Jerusalem is both the Sommo family’s home base and a political and practical hub in the novel. It connects Michel Sommo’s organizing, commercial ambitions, and family life to struggles over land elsewhere in the country. The city’s importance becomes especially clear when it is set against Gideon House near Zikhron Yaakov: Jerusalem is where family members are expected to return, while the country property becomes a place of separation, care, and renewed contact.

Family Home and Urban Base

Boaz Brandstetter has refused for years to visit Ilana Sommo and Michel Sommo in Jerusalem, a distance that makes the city a measure of his estrangement from his mother’s household. The report on the family distinguishes this damaged relationship from Michel’s close ties with his extended family. Jerusalem is thus not merely a location on a map; it is the home to which Boaz does not come, and from which the family’s changing alliances are viewed.

That household is also connected to substantial financial need. A request to Alexander Gideon itemizes funds for paying off a mortgage, building an additional room and a half, and securing the futures of a son and a young daughter. It asks separately for support toward buying and renovating Alkalai House in the Jewish Quarter of Old Hebron, described as Jewish property seized during the 1929 riots and now sought through purchase rather than force. The request links the practical demands of family life with a project of land recovery beyond Jerusalem; its language makes housing, inheritance, and national purpose part of the same appeal.

Political Organizing and Public Networks

Michel’s political activity gives Jerusalem a wider role. In 1964, he helped organize Moledet, a group of North African intellectuals and students in the city. Financial and ideological disagreements split the group, which ceased to exist in 1965. On the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War, Michel campaigned and gathered signatures against the Eshkol government’s wait-and-see policy and in favor of taking the military initiative against Egypt and other Arab countries.

After the war, he volunteered for the Greater Israel Movement, working in propaganda and demonstrations. He left it in 1971, then made a public gesture of surrendering his National Religious Party membership card. In 1972 he helped found the Jewish Fellowship Movement, whose membership consisted largely of young immigrants from America and Russia, and continued to serve on its executive committee. Its activities included protests against troop disengagements in Sinai and the Golan Heights after the Yom Kippur War, as well as attempts to buy land illegally from Arabs near Bethlehem. Police interviewed Michel twice about the organization’s activity, but did not charge him. The account also notes that he was not personally identified with violent lawbreaking and had published letters urging Arabs to leave the country and occupied territories peacefully, with financial inducements.

Land, Commerce, and the City’s Wider Reach

Jerusalem is a base for plans whose consequences extend well beyond the city. In correspondence with Gideon, Michel’s proposed approach to the Territories combines buying Arab land and property at full price with paying for the owners’ departure. Gideon challenges the financial scale of the proposal, calculating the enormous cost of compensating millions of people, and questions whether acquiring the Territories could justify the expense. Their exchange exposes how arguments about property and population movement turn political objectives into practical schemes of purchase, finance, and relocation.

Michel’s business life also changes the texture of his Jerusalem household. Ilana describes him setting out each morning for a new business and returning late. Religious land dealers visit after the Sabbath has formally ended; Michel serves them coffee and then confers with them at length. He explains building plots, grants, Jordanian property laws, loans, working capital, bonuses, financial securities, gross incomes, and infrastructure costs. His growing confidence is tied to an expectation that Gideon will make money or property available to the family, and to Michel’s belief that such wealth can be directed toward religious purposes and the redemption of the land. The domestic scene therefore shows Jerusalem’s political-commercial networks entering the home, where family members are expected to perform hospitality even as Ilana feels shut out of the dealings.

Jerusalem in the Family’s Return and Separation

Jerusalem also appears as the place to which the Sommo family retreats when events at Gideon House become public and painful. After Ilana takes Yifat to stay with Boaz at the abandoned property near Zikhron Yaakov, Michel returns from Paris to find his wife and daughter absent and Alexander Gideon there as well. Michel’s brother and friends go to speak with Ilana; when she refuses to see them, they return to Jerusalem and remain with the family until late at night. Their response includes a plan for Michel to lodge a formal complaint over Ilana taking Yifat away without his consent. The city becomes the site where relatives and friends attempt to manage a crisis that has unfolded elsewhere.

Later, Michel’s letter to Gideon moves from jealousy and grievance toward reconciliation. He asks Ilana and Yifat to return home and invites Gideon to stay with the family while receiving treatment at Hadassah Hospital. He also proposes that Boaz come to care for his father. The invitation reverses the earlier estrangement: the man who had accused Gideon now offers him a place within the household and undertakes to arrange medical help. Jerusalem is where this offer of shelter and forgiveness is made, even as Ilana remains at Gideon House to care for the seriously ill man.

Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, Jerusalem gathers together the novel’s intersecting forms of belonging: family membership, political allegiance, property, and religious duty. It is home to which Boaz will not return, the setting for Michel’s organizing and commercial education, and the point of return for relatives after the confrontation at Gideon House. Yet the city’s reach is never confined to its streets. From Jerusalem, plans and arguments extend toward Hebron, Bethlehem, and contested land elsewhere; from Gideon House, illness and care draw the separated family back into relation. Jerusalem’s significance lies in this tension between a household’s fixed address and the unsettled claims that continually pull its members outward.