From jealousy and accusation to compassion and forgiveness between Alexander Gideon and Michel Sommo

The relationship between Alexander Gideon and Michel Sommo moves from wary dealings conducted through money and family disputes toward a late, hard-won recognition of each other’s character. At first, Alexander suspects Michel is directing Ilana’s appeals for financial help and sees assistance as entangled with pressure and concealed motives. Later, as illness and family life expose what each man has done for the other’s household, Alexander names Michel a good man, and Michel responds to Alexander’s approaching death with forgiveness, hospitality, and concrete efforts to help him.

Early dealings and financial suspicion

Alexander’s first view of Michel is shaped by letters asking for help on behalf of the Sommo family. Ilana offers to make formal concessions about Boaz’s paternity if Alexander will provide assistance, while explaining that Boaz is alienated from the family and may soon be expelled from boarding school. Michel knows about the appeal and has agreed that Ilana should write, though not to every part of what she proposes. The exchange makes the request both a family crisis and a negotiation in which Alexander’s power to help is difficult to separate from the history between the adults.

When Alexander replies to Michel, he says he believes Michel is the hidden force behind Ilana’s demands and suspects that her second letter is also meant to signal Michel’s financial difficulties. Even so, he offers another five thousand dollars through his lawyer, Manfred Zakheim, and invites Michel to state the final amount required to resolve the family’s problems. The offer comes with terms: Alexander does not want to be questioned about his motives or thanked extravagantly. His assistance is real, but he insists on controlling how it is understood and on keeping the transaction at arm’s length.

Michel and Ilana then specify the family’s needs in a formal letter. They request about sixty thousand dollars to clear a mortgage and add a room and a half, another comparable sum for the future of Boaz and their daughter, and a further ninety-five thousand dollars toward buying and renovating Alkalai House in the Jewish Quarter of Old Hebron. They describe the property as having been seized during the 1929 riots and their effort to repossess it through purchase rather than violence. Their letter also praises Alexander’s scientific writing and addresses him with conspicuous respect. Money, civic purpose, and personal deference are thus gathered into one appeal, while Alexander’s earlier suspicion leaves the relationship unsettled.

Assistance and a changing family alliance

The relationship begins to shift as the consequences of that assistance become visible in the family’s everyday life. Writing privately to Alexander, Ilana reports that Boaz is now all right: Alexander’s money and Michel’s judgment helped extricate him from trouble, and friends of the Sommo family helped close his police record. Michel, she says, is slowly finding a way toward Boaz. He has even persuaded him to visit the family in Jerusalem, where Michel and his much taller stepson compete playfully for the little girl’s attention. After the Sabbath, Michel prepares a meal for the family, and the adults go to a late film while a neighbor’s son watches the child.

Ilana presents this rapprochement as a challenge to Alexander’s expectations. Michel and Boaz are becoming almost friends, she observes, and small domestic scenes make the change visible: Michel climbs onto Boaz’s shoulders to change a veranda light bulb, while Yifat tries to put Michel’s slippers on Boaz’s feet. The account complicates any simple division between Alexander as rescuer and Michel as rival. Alexander’s money has mattered, but Michel is doing the slower work of building a relationship with the young man in his own home.

A later visit to Haifa offers another glimpse of Michel’s care for his family. While Ilana is away, he notices that Yifat has a fever, cancels a meeting with the deputy minister of defense that he had awaited for nearly two months, takes her to a clinic, and stays beside her through the day. He arranges medical care, gives her food and medicine, and sleeps on a mattress at the foot of her bed. Ilana returns from her visit to Alexander and reacts with irritation rather than gratitude, suspecting that Michel’s devotion may make her feel guilty. The scene does not resolve the tension between them, but it establishes the patient, practical care that Alexander later comes to recognize as part of Michel’s character.

Recognition amid illness and jealousy

When Alexander returns to Israel gravely ill and stays at his childhood home, Michel becomes anxious about Ilana’s presence there. Alexander writes to him that Ilana has chosen to remain for a few days to care for him before his treatment, and asks Michel to treat her kindly when she returns. He also answers the jealousy behind Michel’s suspicions directly: his relationship with Ilana is not a conventional marriage, and he is prepared to provide a sworn statement of her innocence if Michel needs one. The letter does not dismiss Michel’s sensitivity; Alexander says he understands it, in part because it is not wholly foreign to him.

Alexander’s account of his marriage to Ilana gives the present tension a longer history. He says he married her in 1959, that they separated in 1968 after a painful marriage, and that their divorce was vicious, with his own conduct marked by hatred and vindictiveness. He then left the country and severed contact. By the time he writes to Michel, he is reconsidering both his past and his own conduct as his life approaches its end. The letter is therefore more than a defense against jealousy: it is an attempt to speak plainly where earlier relationships had been shaped by hostility and silence.

The decisive change is Alexander’s judgment of Michel. He admits that most of Michel’s complaints against him are justified, while allowing that anger may have sharpened some of them. He says that he considers Michel not merely better than himself but a good man, a view formed during the previous year and especially the preceding days through what he has learned from Ilana and Boaz. Alexander also apologizes for the trouble his existence causes Michel and acknowledges his own arrogance. His revised will, he says, provides for Boaz and the Sommo family, including protection for Yifat from the poverty Michel described. The provision is practical help, but it now accompanies an explicit recognition of Michel’s worth rather than a demand that the gift be received on Alexander’s terms.

Forgiveness and practical solidarity

Michel’s answer arrives after he has learned that Alexander is desperately ill. He asks forgiveness for the harsh and unnecessary insults in his earlier letter, explaining that he wrote in great grief and did not know Alexander was near death. The apology reverses the earlier pattern of accusation: Michel does not defend the insults or ask Alexander to excuse them without explanation; he acknowledges the circumstances and seeks to repair the harm.

As the Days of Awe approach, Michel urges Ilana and Yifat to return home and asks Alexander to come at once for treatment at Hadassah Hospital, stay as their guest, and allow Boaz to remain close and care for his father. He offers to explain the situation to Rabbi Bouskila, arranges for special attention through a hospital contact, and plans to pray for Alexander at the Western Wall. His appeal joins religious hope to practical arrangements, rather than leaving care at the level of sentiment. He also asks Alexander to tell Ilana and Boaz that the two men have forgiven each other.

The reconciliation does not erase their earlier conflicts or make their histories interchangeable. It changes what each man is willing to see in the other: Alexander recognizes Michel’s goodness through his conduct toward the family, while Michel answers Alexander’s late candor with an apology and an open place in his home. Their relationship ends not in a recovered intimacy from the past but in a shared effort to shelter Ilana, Yifat, Boaz, and Alexander himself during the time that remains.