Marriage and former love between Alexander Gideon and Ilana Sommo

The marriage and former love between Alexander Gideon and Ilana Sommo is a relationship shaped by a powerful early sense of recognition and a later history of jealousy, violence, divorce, and unresolved longing. Their shared past is told not as a settled romance but through letters that alternately explain, accuse, remember, and reach across the silence separating them.

Meeting and Marriage

In Ilana Sommo’s retrospective account, Alexander Gideon describes himself as isolated and inexperienced in emotional intimacy when they become close. At twenty-eight, he says that he has rarely formed personal friendships, feels pressured by emotion, and has imagined a life devoted to military theory and academic work. He calls Ilana his first friend and his only friend, and wonders whether they are alike. His disclosures make their closeness seem less like a conventional courtship than a rare opening in the guarded life he describes.

Ilana answers his vulnerability by telling him that his sadness has awakened love in her. She wants a child with him and says she would marry him if he would marry her. In her account, this exchange is the emotional turning point: a relationship that had carried pressure and uncertainty becomes, for her, a bond of profound mutual identification. She remembers comforting him through a moment of acute anxiety about intimacy, and describes the tenderness of that night as confirming their sense of becoming one. A few weeks later, Alexander takes her to meet his father; by autumn, they are married.

Marriage, Jealousy, and Rupture

The marriage’s early closeness does not protect it from destructive patterns. Ilana recalls that by the time their son Boaz Brandstetter was two, love had become inseparable from hostility. In her account, Alexander discovered evidence that she had been involved with another man and responded with intense jealousy, interrogation, and violence. Their private life became organized around suspicion and repeated demands for explanations, while Alexander also disappeared for stretches of time and withdrew into his academic work.

Ilana describes the marriage as increasingly harmful to her sense of self. She recalls repeated suicide attempts during this period, as well as Alexander’s alliance with Manfred Zakheim and his conflict with his father over the family house. These events form part of the wider crisis around the couple, but Ilana’s account makes clear that their own relationship had become a source of fear, humiliation, and emotional exhaustion. Alexander eventually divorced her. At the courthouse, he sent her a few lines of poetry through Zakheim rather than adding words of his own. Ilana remembers the decree as ending their legal claims on one another, followed by seven years in which he did not write to her.

Separation and the Return of Correspondence

The divorce ends their marriage but not their exchange. In a later letter, Alexander tries to explain why he left by invoking Ilana’s capacity to bear children and describing himself as having had no chance against her. He portrays himself as having run away, only for her to reach him even in his retreat. The explanation is intimate but oblique: it frames their separation through unequal power and pursuit without resolving the accumulated harm Ilana has described.

Their correspondence returns to the past in a teasing, barbed register. On August 2, 1976, Ilana tells Alexander not to write through Zakheim and invites him either to write directly, appear in person, or invite her to a wedding. She recalls that nearly a month has passed since he imagined sweeping a secretary off her feet, and mocks the distance between his grand self-presentation and the absence of any actual wedding. The letter turns his imagined proposal into a test of whether he can make a real gesture toward another life, while also exposing how closely Ilana continues to follow his claims and plans.

In another passage, Alexander imagines restoring a crumbling house, repairing its fountain, and establishing a settlement where the two of them might live together. The fantasy gives their bond a domestic and almost ritual form, but it remains hypothetical. His letters also reveal a wish to return rather than leave the future entirely to others; Ilana’s replies keep that possibility emotionally charged without treating it as a reconciliation already achieved.

Shared Family and Unresolved Attachment

Their son remains a living connection between them even after the marriage ends. When Ilana visits Boaz at the neglected house where he is staying, she remembers his childhood illness and the kidney complications that preceded her divorce from Alexander. She also recalls that Alexander had intended to donate a kidney to him. The memory joins the couple through parental concern: even in a scene where Alexander is absent, Ilana understands Boaz’s history through the care and crisis they once shared.

Ilana’s later writing holds anger and attachment together. She recalls the cruelty of the marriage and tells Alexander to leave her new life alone, yet she also imagines the home he might build with another wife: a garden, a child, books, and ordinary domestic care. That imagined future is not simply a blessing or a rejection. Her fantasy ends by placing herself back inside it, as an unseen presence between him and his imagined family. The image makes the central contradiction of their relationship plain: the marriage is over, but each continues to occupy the other’s inner life.

Narrative Significance

The relationship is reconstructed through alternating perspectives rather than a single authoritative account. Alexander’s explanation emphasizes his flight and Ilana’s power to pursue him; Ilana’s recollections preserve the tenderness that preceded the marriage’s deterioration while also naming the violence and despair within it. Their letters therefore do not settle the question of what their love meant. They show instead how intimacy can survive as memory, accusation, and imagined return, even when the couple’s shared life has ended.