Father-son relationship between Alexander Gideon and Volodya Gideon

The father-son relationship between Alexander Gideon and Volodya Gudonski is revealed through recollection rather than a sustained account of their life together. Its defining condition is a childhood marked by isolation: Alexander grew up on a large, secluded estate with little company beyond his father and a rhesus monkey. Years later, when Ilana Sommo visits Volodya in a sanatorium, his confusion and her careful attention show the relationship’s continuing presence in family memory, even as its history remains shadowed by loss and absence.

Childhood on the Estate

Alexander’s childhood is remembered as profoundly solitary. At the estate, he had no mother, siblings, or ordinary childhood friend; the rhesus monkey that he and Volodya dressed as a waiter and trained to carry pomegranate juice was his sole companion. The unusual domestic ritual suggests a father and son sharing an enclosed world, but it does not erase the child’s lack of companionship beyond the household. The monkey eventually bit Alexander, leaving a scar, and Volodya ordered a servant to shoot it. Alexander dug the animal’s grave and wrote an epitaph. The episode ends not with another companion arriving, but with Alexander alone again.

The estate itself gives that isolation a physical setting. As an adult, Ilana finds the grounds overgrown and the house silent; the town of Zikhron has expanded toward it without quite reaching it. The once-imposing property has become a ruin, its architecture softened by neglect. Her visit prompts memories of the child who lived there, linking the present desolation of the estate to the loneliness of Alexander’s upbringing. The house is not simply a family possession in these recollections: it is the landscape in which his relationship with Volodya developed, and the place where the absence of other close ties became part of his childhood.

Loss and Family Memory

A central wound in the account is the death of Alexander’s mother. She died during a gap between the departure of the day nurse and the arrival of the night nurse, while Volodya was away collecting iron girders from Italy. The recollection establishes the circumstances without explaining more than the narrative supplies. For Alexander, the death belongs to a childhood already described as lacking a mother, and it helps explain why the remembered household is so sharply defined by absence.

Ilana recalls the photograph of Alexander’s mother that once stood in Volodya’s library, flanked by candles and accompanied by a vase of everlasting flowers. In her later return to the estate, she wonders whether these objects have survived. Their possible disappearance makes family memory feel fragile: the photograph and its arrangements once preserved a place for the dead within Volodya’s rooms, but time may have erased even those memorial traces. Ilana also remembers the tobacco, sadness, and vodka associated with Volodya and his many rooms. These impressions connect the father’s presence to an atmosphere of grief, while her comparison with the qualities she recognizes in their son suggests that family inheritance is felt as well as consciously remembered.

Volodya in Later Life

On 15 August 1976, Ilana travels from Zikhron to Haifa to visit Volodya at a sanatorium on Mount Carmel. She finds him alone in a garden, seated at a table with cake and yogurt. His appearance and manner remain imposing to her, but his understanding of the visit is uncertain: he addresses her as Madame Rovina and thanks her for coming to his funeral. He accepts the chrysanthemums she brings, places one in his buttonhole, and puts the rest in his yogurt glass. The gestures are precise, but his account of why she has come does not match the visit.

The meeting combines disorientation with moments of recognition and apparent playfulness. When Ilana asks about his condition, Volodya looks at her, chuckles as if he has detected a small deception, and seems willing to forgive it. He then turns to a question about whether a deeply religious person can be pardoned for cruelty and neglect. Ilana listens, pretends to sip the drink he offers, and brushes crumbs from his beard after he finishes his cake. Volodya strokes her hair and begins reciting a passage before losing his way and falling silent. The scene does not provide a direct conversation between father and son; instead, Ilana’s visit makes Volodya’s frailty visible to the family member who remembers the estate and its past.

The Bond in Retrospect

The relationship emerges through a contrast between shared childhood life and the lasting solitude that followed. Volodya and Alexander did things together, most memorably making the monkey part of a household performance, yet the account also emphasizes the absence of other children and the loss of Alexander’s mother. The monkey’s death is a small domestic event with a lasting consequence: Alexander’s companionship narrows again, and he carries the memory in the scar and the epitaph.

The later scenes do not settle whether Volodya was a source of comfort, a cause of pain, or both. They hold those possibilities together. Ilana’s account remembers the father through the rooms, objects, and childhood episodes that shaped Alexander’s life, then shows him as an old man whose thoughts wander but who can still respond to her presence. The relationship’s significance lies in that uneven transmission: Volodya remains central to Alexander’s memories, while much of what the reader learns about father and son comes through another generation’s act of remembering.