Mother-son relationship between Ilana Sommo and Boaz Gideon

Ilana Sommo and Boaz Gideon’s mother-son relationship is defined by a painful gap between Ilana’s enduring need to care for her son and Boaz’s hard-won independence. When they meet at his home in Zikhron Yaakov, he receives her with easy hospitality rather than reproach. Their conversation reveals that, as a child, he had mistaken his parents’ fighting and his mother’s repeated crises for events caused by him. As an adult, he can name that history without rejecting her: he tells her that he loved her, and still does not despise her, even as she struggles to believe she has anything left to give him.

Childhood and parental conflict

An earlier family memory gives the relationship a gentler frame. After the Six-Day War, Ilana recalls a summer in Ashkelon when Alexander Gideon built a raft from wooden posts and rope, taught Boaz sailors’ knots, and carried Ilana and the boy ashore after a dangerous moment at sea. The episode places Boaz within a shared family past shaped by his parents’ care for him, even as the memory is narrated through Ilana’s uncertainty about what she saw in Alexander’s face. It is not a simple portrait of a secure household; rather, it is a remembered instance of parental protection amid the conflicts that later came to dominate the family.

By the time Ilana visits Boaz in Zikhron Yaakov, she is drawn to the sound of his voice before she has even faced him. She considers leaving without being seen, then watches him emerge from the house and recognizes how much he has changed since she last saw him in Jerusalem. His calm identification of her makes the encounter immediate, but Ilana’s own response is hesitant: she twists the strap of her handbag and claims she has only stopped briefly on the way to visit Rahel Morag. She also falsely says that Yifat and Michel Sommo send their greetings. Her evasions show how difficult it is for her to approach her son plainly, even when she has come to see him.

The visit to Boaz’s home

Boaz responds to the visit through practical acts of welcome. He asks Cindy to bring water, explains that the house has no electricity, and says that he has recently found and fitted a tap to a water pipeline. He offers Ilana food and drink, introduces the two volunteers staying there, and makes clear that she is his guest. His household is modest and improvised, but he has made space for people and work. The contrast between Ilana’s anxious arrival and his matter-of-fact hospitality gives their reunion its emotional shape: she comes expecting to be a nuisance, while he treats her presence as something that requires care rather than explanation.

Ilana’s embarrassment persists. She apologizes for bringing no provisions and calls herself an inadequate mother. Boaz does not try to comfort her with a sentimental denial; he accepts the charge without making it a reason to turn her away. He places a hand on her hip to guide her toward the house and warns her about a broken step. Inside, the memory of having borne and nursed him overwhelms her. She recalls the diphtheria that nearly killed him when he was four and the later kidney complications before her divorce from Alexander. She also remembers that Alexander had intended to donate a kidney to Boaz. The adult son standing before her is at once familiar through these memories and difficult for her to approach as a grown man.

What Boaz remembers

When Ilana asks whether he has ever loved anyone, Boaz answers by including her and Alexander among the people he loved as a child, when he understood them as his parents. He explains that their shouting and fighting made him think he was to blame. During Ilana’s repeated suicide attempts and hospitalizations, he wanted to retaliate against Alexander; when Ilana was involved with Alexander’s friends, he wanted to harm them. He says that, instead, he used to fight people who came within reach. This account gives his past violence a specific family context without excusing it: as a child he misread the adults’ conflict as his responsibility, and anger became a way of responding to what he could not understand.

Boaz describes himself as having changed. He says he is now against beating people unless someone hits him first, and that his concerns are work, rest, and the country. His declaration of Zionism sits beside his condemnation of wars, killing, and political violence. In the conversation with his mother, this shift matters as evidence of a son who can look back at the harm produced by his childhood without reducing himself to it. He can speak directly about what he felt, including his love for Ilana, while also defining the limits he now places on violence.

An offer, and its limits

Boaz’s care for Ilana later takes the form of an invitation. In a letter to Michel, he says Ilana seemed markedly worse when she visited and proposes that she and Yifat come to Zikhron Yaakov for a while, rest, and help around the house or vegetable garden. He has prepared a clean room with furniture and says that the household has water and electricity permits, tools, plants, sprinklers, and chickens. He is willing to make room for a kosher section if Ilana wants one. The offer is not merely an expression of affection: Boaz imagines a daily life in which his mother can work, rest, and live according to her own needs rather than being required to conform to Michel’s religious expectations.

Ilana cannot accept. In her reply to Boaz, she says that coming with Yifat would hurt Michel and admits that she feels she has failed and has nothing to contribute. Yet she also insists that a woman who feels like a failure can still love. Her wish to darn Boaz’s clothes and wash his underwear expresses a longing to care for him through ordinary domestic work, now that he is grown and has built a life of his own. She is astonished that he does not hate her and asks him, without demanding a reply, to try not to despise her. The exchange does not resolve the distance between them: Boaz offers a place in his home, while Ilana’s attachment remains bound up with guilt and her marriage to Michel.

Meaning of the relationship

Their relationship moves between remembered dependence and adult separation. Ilana recalls the infant at her breast and the sick child she feared losing; Boaz remembers a childhood in which his parents’ conflict seemed to make him responsible for their pain. At the Zikhron home, he is no longer simply the vulnerable boy she protected, and she is not able to recover closeness by treating herself as his caregiver. Nevertheless, his hospitality and his invitation to share his household show that tenderness survives the history of confusion and distress. Their bond is neither repaired by a single reunion nor expressed only through regret: it appears in a glass of water, a warning at a broken step, an offer of a room, and Ilana’s wish to perform small acts of care. The unresolved ending preserves both the possibility of renewed intimacy and the constraints that keep mother and son apart.