Gideon House, Alexander A. Gideon’s childhood home in Zikhron Yaakov, changes from an abandoned family property into Boaz Brandstetter’s place of work and communal living, and finally into the refuge where Alexander returns during his terminal illness. Its importance lies in that transformation: the house is at once a physical inheritance, a repository of childhood memory, and a piece of land around which competing family and political plans gather.

Setting, Architecture, and Childhood

The house is a large, eccentric stone residence associated with the Gideon family. Its architecture is described as nearly black local stone, edged with stone brought from Mount Hebron or the Shouf Mountains. High walls enclose a disorienting arrangement of twisting passages, spiral staircases, storerooms, hidden spaces, and entrances that lead to other entrances. A passage once connected the cellar beneath one wing to a garden pavilion; by the time the house is revisited, the tunnel is blocked with earth. The design makes the property feel less like an orderly home than a structure built to hold concealed routes and private histories.

For Alexander, those spaces are inseparable from growing up there. As he later recounts his childhood to Michel Sommo, individual corners and rooms prompt memories of play, solitary reading, experiments, and painful encounters with his father. The house also contains the remembered hiding place beneath the back stairs where, as a boy, he wept after his father killed his pet monkey. These recollections make the building more than a backdrop: its rooms preserve a map of Alexander’s childhood, including the fear and isolation that his adult return brings back into view. Among the physical traces he rediscovers are the decayed remains of his mother’s sandals beneath a loose floorboard.

The property’s scale and elaborate layout contrast with the disorder of its later condition. Alexander’s childhood memories give the house an intimate, sometimes troubling history, while its imposing exterior and maze-like construction carry the weight of family authority. The same rooms that once belonged to the world of his father become, after years of neglect, spaces that Boaz and his companions can repair and inhabit on different terms.

An Abandoned Property Offered to Boaz

Alexander offers Boaz a choice between going to the United States, where he would receive a place to stay and help finding work, and moving to the large, empty house near Zikhron Yaakov. The property is in poor condition, but Alexander proposes to pay Boaz a fair monthly wage for restoring it and to cover building materials. Boaz would be free to invite others to live there and to decide what work to undertake, including possible agriculture. The offer gives him both a place and a practical project without requiring him to accept a conventional plan for his future.

Alexander directs Boaz to contact Roberto di Modena, rather than Manfred Zakheim, to put his choice into effect. Di Modena subsequently reports that Boaz has been installed at the property after some formal difficulties, has received the initial money Alexander specified, and will be paid monthly under his instructions. Boaz arrives in Zikhron the previous day, turning an abstract offer into a new arrangement of residence and work.

The house is initially a ruin rather than a ready-made refuge. When Ilana Sommo visits, she finds a locked, rusting gate, a damaged roof, neglected grounds, and vegetation growing through and around the building. The ornamental pool, fountain, and terrace have been overtaken by growth. The description registers both how far the property has fallen and the scale of the labor required to make it habitable. Boaz’s occupation therefore begins not with possession of a finished home, but with the continuing work of reclaiming an abandoned structure.

Boaz’s Commune and the Work of Restoration

Boaz gradually turns the house and its grounds into a working communal settlement. He invites Ilana to stay, offering her work and food and proposing practical tasks such as cooking or caring for goats. He describes a life organized around work, shared company, and repairs rather than the violence and political conflict he sees elsewhere. The grounds include a vegetable garden in the making, and he expects to build a shed for the goats. Restoration is presented as an ongoing undertaking: he anticipates that, in a month or two, there will be one fewer ruin in the country.

The household includes young companions who help clear the grounds and live alongside him. The restored wing and the kitchen become parts of a shared domestic routine, while work on the property continues alongside cooking, animal care, and communal evenings. The restoration does not erase the house’s former history; it changes who can occupy its rooms and what those rooms are used for. Alexander’s proposal that Boaz be free to invite others is realized in a collective life that is informal and distinct from the family household the building once contained.

When Alexander comes back to the house, Boaz has allocated Ilana and her daughter, Yifat, a large ground-floor room. It looks through French windows toward the settlement below, the banana plantations, the coastal strip, and the sea. The room once housed Alexander’s father’s extensive library; now it has been painted blue and serves as a shared living and sleeping space. Beds, storage furniture, fertilizer sacks, and fuel drums occupy it, while a painting of Boaz on one wall reflects the communal world taking shape around him. The room’s new function brings family life into a space formerly associated with the older generation’s status and possessions.

Property, Inheritance, and Political Maneuvering

Gideon House is also an asset in a larger dispute over money and political purpose. The Sommo family had earlier requested substantial financial help, including money toward buying and renovating Alkalai House in Hebron’s Jewish Quarter. That request described the property as land seized during the 1929 riots and presented its recovery as a purchase at full market price rather than through violence. The proposed use of private funds to acquire and renovate property thus connects the family’s finances to competing claims about land and its recovery.

Michel Sommo’s political and commercial ambitions add another layer to the house’s significance. In a letter, Alexander questions Michel’s proposal to pay Arab landowners and finance their departure, arguing that the scale of the plan would be prohibitively costly. He also reveals that Michel’s organization has pursued land negotiations west of Bethlehem with a religious order based in Toulouse, with the proposed exchange linked to a substantial property within the pre-1967 borders. Alexander understands Zikhron Yaakov as part of a potential property arrangement connecting those negotiations, although the outcome remains uncertain.

That uncertainty reaches the house directly when Alexander instructs Manfred to sell the Zikhron property to finance Michel’s campaign. Manfred delays, sells another property instead, and preserves Zikhron after Alexander changes his mind and again insists on keeping it. The conflicting instructions show how abruptly the house can shift between home, inheritance, and negotiable capital. Alexander later tells Michel that the property officially remains registered in his own name but really belongs to Boaz. Its practical use already supports that claim: Boaz is living there, restoring it, and shaping its future with the people he has gathered around him.

Alexander’s Return and the House’s Uncertain Future

Alexander returns to Zikhron while gravely ill, after years away and after the deterioration of his kidney cancer. He says he has come to see Boaz and to stay in the house where he grew up. The return reverses the earlier direction of movement: the son whom the house sheltered in childhood comes back not as its unquestioned head, but as a weakened man whose possessions remain largely packed and whose remaining time is limited. Boaz’s advice that he leave the hospital and stay at the property gives the old home a new role as a place to spend his final period of life.

The restoration does not remove the house’s vulnerability. On a rainy day in October 1976, the large building stands deserted and dark while the commune’s members gather around a fire in the kitchen, singing and passing the time. Alexander joins the household’s work, helping prepare food, and the house’s active life is concentrated in one room rather than spread through the entire structure. The scene sets communal warmth and routine against the abandoned rooms and the returning presence of the house’s old ghosts.

Ilana’s later account projects another possible ending rather than confirming it as an event. She imagines Boaz leaving on one of his solitary excursions and not returning; his companions would eventually disperse, animals and weeds would reclaim the house, and she would be left to watch over its decline. The house’s future is therefore unresolved. It has been made habitable through Boaz’s labor and temporarily filled by a chosen community, but its survival depends on relationships and routines that may not last. Across the novel, Gideon House gathers those fragile arrangements into one place: family memory, inheritance, political property schemes, and the effort to make a home from a ruin.