Ilana Brandstetter-Sommo

Ilana Brandstetter-Sommo is a mother, wife, and former spouse whose letters make private need part of the novel’s public record. After years of silence from Alexander A. Gideon, she writes to him for help with their estranged son, Boaz Brandstetter. Her appeals range from practical requests for money and intervention to disclosures about family life and the unresolved bitterness of their marriage. As circumstances change, the letters register a shift: what begins as an attempt to enlist Gideon’s power becomes a record of relationships forming beyond his control, and eventually of Ilana’s presence beside him when he returns home ill.

Identity and Family Background

Ilana writes from Jerusalem on February 5, 1976, addressing Gideon after seven years without contact. She imagines that he may have kept track of her family through his lawyer, Manfred M. Zakheim, or may have cut them out of his life altogether. Her uncertainty frames the letter: she is approaching a man whose resources she believes could help, but whose feelings and knowledge she cannot confidently read.

In Ilana’s account, after Gideon expelled her and Boaz, she had nowhere else to go and no money. She and her son went to stay with her sister and brother-in-law in their kibbutz. Ilana remained there for six months before returning to Jerusalem to work in a bookshop; Boaz stayed in the kibbutz for another five years, until he was thirteen. She visited him every three weeks. After she married Michel-Henri Sommo, Boaz refused to visit the family in Jerusalem, used an insulting name for his mother, and hung up when told that a daughter had been born. The girl, Madeleine Yifat Sommo, would later become part of the household’s fragile connections with Gideon.

Ilana’s letters also show how the family’s finances and emotional ties overlap. She reports that Michel-Henri’s relatives in Paris send a small monthly contribution toward Boaz’s boarding-school costs despite having little money themselves, a large extended family, and no personal relationship with the boy. Ilana presents this support as one part of a broader network of obligation, while turning to Gideon because she believes he has influence and resources that she and Michel-Henri lack.

The Appeal for Boaz

Two years before her first 1976 letter, Ilana recounts, Boaz arrived at the family home on a winter night after deciding he would leave the kibbutz. He demanded a place at an agricultural high school and threatened to live on the streets if he could not get one. Michel-Henri responded by having him change out of his wet clothes, eat, wash, and sleep before the family discussed what to do. Boaz rejected Michel-Henri’s authority, but Michel-Henri tried to reset the encounter rather than escalate it. The episode presents the household’s effort to accommodate Boaz even as he resists being treated as a son by his stepfather.

The school Ilana and Michel-Henri helped him enter was already in danger of expelling him. Ilana tells Gideon that Boaz has alienated the family, uses her maiden name on official documents, and gives hostile names to his mother, father, and school. With only a fortnight before he might be put out on the street, she asks Gideon to intervene. She offers to sign a notarized statement naming anyone he chooses as Boaz’s father in exchange for what she calls humanitarian assistance. The bargain lays bare the pressure behind her appeal: she is willing to surrender a claim about paternity if that is what it takes to secure practical help for her son.

Ilana also invokes Boaz’s longstanding attraction to the sea and suggests that Gideon might use his connections to help him enter naval college. To make that possibility personal rather than merely administrative, she recalls a summer in Ashkelon during the 1967 Six-Day War, when Boaz was associated with a whirlpool, fishermen, and a raft. The remembered scene connects Gideon to their son’s childhood even as the present-day request depends on Gideon’s ability to act. Ilana’s appeal thus combines a concrete deadline, a proposed route forward, and an appeal to a shared past.

Money, Leverage, and Family Requests

Gideon’s assistance soon takes a more explicit financial form. In a registered letter to Michel-Henri, he says that Ilana has sent him two long letters and suggests that the later one hints at financial difficulties. He suspects Michel-Henri is directing her requests, but states that he has instructed Manfred M. Zakheim to transfer another five thousand dollars to Michel-Henri’s account. He offers to consider a larger, final sum if Michel-Henri sends a direct request through Zakheim, while asking not to be questioned about his motives or thanked effusively. The money is presented as help, but its terms also reveal Gideon’s desire to control the channel and tone of exchange.

A subsequent request, signed by Ilana and Michel-Henri, specifies the scale of the family’s needs. They ask for sixty thousand dollars to pay off their mortgage and build an additional room and a half, another equivalent 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 Hebron. They describe the property as Jewish-owned land seized during the 1929 Palestine riots and say they hope to repossess it by paying the market price rather than using violence. The letter ends by praising Gideon’s scientific writing and its contribution to the honor of the Jewish people, and wishes him a happy Purim. Its formal respect sits beside an extensive financial request and a religious-political project.

The contrast between the couple’s joint request and Ilana’s later private writing is significant. At one point she tells Gideon that Michel-Henri knows about her letter but not about a final, compromising offer she has added. She admits that this secret could damage her marriage, even as she presents it as another way to persuade Gideon to help. Her willingness to expose herself to personal consequences makes the appeal more than a straightforward request for funds; the letter turns intimacy, reputation, and money into forms of leverage, while showing how little room Ilana believes she has to negotiate from.

Changing Alliances and the Voice of the Letters

In a later letter written without Michel-Henri’s knowledge, Ilana reports that Boaz is safe for the moment. Gideon’s money and Michel-Henri’s judgment have helped extricate him from trouble, and friends of the Sommo family have had his police record closed. More important to Ilana than this practical rescue is the slow movement between Boaz and Michel-Henri. Michel-Henri has persuaded Boaz to visit Jerusalem, and the two now compete for the attention of Madeleine Yifat. After the Sabbath, Michel-Henri prepares a meal for the family and arranges for a neighbor’s son to babysit so the adults can go to the cinema. Ilana describes these ordinary acts as signs that the relationship is changing.

Her account gives that rapprochement its own physical comedy: Michel-Henri climbs onto Boaz’s shoulders to change a veranda light bulb, while Madeleine Yifat tries to put her father’s slippers on her much larger brother. These details complicate Gideon’s role as benefactor. Boaz’s immediate family is making connections through its own habits and gestures, not simply following a plan organized around Gideon’s intervention. Ilana recognizes this shift and addresses Gideon as someone whose strategy may have been overtaken by events.

The letters also change the way Ilana addresses Gideon. A request sent through Zakheim is signed Ilana Sommo (Gideon), and asks that any donation be made without making it conditional on a paternity test. She emphasizes that information about Boaz’s whereabouts matters urgently, even if it arrives in the middle of the night. Later, writing under the name Weeping Willow, she returns to the failed marriage as an unresolved emotional conflict. In a letter that reaches Gideon while he is in Chicago after a term in London and lectures in Holland and Sweden, he identifies her writing as an angry response to his earlier letter. Her demand to know where he is and how his health is reflects an attachment that persists alongside her accusations about the divorce and his departure.

Return, Care, and Significance

When Gideon returns to Israel, he comes without advance notice to see Boaz and stay in the house where he grew up. He finds Ilana there, and she assumes a nursing role. He says that he did not ask her to stay but saw no reason to send her away; he also acknowledges that the house belongs in substance to Boaz, although it remains registered in Gideon’s name. Their relationship, he explains to Michel-Henri, is no longer a conventional marriage. That description leaves their closeness deliberately unsettled: the divorce and years of separation remain part of their history, but Ilana is present as caregiver rather than as a spouse seeking restoration of the old household.

Gideon’s revised will provides for both Boaz and Michel-Henri’s family, extending his material intervention beyond the immediate emergencies that first brought Ilana’s letters to him. His account of Madeleine Yifat makes the change intimate and particular: she brings him an improvised medicine of kerosene and mulberry leaves, gives him a dead grasshopper in a plastic bag, and receives three paper boats in return. Their short conversation about water, followed by her later attempts to draw him into a dance, gives the bequest a human context without erasing the history of money as power and obligation.

Ilana’s narrative role is therefore not simply to request rescue for Boaz. Her letters show a family rearranging itself under financial pressure, with Gideon’s assistance enabling some changes while failing to dictate their emotional outcome. Boaz and Michel-Henri begin to approach one another; Madeleine Yifat forms a small, direct bond with Gideon; and Ilana moves from pleading for his intervention to caring for him in the house he has returned to. Across these reversals, her written voice preserves both the practical details of dependence and the unresolved personal history that makes every offer of help carry more than one meaning.