. He coaxes her to drink warm milk and honey, tells stories, sings to her, and measures her breathing with a stopwatch as she sleeps. He eventually lies on a mattress at the foot of her bed, remaining close in case she coughs or her covers fall away. The detailed episode establishes the labor of care that underlies Michel’s later insistence on his place in her life.

Ilana’s recollection of family Saturdays in Jerusalem preserves a different measure of that intimacy. Yifat would creep into her parents’ bed in pajamas patterned with cyclamens, bringing her doll to make a pillow cave beneath the blanket. Michel brought cocoa and orange juice to the bed, lathered his and Yifat’s cheeks with shaving cream, and raced her while they brushed their teeth. The family walked to the wadi, shared grace on the balcony, and played with toy bricks to rebuild the Temple. These remembered customs make the later separation concrete: the threatened loss is not only formal custody but the repeated rituals through which Yifat had belonged to a household.

One memory also complicates the warmth of that domestic picture. After Yifat used Ilana’s lipstick to color a map of the twelve tribes, Michel locked her outside on the balcony and tried to resist the sound of her crying. When the crying stopped and silence replaced it, he rushed out and folded her into his sweater. Ilana recalls the episode while asking Michel to pity her as he had ultimately pitied their daughter. Yifat’s childhood scene thus becomes part of the parents’ argument over discipline, tenderness, and whether forgiveness can follow punishment.

Place in Alexander’s final household

As Alexander becomes seriously ill, Yifat’s presence helps make the commune a household rather than merely a refuge or collective project. She waters its garden, visits his room, gives him homemade remedies, and reports her discoveries to her father. In a morning ritual Alexander imagines sharing with Michel, Yifat is greeted with the words, “Bonjour, Mademoiselle Sommo, arise, renew your youth like a lion for the service of the Creator.” The greeting places her within the daily rhythms of Alexander’s care, even though his attention to her is shaped by illness and by his uncertain, temporary position in her family life.

Her role is also bound to the adults’ efforts to care for Alexander. At the end of the day, Boaz carries him upstairs from the commune’s kitchen, where Alexander has listened to the guitar among the young people. Ilana then tends to him through the night. Yifat’s earlier games with Alexander and her watering of the garden belong to the same shared domestic world, but they do not resolve the dispute with Michel. The narrative leaves her at the center of an unfinished arrangement: cherished in more than one household, claimed by her father, and present in a seaside commune whose future is measured against Alexander’s failing health.