Gideon Searches for Boaz and Proposes Tissue Testing for Paternity

Alexander Gideon’s search for Boaz B. becomes a renewed contest over paternity, money, and the meaning of an old legal refusal. After learning that Boaz has apparently run away to sea, Gideon instructs Manfred Zakheim to find him and offers another fifty thousand dollars if Zakheim can arrange a tissue test. Ilana Sommo withdraws her previous opposition to testing, but rejects any suggestion that her consent is bought. The proposed test reopens a question that the parents had left unresolved in court: whether Gideon is Boaz’s biological father, and why both sides once resisted finding out.

The search and the proposal

Gideon’s cable, dispatched from London, gives Zakheim two linked instructions: locate the missing boy and arrange a tissue test if Boaz can be persuaded to take part. Gideon offers an additional fifty thousand dollars on the condition that the test be arranged, and says he will take a parallel test in London at the same time. The simultaneous tests make the proposal more than a request for a sample from Boaz alone; Gideon presents himself as willing to submit to the same process.

The boy’s whereabouts remain the immediate obstacle. Ilana tells Zakheim that her former husband has informed the family that Boaz has apparently run away to sea, and asks the lawyer to act on whatever information he can find. She wants to be told as soon as anything is discovered, even if the news comes in the middle of the night. Her urgency is directed first toward locating Boaz; the test can happen only if he is found and agrees to it.

Ilana’s consent and its limits

In her letter dated May 14, 1976, Ilana confirms in writing that she has withdrawn her opposition of seven years earlier. She distinguishes that decision from Gideon’s financial offer: he need not give the family another penny for her to consent. If he wishes to donate to the cause supported by her present husband, he may do so separately, without tying the donation to the test. Her position removes her former objection while refusing to turn consent into a transaction.

Ilana also stresses that the proposal has come from Gideon this time. During the earlier court case, she recalls, she opposed testing, but Gideon had not agreed to be tested either. The recollection complicates any simple account in which one parent alone prevented the question from being settled. Now she welcomes his request, yet the practical decision is not hers alone: Boaz must be found and persuaded to participate.

Gideon’s questions about the past

Gideon’s later response makes clear that Ilana’s changed position does not settle his doubts about the history between them. He asks why she resisted testing so strongly during the court proceedings and wonders whether she feared the result would establish that he was Boaz’s father or prove that he was not. He also asks whether she ever doubted Boaz’s paternity. These are questions, not answers: the correspondence discloses the uncertainty that Gideon continues to carry, without resolving what Ilana believed at the time.

He questions the timing of her consent as well. Because money had been at issue during the former case, he asks whether money explains her present agreement; Ilana’s letter has already explicitly denied that connection. Gideon repeats the offer of fifty thousand dollars after the test, regardless of its outcome. Zakheim, he reports, believes that promising payment irrespective of the result gives Ilana all the leverage and leaves Gideon exposed. Gideon recounts this judgment while asking Ilana whether Zakheim is right, so the offer functions both as practical inducement and as a source of suspicion about the bargaining between them.

An unresolved test

The search depends on several conditions that the letters cannot guarantee: Zakheim must locate Boaz, Boaz must agree to testing, and the parallel samples must be taken. Gideon’s offer specifies that payment follows completion of the test and does not depend on what it shows. Ilana, for her part, treats consent and financial support as separate matters and asks Zakheim to report any lead about her son without delay.

The episode therefore advances the possibility of establishing paternity without supplying a result. Its force lies in the reversal of the earlier impasse: Ilana now consents, and Gideon now proposes to be tested, while each recalls that the other had resisted in court. The missing boy remains at the center of both the family’s immediate anxiety and its unresolved legal history; until he is found and persuaded, the proposed test cannot answer the question that has again become urgent.