Relationship between Ilana and Yifat

Ilana Sommo’s relationship with Yifat is defined by intimate daily care and, later, by the distress of being separated from her daughter. Yifat’s illness, routines, and small domestic rituals make motherhood concrete; when Michel Sommo takes Yifat away and begins divorce proceedings, Ilana’s longing for her becomes a measure of what she has lost and what she still hopes to repair.

Family history and the first divorce

Ilana’s earlier marriage to Alexander Gideon forms part of the legal and emotional history surrounding her family, but the surviving court records give a stark account rather than a picture of her relationship with Yifat. In 1968, the Rabbinical Court found that Ilana had admitted adultery and ruled that she forfeited her ketubah and maintenance. In a separate Jerusalem District Court proceeding, Alexander disputed being the child’s father. The blood test was inconclusive, and the court proposed tissue testing; both Ilana and Alexander declined. Ilana withdrew her claim for maintenance for herself and the child, and the court struck out the claim after both parties stated that they had no further demands on each other. These records show how questions of parentage and financial responsibility shaped the family’s legal circumstances, but they do not establish Yifat’s biological parentage.

Care and family life with Michel

In Ilana’s account of family life with Michel, Yifat appears within a household that also includes her older son, Boaz Brandstetter. Michel gradually reconnects with Boaz, and one weekend he persuades him to visit the family in Jerusalem. Ilana recalls the contrast between Michel’s small frame and Boaz’s imposing size as the two compete for Yifat’s attention. After the Sabbath, Michel prepares a meal, arranges a babysitter with the neighbors’ son, and takes the family to the cinema. The episode places Yifat at the center of a tentative shared domestic life: her presence gives the adults a reason to gather, even as their relationships with one another remain complicated.

A later visit to Haifa reveals Michel’s attentiveness to Yifat in a moment of illness. While Ilana is away, he notices a fever before taking her to nursery, cancels a long-awaited meeting with the deputy minister of defense, and takes her to a clinic. He follows the doctor’s advice, obtains medicine, prepares food, and stays beside her through the day. Ilana returns to find him asleep at the foot of Yifat’s bed, fully dressed. Her first response is irritation and suspicion that his sacrifice might make her feel guilty; the account nevertheless records the sustained practical care he has given their daughter. Their parenting is thus shown both through what Michel does for Yifat and through Ilana’s conflicted reading of his actions.

Separation and the struggle to see Yifat

The relationship changes sharply when Ilana takes Yifat to stay with Boaz in an abandoned building between Zikhron Yaakov and Binyamina. Michel has been away in Paris. On his return, Alexander has also arrived, and Michel is shocked by the situation and by Ilana’s refusal, for the time being, to return home. Friends and relatives discuss a formal complaint over Ilana taking the child without Michel’s consent, but Michel refuses to file one. His refusal does not prevent the separation from deepening: later, through Rabbi Bouskila, Ilana learns that Michel has initiated divorce proceedings and that he regards her as a rebellious wife. He has sent his brother-in-law to collect Yifat, and Ilana is told that she is forbidden to see her.

The account makes the separation tangible through the ordinary things Ilana imagines doing with Yifat. In a letter to Michel, she pictures the two of them sharing meals, bathing and dressing the child, combing each other’s hair, and singing her to sleep. These details are not a report of current access: they are Ilana’s imagined reconstruction of family life from which she has been excluded. The domestic sequence gives her absence its particular weight, turning daily routines into reminders of the bond she cannot exercise in person.

Longing, responsibility, and unresolved distance

Ilana’s relatives try to intervene. Rahel and Yoash visit her, urge her to hire a lawyer and insist on her right to know what has happened to Yifat and to see her, and Rahel offers to speak with Michel about reconciliation. Ilana is too exhausted to take up the effort at that moment; she responds by asking to be left alone. Later, however, her letters make the wish for reunion explicit. She asks Michel to bring Yifat to Zikhron and offers forgiveness if he does. Her appeal joins the wish to see her daughter with a hope of resuming intimacy with Michel, though it does not show that either wish is fulfilled.

Even as Ilana begins caring for the gravely ill Alexander, Yifat remains present in her thoughts. She wonders whether Michel collects their daughter from nursery, sings to her, or has placed her with relatives, and she imagines the household continuing without her. The narrative therefore holds two forms of care in tension: Ilana’s hands-on nursing of Alexander in the Zikhron house and her separation from Yifat, whose daily life she can only picture from afar. The relationship’s last presented condition is not reunion but yearning, shaped by the practical and legal conflict between Ilana and Michel and by the silence through which that conflict is sustained.