Relationship between Michel Sommo and Boaz Brandstetter

Michel Sommo and Boaz Brandstetter’s relationship moves from open rejection toward an understated, hard-won affection. Michel is Boaz’s stepfather, but neither the role nor the household’s support initially earns him acceptance: Boaz insults him and resists his authority. Michel’s response is not to demand love or pretend to be Boaz’s father. He sets limits, offers concrete help, and leaves room for Boaz to choose what kind of life he wants. Their later closeness emerges in precisely those ordinary acts—work arranged, food shared, a visit made possible—that neither man turns into a sentimental declaration.

The first encounter: authority refused

When Boaz returned to the family home one winter night, he was thirteen and a half, broad and tall for his age, and threatening to leave the kibbutz unless his mother sent him to an agricultural high school. Michel woke and offered him the immediate necessities of shelter: dry clothes, food, a wash, and a conversation the next morning. Boaz answered by challenging who Michel was to tell him what to do. The exchange establishes their central difficulty: Michel is the adult in the household, but Boaz refuses to recognize that position as a source of authority.

Michel did not answer the challenge by escalating it into a physical contest. Instead, he told Boaz to go outside, calm down, return, and try the conversation again with more consideration. When Boaz turned toward the door, Ilana stood between him and the exit and agreed that he could attend agricultural school if that was what he really wanted. Michel added a condition: Boaz should apologize to his mother, ask properly, and thank her. The demand was an attempt to impose ordinary civility, not to claim a father’s unquestioned obedience.

The encounter ended in contradiction rather than reconciliation. Boaz expressed contempt for Michel and for his mother’s marriage, then reached out and touched Ilana’s hair before remarking kindly on the baby. Michel’s care for the infant and his insistence on household manners did not dissolve Boaz’s hostility. But the scene also shows that the family’s exchanges are not reducible to hostility: tenderness and contempt appear side by side, without resolving one another.

Help without a claim to affection

With help from Michel’s brother, the family secured Boaz a place at Telamim Agricultural High School. Boaz had requested the school, but later called it Devil’s Island; the name captures how little the arrangement felt like belonging to him. Michel and Ilana paid the fees, and the family did not visit at Boaz’s request. The money came through a strained household budget, supplemented by small monthly contributions from Michel’s immigrant parents in France, who had never met Boaz and had five other children and eight grandchildren to support. Michel’s practical involvement therefore began well before the two were able to speak easily.

When Boaz later got into trouble with the police, Michel went to the station in person to arrange a private conversation. Boaz initially refused release and said he wanted to be left alone. Michel did not argue that Boaz owed him affection or even gratitude. He invited him to state what he wanted from life, while acknowledging that Boaz could reject the invitation. When Boaz said he wanted nothing, Michel stood to leave and made clear that he would not keep pleading. Boaz then threatened that he might commit a crime and run away; Michel still did not bargain with the threat. He gave Boaz a short choice about whether to accept bail.

That refusal to be drawn into a contest changed the conversation. Boaz asked why Michel had travelled from Jerusalem to help if he did not care about him. Michel answered with humor, rather than a declaration of paternal love, and asked whether Boaz was coming. He secured Boaz’s release using money supplied by Alexander Gideon, took him to a kosher Chinese restaurant in Tel Aviv, and went with him to a film. The narrator notes that an observer might have mistaken the two for father and son, a reversal that quietly contrasts the ease of their outing with Boaz’s earlier refusal to recognize Michel as family.

Michel also acted on what Boaz said he wanted next: work and earnings of his own. Without waiting for a family discussion, he arranged a job with a wholesale greengrocer connected to his cousin. Boaz’s independence mattered to him; Michel’s response was to help make it possible, rather than insist that the young man remain dependent on the household. Boaz stayed at the Ramat Aviv Planetarium through a personal connection Michel could call upon, and became interested in its telescopes and optics. The arrangement linked Michel’s network to Boaz’s chosen interests without requiring Boaz to present himself as reconciled.

A bond built through repeated visits and refusals

Michel’s later relationship with Boaz develops through more than crisis management. He helped persuade Boaz to visit the family in Jerusalem. During one weekend, Boaz and Michel competed for the attention of Yifat, while Michel prepared a meal for the household and arranged for a neighbor’s son to look after her so the adults could go to a film. Small, shared domestic circumstances replaced the earlier confrontation: the two were now spending a Sabbath together, and Michel was making room for Boaz in family life without demanding that the past be forgotten.

Their ease remained uneven. When Boaz proposed that Michel invest in a tourist-boat business in the Red Sea, Michel refused to lend or invest money. He made the refusal plain and invoked the principle that bread should be earned through labor. The boundary mattered because Boaz had previously sought work and financial independence; Michel distinguished supporting those aims from financing a venture he did not consider a responsible use of money. Yet his refusal did not become a withdrawal of hospitality. He came down from the windowsill where he had been repairing a blind, made food for Boaz and his friend, and later took the family out for a film and ice cream.

When Boaz asked about the money from America, Michel explained that it belonged in equal shares to Ilana, Boaz, and Yifat, although the children could not control their portions while they were legally minors. He told Boaz that money for study was available, but that he would not finance the proposed boats, tourists, or other spending he regarded as unearned. In Michel’s explanation, support carried responsibilities and limits; it was meant to help Boaz become a person capable of making his way, not to underwrite every plan. Boaz listened without answering. His silence, and the narrator’s description of the two as silently fond of one another beneath their contempt and humiliation, mark a change that neither converts into an explicit reconciliation speech.

Recognition, inheritance, and the limits of the record

The family’s requests for financial help from Alexander Gideon form part of Michel and Boaz’s relationship because Michel repeatedly turns assistance into practical arrangements. The Sommos jointly requested substantial support for their household and for the future of the children, as well as funds toward buying and renovating Alkalai House in Hebron. Michel also accepted that the source of Boaz’s bail money should eventually be disclosed. In a later letter, he invited Boaz to Jerusalem for the Sabbath, promised a room in a planned extension, and explained that the money was his father’s. He encouraged Boaz not to let pride prevent him from visiting, while offering a place even before the extension was built.

By the time Alexander returned to Israel seriously ill, he had revised his will to provide for Boaz and the Sommo family. His account recognizes the good Michel had shown, and the care and judgment that had helped Boaz through repeated difficulties. The inheritance belongs to Alexander’s decisions, not to a settlement Michel and Boaz arrange between themselves; still, it confirms that Michel’s sustained work within the family has become visible to the man whose money helped support it.

The evidence does not end with a formal declaration that Michel and Boaz are father and son, or with a complete account of what their relationship becomes afterward. Its significance lies instead in the movement from Boaz’s early rejection of Michel’s place in the household to a pattern of shared meals, outings, candid disagreement, and quiet fondness. Michel does not demand the title Boaz once denied him. He earns a place through persistence and restraint, offering help where it can be used and refusing it where he believes it would undermine Boaz’s independence.