Gideon appeals to Michel and offers him an inheritance

Alexander A. Gideon’s appeal to Michel Sommo is both a defense against suspicion and a last attempt to keep his family near him. Writing from his childhood home in Zikhron Yaakov while seriously ill, Gideon explains why Ilana is caring for him, acknowledges the damage he caused in their marriage, and offers Michel half his inheritance in return for allowing Ilana and the children to stay. The bargain gives a material form to a request that Gideon cannot secure through ordinary family claims: more time before separation becomes final.

Background: Requests for Help

The appeal follows a series of letters and financial requests from the Sommo household. In an earlier plea, Ilana asked Gideon to provide urgent help for Boaz Brandstetter, whose boarding school was about to expel him. She offered to sign a notarized statement naming anyone Gideon chose as Boaz’s father if Gideon would assist the boy. Her letter described a household at the edge of what it could manage, and stressed that Boaz’s maternal grandparents in Paris were contributing what little they could despite supporting a large family of their own.

The family’s financial needs later became more formal and expansive. In a signed request, Ilana and Michel Sommo listed about sixty thousand dollars for their mortgage and an additional room, another comparable sum for the children’s future, and ninety-five thousand dollars toward buying and renovating Alkalai House in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Hebron. They presented the proposed purchase as an effort to repossess a Jewish property taken during the 1929 Palestine riots by paying its full market price rather than using violence. Gideon had already instructed his lawyer, Manfred Zakheim, to transfer a further five thousand dollars to Michel’s bank account. He then asked Michel to state the final sum required directly, rather than continue to send requests through Ilana in indirect terms.

These earlier exchanges establish the pattern that the later appeal changes. Gideon’s money has answered practical needs, but it has also exposed distrust over motives and obligations. In the September letter, he no longer treats assistance merely as a response to a sum requested: he makes an explicit offer in exchange for a decision about the family’s immediate future.

Illness, Return, and Explanation

Gideon writes after receiving a distressed letter from Michel, delivered by Michel’s brother-in-law. He rejects the suspicion that anyone has deceived Michel, while recognizing that Michel’s sensitivity is not foreign to him. Ilana, he explains, chose to remain at the house for several days and care for him until he entered the hospital for radiotherapy; she was expected to return to Michel afterward. Gideon asks Michel not to punish her for staying and turns Michel’s own concern about her suffering into a request for kindness toward her.

The explanation is made urgent by Gideon’s account of his illness. He says that he contracted kidney cancer the previous year, underwent two operations, and now has growth in his abdomen. Doctors in New York City saw no point in another operation, and he expects to remain at Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem. He invokes this condition to counter Michel’s jealousy: Gideon’s return and Ilana’s care, he insists, should not be read as evidence of an affair or a renewed conventional marriage.

He sets the present against the history of his relationship with Ilana. They married in September 1959, and Boaz was born a few months later after Ilana chose to have a child. Gideon says he had told her from the beginning that he did not consider himself suited to fatherhood. He also admits that their life together became painful and that he delayed their separation through weakness of character. Their divorce in September 1968 was vicious, and he describes his own conduct as petty, hateful, and vindictive. He then left the country and cut off contact. His return to Israel, without advance notice, comes years later, after a request for help and amid the prospect that his life is nearing its end; regret over unresolved matters is among the reasons he gives for coming back to see Boaz and stay in the house where he grew up.

Family Claims and the Revised Will

Gideon’s account distinguishes formal status from the bonds he now recognizes. The house still stands officially in his name, but he says it belongs to Boaz Brandstetter. That admission links his return to a broader effort to secure his son’s future, rather than simply reclaim a property or resume his former marriage. In the same letter, Gideon says his revised will provides for Boaz and for Michel’s family. He warns Michel against wasting the money on messianic investments and presents the provision as protection for Michel’s daughter from the poverty Michel had described.

His description of the little girl is grounded in a small exchange at the house. While the commune slept, she came to his bedside with a homemade remedy of kerosene and mulberry leaves, gave him a dead grasshopper in a plastic bag, and asked for three paper boats in return. The two then talked briefly about the nature of water. On another visit she typed her name on Gideon’s Baby Hermes typewriter, brought him ants in a cup, and invited him to dance. Too ill to accept, and unable to dance, he declined. These encounters make the daughter’s place in his concern concrete: she is not an abstract beneficiary in a will but a child who has found a way to approach him, exchange gifts, and draw him into conversation.

Gideon also responds to Michel’s political and ideological accusations. He concedes most of them, while reserving the right to distinguish accusation from emotional exaggeration. More strikingly, he says that what he has learned about Michel from Ilana, Boaz, and the children has led him to regard Michel as a good man and a better man than himself. That judgment does not erase their differences or Michel’s contempt for Gideon; it alters the appeal’s tone. The offer is addressed not to a rival to be defeated, but to someone whose decency Gideon has come to recognize.

The Inheritance Bargain

The letter’s practical request arrives through an improvised messenger. Because Gideon has no telephone at the house, he sends Boaz by bicycle to find a taxi in Zikhron. The driver is to take the letter to Michel in Jerusalem as soon as the Sabbath ends, wait for Michel’s reply, and bring it back that night. Gideon says he is tired and in pain, and the arrangements give the exchange a strict clock: Michel is asked to decide before the night is over.

The choice Gideon sets out is stark but limited. If Michel insists on having Ilana and the two children back immediately, Gideon will send them the following morning. If Michel agrees to let them remain a little longer, he will receive half of Gideon’s inheritance, as well as the moral benefit of doing what Gideon regards as a good deed. The money is therefore both provision and inducement, but Gideon frames the offer as a choice rather than an order. It seeks Michel’s consent to a temporary delay, not a permanent transfer of Ilana’s loyalties or a claim to restore the former marriage.

That distinction matters because Gideon’s earlier generosity had been entangled with humiliation, suspicion, and the question of what could be demanded in return. Here, he acknowledges Michel’s right to ask for his family back, then places a share of his estate beside the alternative. The transaction cannot undo the divorce, the years of estrangement, or the harm Gideon admits to having caused. It can only purchase an interval in which he remains near Ilana and the children, and in which Michel is asked to decide whether that interval is worth accepting.

Epistolary Form and Unresolved Outcome

The event is presented through Gideon’s dated letter, not through an independent account of the exchange. Its sections move from rebuttal, to the history of the marriage, to the will and the children, and finally to the timed proposal. This form gives the appeal immediacy: the taxi is waiting for a reply, and Gideon’s illness makes delay consequential. At the same time, the reader receives Gideon’s own account of motives and relationships, including his admission of past vindictiveness and his insistence that Michel’s suspicions are unfounded.

The letter does not supply Michel’s answer. The bargain’s success, and whether Ilana and the children remain at the house beyond the immediate period, are therefore unresolved within this event. What it does establish is the changed shape of Gideon’s appeal: after years of estrangement and a history of financial requests, he asks Michel directly for time, offers an inheritance to make that request possible, and recognizes Michel’s claim to decide. The inheritance stands at once for future security and for a present interval Gideon fears he may not have.