Palestine occupies two registers in the novel: it is a place of competing political and property claims, and a landscape whose meaning shifts between dream, memory, and disappointment. Volodya Gudonski’s account makes that division intensely personal, while the plans of Michel Sommo and others tie the territory to organized efforts to acquire land and reshape who lives on it.

Palestine in Volodya Gudonski’s Recollection

In a long, digressive address to a visitor, Volodya Gudonski describes Palestine as both dream and nightmare, setting the imagined promise against what he calls its harsh reality. The recollection begins in the landscape of his childhood in Shirky, with open meadows, forests, and a stream, then turns toward his journey to Palestine. His account presents the move not as a straightforward arrival in a promised homeland but as an experience shadowed by fear, exile, and disillusionment.

Volodya recalls being sent to Ottoman Palestine after an incident in his youth and describes the country through images of wilderness, graveyards, prophets, Bedouins, and danger. He makes the landscape a stage for his estrangement from God and for a life he judges to have been squandered. His sweeping claims about the absence of God and love in the land belong to his troubled, self-accusing monologue; they convey his state of mind rather than offer an impersonal description of Palestine.

He also links the country’s history to settlement and religious memory, claiming that he was the first Jew since biblical times to extract honey from bees there. In the same recollection, he reflects on the land built by the Jews as flawed and imperfect, yet built nonetheless. Palestine thus remains unresolved in his telling: neither the sacred ideal he once might have imagined nor a place he can dismiss as merely real and ordinary.

Land, Settlement, and Political Action

Elsewhere, Palestine is the setting for political organizing and practical schemes over territory. Before the Six-Day War, Michel Sommo campaigned against the government’s wait-and-see policy and supported taking the military initiative. After the war he joined the Greater Israel Movement, working in propaganda and demonstrations, and later helped found the Jewish Fellowship Movement. That organization opposed troop disengagements in the Sinai and Golan Heights and pursued attempts to buy land from Arabs near Bethlehem; Michel was interviewed by police twice in connection with the group, though the account says he was not charged and was not personally involved in violent lawbreaking.

A proposal Michel sent to Alexander A. Gideon makes the material stakes explicit. It requested funds to recover Alkalai House in Hebron, describing it as Jewish property seized by force during the 1929 Palestine riots and proposing repossession through payment of the full market price. The appeal presents purchase, rather than violence, as the method of recovery, while showing how property and historical dispossession remain bound together in the characters’ plans.

Alexander A. Gideon’s response to Michel’s prospectus questions the cost and consequences of a broader population-transfer plan. As he understood it, the proposal would pay Arabs for their land and property and provide one-way passage at public expense. Gideon argues that compensating two million people at the proposed rate would be financially ruinous, then turns the scheme into an imagined exchange of the coastal plain for the mountains. His reply exposes the gap between a political vision of territorial acquisition and the immense human and financial arrangements required to enact it.

The Bethlehem Negotiation

A later letter reveals a more specific effort to acquire land west of Bethlehem. Gideon writes that Michel’s trip to Paris had been financed by a backer identified only as Mr. N., and that Michel had negotiated on behalf of his organization with a Christian religious order headquartered in Toulouse. The order was not prepared to sell its land in the Holy Land, but was apparently willing to exchange its fields near Bethlehem for a substantial building and attached land within the pre-1967 borders.

The proposed transaction connected several places and interests: the Bethlehem land, the order’s headquarters in Toulouse, and property in Zikhron Yaakov that Gideon might sell. Gideon says that the exchange depended on his changing decision about his own property, and that he intended to try to persuade him. Michel’s restored French nationality, arranged after his Paris visit, had also supplied a legal basis for a transaction in which the financier preferred not to appear formally. The correspondence therefore presents land acquisition not as an abstract ideal but as a chain of negotiations, financing, property transfers, and political positioning.

Private Wealth and the Redemption of Land

The political language of land redemption enters domestic life through Michel’s expectations about Alexander A. Gideon’s money. In a letter describing life at home, Ilana reports that Michel has become absorbed in property development: he teaches her about building plots, grants, property law, loans, working capital, and investment costs, while assuming that Gideon’s wealth will eventually be available to the family. Michel interprets a future donation as a means of atoning for Gideon’s sins and expects the money to support the redemption of the land. The account shows how a political and religious mission can also function as an anticipated source of private capital.

Across these episodes, Palestine is never only a landscape. Volodya’s recollection makes it a painful collision between promised meaning and lived experience; political organizers and property schemes treat it as territory to be acquired, settled, or exchanged. The contrast between those registers gives the place its narrative force: claims of sacred purpose coexist with negotiations over money, ownership, migration, and the people already living on the land.