Mount Carmel

Mount Carmel is both a place of care and a landscape of solitude. In the letters, its sanatorium garden becomes the site of Ilana Sommo’s encounter with Volodya Gudonski, while the mountain’s wooded valleys and caves are part of Boaz Brandstetter’s private wanderings.

Setting and Sanatorium

The sanatorium where Volodya Gudonski stays is described as being on Mount Carmel, above the harbor at Haifa. Its gardens are presented as quiet and shaded, with a view toward the sea; a sheltered arbor provides the setting for Ilana’s visit. The scene places the sanatorium within a calm institutional refuge, distinct from the abandoned family property at Zikhron that she has just left.

Ilana’s Visit

In a letter dated 15 August 1976, Ilana recounts traveling from Zikhron to Haifa and finding Volodya alone at a table in the garden. She brings him chrysanthemums from the Central Bus Station. He receives her formally, places one flower in his dressing-gown buttonhole and the others in his yogurt glass, and mistakes her visit for attendance at his funeral. His response makes the visit an encounter shaped by his confusion as well as by the distance between them.

The visit also connects Mount Carmel to Ilana’s earlier, interrupted journey. On 9 August she had set out for the sanatorium but, on impulse, got off at Hadera and took a bus to Zikhron instead. Her later arrival in Haifa completes the visit she had postponed, after first confronting the overgrown, neglected state of the family house.

Boaz’s Mountain Wanderings

Mount Carmel is also part of Boaz’s roaming territory. He disappears for three or four days at a time to measure wooded valleys, explore abandoned caves, and wander through dense vegetation; he also goes down to the sea alone on a raft made without nails. These excursions make the mountain a space for solitary movement beyond the daily life of the household and commune.

As winter approaches, the narrator anticipates that the heavy rains will require the telescope to be taken down from the roof and will bring Boaz’s solitary journeys to an end. The mountain’s seasons therefore place a limit on his freedom to disappear, although the account presents this as an expected change rather than a completed one.

Narrative Significance

Mount Carmel gathers two different forms of separation into one landscape. Ilana travels there to approach Volodya, whose recognition of her is unreliable; Boaz uses the mountain to withdraw from other people and the settled life at home. The contrast gives the place a double role: it offers a setting for attempted contact while also sheltering an ongoing retreat into solitude.