Father-son relationship between Alexander Gideon and Volodya Gudonski

The father-son relationship between Alexander Gideon and Volodya Gudonski is defined by a persistent imbalance of power: Volodya commands the family’s attention and resources, while Alexander struggles to make a life not governed by his father’s will. The relationship is neither simple rejection nor reconciliation. It runs through Alexander’s memories as a sequence of silencing, extravagant intervention, withdrawal, and belated provision, leaving property in the son’s hands but no settled answer to what he owes his father or should do with the inheritance.

Identity and family background

Volodya Gudonski is presented as a wealthy land dealer and importer of iron, a man whose reputation precedes him and whose influence extends into both business and private life. Alexander recalls arriving with his intended at his father’s estate between Binyamina and Zikhron Yaakov in 1959. Volodya’s scale of life—his estate, his staff, his authority, and the stories told about his temper—makes the meeting feel less like an ordinary introduction than an encounter with a patriarch whose approval can shape the young couple’s future.

Alexander’s recollection also comes with a complicated family chronology. Volodya arranged financial support for his son and his intended, yet later described Alexander as an unremarkable, bureaucratic figure in comparison with the more exciting bond he imagined with his daughter-in-law. That contrast points to a central strain in the relationship: Volodya could provide for Alexander while simultaneously diminishing him, treating his son less as an independent adult than as an inadequate presence beside a woman who captured his attention.

A courtship overtaken by paternal authority

During the 1959 visit, Volodya took charge of the proceedings. He led the couple around the estate, conversed at length with Alexander’s intended, and set the tone for the visit from beginning to end. Alexander, meanwhile, was denied a meaningful part in the conversation. Years later, as he wrote his memories in Chicago, he recalled the old pattern returning in his face: the foolish grin he had worn while his father monopolized the encounter. His recollection ties that enforced silence to a lasting grievance, especially because his intended seemed to join in the scene rather than stand apart from it.

The visit ended with a sudden practical consequence. After appearing to fall asleep, Volodya rose as the couple tried to leave and kissed the young woman farewell. In the early hours, he telephoned Manfred Zakheim with instructions to buy the couple an apartment in Jerusalem and to arrange a wedding. Alexander later emphasized that the pair had gone only to introduce his intended to his father; the marriage question had not been settled. Volodya’s intervention therefore did more than offer help. It turned a tentative family visit into a decision made on the couple’s behalf, demonstrating how his generosity could also function as command.

The pattern continued after the wedding, which Volodya forgot to attend. While away with a new mistress, he left his son absent from the occasion in another way: he was not there to mark a major family event. Soon afterward, while Alexander was away on army maneuvers in the Negev, Volodya approached Alexander’s wife and proposed a private outing. Alexander’s account reports that Volodya contrasted his son’s supposed lack of spirit with the connection he claimed to share with her. When she refused, he insulted her and left. The episode reinforces the relationship’s asymmetry: Volodya asserted a special claim on his son’s marriage, while Alexander’s own position within it remained subject to his father’s judgments and intrusions.

Estrangement, parenthood, and retreat

When Alexander’s son Boaz was born, Volodya was in northern Portugal. He sent money to obtain a certificate naming a Himalayan peak after the child, an extravagant gesture that linked the family name to an improbable, distant monument. Yet this symbolic gift did not lead to steady closeness. When Boaz was two or three, Volodya withdrew from the family and refused to receive them. He dismissed workers and household staff, kept only an elderly Armenian companion, and lived increasingly apart from the estate’s former life. The property deteriorated around him as he turned to studying Persian, astrology, and the Feldenkrais Method.

The family eventually risked visiting despite Volodya’s refusal of contact. On that occasion, Alexander recalls being received with unexpected warmth. Volodya addressed both him and Boaz with a term Alexander translates as referring to a foundling, and repeatedly took the boy downstairs, after which Boaz returned with an old coin. He addressed Alexander’s wife by a name associated with Alexander’s deceased mother and expressed regret about her illness. The visit did not erase the preceding estrangement, but it offered a brief, tender counter-image to Volodya’s earlier rejection and domination. His attention to his grandson also gave the family a way back into the closed estate, even as his manner remained emotionally difficult and unpredictable.

Wealth, illness, and the unsettled legacy

Volodya’s wealth became another arena of conflict between father and son. He began distributing money to people and causes around him, while Zakheim worked to transfer property into Alexander’s name. Volodya resisted these efforts, dismissed Zakheim more than once, and assembled lawyers and professors to support his position. After nearly two years of property being lost through his donations, Zakheim arranged for Volodya to be taken for observation and eventually committed. Volodya then changed course again: he signed a detailed will in the family’s favor and wrote a melancholy letter that forgave his relatives, asked their forgiveness, warned them against one another, and urged them to pity the child.

From 1966 onward, Volodya lived in a private room in a sanatorium on Mount Carmel, silently looking out at the sea. Alexander says he visited twice and was not recognized. That failure of recognition gives their final estrangement a different character from the earlier refusals: the son can come to his father, but the father can no longer acknowledge him. Volodya’s money had helped build the family villa in Yefe Nof, while the abandoned estate between Binyamina and Zikhron Yaakov remained registered in Alexander’s name. The inheritance thus survived the relationship in concrete form even as direct communication became impossible.

Narrative significance

Alexander’s account presents paternal generosity as inseparable from paternal power. Volodya’s apartment, wedding instructions, gifts, and eventual will all provide material support, but they also expose his habit of making decisions that reshape other people’s lives. Against that history, Alexander’s later uncertainty about whether to sell the old estate, give money to others, or return and restore it is more than a financial dilemma. It is an unresolved response to the father who both secured his inheritance and made independence difficult. The relationship ends without a final conversation or mutual recognition: the son retains the property and the memories, while the father remains silent in the sanatorium.