Boaz’s commune restores the Gideon estate

Boaz Brandstetter’s commune restores the abandoned Gideon estate at Zikhron Yaakov, changing it from an overgrown family property into a functioning settlement. The work is both practical and relational: Boaz gathers people and resources to repair the house and cultivate the land, while his ailing father, Alexander Gideon, returns to a home where he is no longer its commanding owner but a dependent, watchful presence. The restored estate becomes the setting for a provisional form of family life, built through labor, shared routines, and care rather than reconciliation declared outright.

Background and Arrangement

The restoration begins as an arrangement made on Alexander’s behalf. Manfred Zakheim reports that Alexander has instructed him to find Boaz and help him establish a kind of hippie colony on the father’s abandoned land. Zakheim follows through despite his resentment at being given another task: he goes to Zikhron Yaakov, pleads, pays, and works to pacify the local police. His account makes clear that the commune’s beginning depends not only on Boaz’s initiative but also on an older network of money, favors, and intervention.

This episode takes place amid other attempts to turn money and property toward political and religious purposes. The Sommo family had sought substantial funds for family expenses and for buying and renovating Alkalai House in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, a property described as seized during the 1929 riots and now pursued through a purchase at market price. Michel Sommo’s political activity also included advocacy for acquiring land and encouraging Arab residents to leave through financial inducements. Against this larger history, Boaz’s work at the estate is not simply another property transaction: its immediate result is a lived-in communal household, though the land remains bound up with inheritance and competing ideas of redemption.

From Overgrowth to a Working Settlement

When Alexander observes the estate, the transformation is already under way. Eight young people have pulled weeds, spread goat manure, and dug the ground. Vegetable beds replace the exotic roses once cultivated by Alexander’s father; Ilana Sommo volunteers to make scarecrows, and Yifat waters the garden. Beside the repaired marble pool, now stocked with carp instead of goldfish, two wicker chairs provide a place for Ilana and Alexander to sit together. These changes restore use to the grounds while preserving traces of the older garden.

The commune’s work reaches well beyond the planting beds. Boaz and his companions clear roots and branches, remove rocks, carry stones, and mix concrete to lay a new floor. The house’s rooms are gradually reclaimed: vegetation that had grown through windows is part of a landscape of neglect, while later repairs include clearing the house, filling cracks, rewiring the electricity, and replacing sunken tiles with concrete. Pigeons are moved from the house to a dovecote; the peacock, by contrast, continues to roam through bedrooms, corridors, and staircases. The estate becomes habitable through numerous small acts rather than a single renovation.

The restored property also acquires the equipment and routines of a working farm. The commune has a small tractor and its attachments, beehives, a goat shed, a stable for a donkey, and coops for geese. Its members keep hens, bake bread, make yogurt and goat-milk cheese, and plan to make wine from grapes. Storehouses and shelters hold seed, fertilizer, kerosene, oil, and irrigation supplies. A workshop in the cellar is put back into use, where Boaz makes furniture. The work turns the estate from inherited acreage into a place sustained by cultivation, repair, and shared production.

Boaz and the People of the Commune

Boaz occupies a distinctive position in the community, but Alexander is careful to distinguish leadership from command: Boaz exists there as a first among equals. The young people sing while working or gathering around a bonfire, and the commune follows its routines quietly around Alexander, who feels like a ghost lodged in the house’s rooms. Most rooms are still empty at first, and the scale of the property emphasizes both the settlement’s small beginnings and the distance between its occupants and the family history embodied by the house.

The group grows over time as other people arrive, described by Ilana as lost souls. The garden is cultivated, orchard trees are pruned, saplings are planted on the hillside, and the communal household becomes more self-sufficient. The evidence does not present this growth as a formal organization with a defined membership or doctrine. It shows a community taking shape through shared labor and the repeated practical needs of living on the property.

Alexander’s observations also register Boaz’s care through concrete acts. When Alexander asks for a table on which to write, Boaz makes one from packing boxes and eucalyptus branches, adding a slanted footrest; he also obtains an electric fan. He makes a walking stick that helps his father rise and move around. Later, he moves Alexander’s bed, table, and typewriter to his mother’s old room, which has a small balcony and a view toward the coastal plain and sea. These provisions do not end the distance between father and son, but they make Alexander’s presence in the restored home possible.

Inheritance, Memory, and Daily Life

The restoration repeatedly brings the past into practical contact with the present. A stone water hole dug by Volodya Gudonski is cleared and restored by his grandson, though the residents mistakenly call it a well. In a niche beneath a rusty boiler, they discover the treasure chest Alexander’s father hid there. Only five Turkish gold coins remain, and Boaz keeps them for Yifat. The find is modest, but it links the estate’s hidden family history to the younger generation’s future.

Other inherited objects and features are given new uses. The pool is repaired and restocked, the old eucalyptus trees remain part of the grounds, and the telescope on the roof offers Alexander the possibility of joining Boaz in looking at the stars, though his weakness makes the rope ladder difficult to climb. For a time, the bottle chimes Boaz has made hang upstairs, their sound marking the weather and the changing life of the house. The former property is neither returned to its original condition nor erased; it is altered by the needs and labor of its new occupants.

Alexander’s position within this life remains limited. Boaz usually speaks to him only about ordinary greetings or what is needed from town. Alexander enjoys the communal singing, cooking, and work, yet his physical weakness restricts his movement, and he depends on others for assistance. In his lucid hours, he teaches Boaz spelling and basic syntax. The arrangement reverses the usual direction of authority: the father, once associated with ownership and command, is now a learner and caregiver-recipient, while the son repairs the home and makes room for him.

Significance and Outcome

The commune’s restoration gives Boaz a way to inhabit the inheritance without simply reproducing his father’s former household. Its agriculture, repairs, and shared domestic routines make the abandoned estate productive again, while its informal structure contrasts with the legal, financial, and political dealings surrounding land elsewhere in the story. That contrast is not a clean escape from inheritance: Alexander’s money helps Boaz acquire equipment, Zakheim’s intervention enables the settlement to begin, and the recovered coins remain tied to the family’s past.

The outcome is therefore both material and provisional. The estate is repaired, cultivated, and increasingly equipped for self-sufficiency, but Alexander remains ill and emotionally estranged from Boaz, and Ilana’s account conveys her own uncertainty and grief. Restoration does not undo the family’s injuries or settle every dispute. It creates a shared place in which care can be practiced through a table, a walking stick, a repaired pool, and work on the land, even when the people living there cannot yet bridge their silences.