Haifa serves both as a destination for difficult family visits and as the setting of treatment for Alexander A. Gideon’s serious illness. In Ilana Sommo’s letters, the city is approached through journeys from elsewhere: first as the place where Volodya Gudonski is living in a sanatorium on Mount Carmel, and later as the site of the hospital where Alexander receives chemotherapy. These visits make Haifa a point at which past relationships and present obligations meet.

Setting and place in the narrative

On 9 August 1976, Ilana sets out for Haifa to visit Volodya, whom she identifies to Alexander as his father. Her route changes before she reaches the city: at Hadera, on a sudden impulse, she leaves the journey to Haifa and takes a bus to Zikhron instead. The diversion brings her to the neglected family house and its overgrown grounds, where she waits outside the locked gate, unsure how the son she has come to see will receive her. Haifa is therefore present even in her absence from it: the intended visit is displaced by a more immediate, uncertain approach to the family’s past.

Six days later, Ilana travels from Zikhron to Haifa and reaches the sanatorium on Mount Carmel. The city’s position in the account is practical as well as emotional. It is reached by bus, and its harbor and railway enter the surroundings of the institution, while the garden provides the setting for her meeting with Volodya. The letter’s movement between Zikhron and Haifa links a decaying family property with a place of institutional care, without suggesting that either can restore what has been lost.

Ilana’s visit to Volodya

At the sanatorium, Ilana finds Volodya sitting alone in the garden. His appearance and conduct make the visit an encounter with someone whose identity and memory are unstable: he looks at her, rises, and bows, but calls her Madame Rovina and thanks her for coming to his funeral. Ilana has brought chrysanthemums from the Central Bus Station. Volodya places one in his dressing-gown buttonhole and puts the rest in his yogurt glass, a small, careful response that does not dispel his confusion.

When Ilana asks whether he needs anything or would like help back to his room, Volodya returns to the same fragment of bargaining. She asks whether he remembers who she is, but the meeting does not resolve into recognition. He later picks up one of the flowers, now dusty and marked by yogurt, offers it to her, and walks back toward the building without waiting for an answer or saying goodbye. The visit ends without an ordinary farewell. Ilana puts the flowers in a trash can and takes the bus back to Jerusalem.

The journey back keeps the meeting emotionally present. Ilana remembers Volodya’s hand and finds its imagined touch consoling, comparing it with Alexander’s stiff, square hand. Haifa has brought her into contact with Alexander’s father, but the memory of that contact also alters her understanding of Alexander: the resemblance between the two men becomes a source of comfort rather than merely a sign of distance between them.

Care, illness, and return journeys

The return from Haifa also brings Ilana back to a domestic crisis. At home, she finds Michel Sommo asleep beside Yifat’s bed. During Ilana’s absence, Michel had noticed that Yifat had a fever, canceled a long-awaited meeting with the deputy minister of defense, and taken the child to a clinic. After a doctor diagnosed a slight ear infection, he obtained medicine, prepared food, and stayed beside her through the day and night. Ilana’s account of arriving home from Haifa thus places her visit to Volodya alongside Michel’s care for Yifat, while recording her own irritated response to his actions and her suspicion that he might be making her feel guilty for leaving.

Haifa later becomes part of a repeated medical routine. Every Sunday, Ilana takes Alexander by taxi to a hospital there for chemotherapy; radiotherapy has been stopped. She reports that his condition has unexpectedly improved: although he remains weak and tired, sleeps through much of the day, and lies awake at night, he is in less pain. He can walk for two or three hours between the wall and the door and make his way to the kitchen with a stick. The account presents the journey as recurring work of care, rather than a single dramatic visit.

Narrative significance

The two Haifa visits are distinct in purpose but connected by the limits of what care can accomplish. Ilana’s visit to Volodya cannot secure recognition or restore a shared past; her trips with Alexander support him through treatment without erasing his illness. In the first episode, the journey culminates in a farewell that is not acknowledged as one. In the later routine, the journey repeats each week, structured by treatment and by the modest improvement it brings.

Haifa also helps organize the letters’ transitions between family members and forms of responsibility. Ilana goes there intending to see Alexander’s father, diverts to Zikhron, then returns from Haifa to find Michel caring for Yifat; later she accompanies Alexander to the city for his own treatment. The location gathers these separate strands without making them identical: filial history, marital strain, parental care, and medical dependence remain distinct, but each is encountered through a journey to or from Haifa.