Manfred Zakheim

Manfred Zakheim is Alexander Gideon’s old friend, legal and business ally, and self-appointed guardian through successive crises. His character emerges most fully in a series of letters in which business calculations, theatrical self-mockery, and intimate memories coexist: he can negotiate the fate of Gideon’s property, scold him for extravagant schemes, and still arrange medical care and travel to be near him. The letters make his loyalty neither simple nor disinterested, but durable enough to survive accusation, anger, and the prospect of Gideon’s death.

Identity and the Letters

Zakheim signs one letter as Manfred Zakheim and another as Uncle Malfrend, the childhood name Alexander Gideon once used for him. The latter signature distills the double position he claims throughout their correspondence: he is at once a seasoned professional who manages Gideon’s affairs and the older intimate who remembers the boy Gideon was. His letters are not neutral reports. They are arguments addressed to Gideon, often written while Zakheim is being accused, dismissed, or asked to begin again. Their comic exaggerations and mock-legal flourishes serve a serious purpose: Zakheim wants his interventions recognized as acts of care rather than betrayal.

He also corrects Gideon’s mistaken assumption that he survived the Holocaust. Zakheim says his family brought him to the country in 1925, when he was ten. The correction is brief, but characteristic: he answers an error without allowing it to diminish his admiration for Gideon’s perceptiveness. In this correspondence, frank correction and affection occupy the same space.

Childhood and Lifelong Attachment

Zakheim locates the beginnings of his bond with Gideon in the latter’s childhood. He remembers a gloomy boy who made figures for rhesus monkeys and tried to bite himself in the mirror, and recalls sitting with him, reading stories at bedtime and playing a card game called Black Bear. In the game, everyone was paired except the black bear, and the player left with it lost. Zakheim says he repeatedly contrived to lose so Gideon could win without realizing the victory had been arranged. Gideon’s rage at losing could turn into smashing and tearing things or biting the back of his hand until it bled; Zakheim’s quiet manipulation of the game was an early form of protective care.

The recollections are not solely of a child being looked after. Gideon, Zakheim recalls, had his own elaborate sense of fairness. When Zakheim lost, Gideon would fetch him a cold beer, give him a marble or white snails gathered in the yard, or slip one of his father’s cigars into his pocket. Once, he scraped mud from Zakheim’s galoshes. When Gideon’s father was roaring at Zakheim, the boy used a broken iron to cause a short circuit and plunge the house into darkness. These small acts of compensation and intervention reveal affection expressed through objects and practical gestures, rather than through easy declarations.

Zakheim also remembers teaching Gideon to make animal shadows with their fingers, while Gideon taught him to ride a donkey. Their childhood intimacy continued across separation. In 1941 Zakheim volunteered for the British Army and spent five years moving through Palestine, Cairo, Cyrenaica, Italy, Germany, Austria, the Hague, and Birmingham. Gideon sent him packages every few weeks, including candy, wool socks, Hebrew newspapers and magazines, and letters with sketches of imaginary weapons; Zakheim sent postcards, stamps, and banknotes in return. When Zakheim came back in 1946, Gideon vacated his room for him, before Zakheim moved into his first apartment in Jerusalem.

Shared Work and Mutual Obligation

Zakheim’s account of the friendship extends beyond childhood tenderness into decades of shared legal and financial work. He recalls that after Gideon’s father began dispersing his fortune and sending money to people claiming to represent the lost tribes of Israel, the father sent Circassians on a night raid against a neighboring kibbutz. Zakheim and Gideon then planned a coup against the disorder around the estate. Zakheim says he conducted eleven lawsuits on Gideon’s behalf before they recovered the property and put Gideon’s father away. He also reminds Gideon of his work during Gideon’s divorce proceedings.

The relationship was reciprocal, though not symmetrical in every moment. Gideon paid for the honeymoon in Japan of Zakheim’s family members Dorit and Zohar and opened a generous savings account when each of Zakheim’s grandchildren was born. Zakheim asks whether these acts were merely calculated investments, but the question exposes the difficulty of separating affection from financial obligation in their history. Gideon has supported Zakheim’s family; Zakheim has spent years carrying Gideon’s legal and practical burdens. He insists that his service began when Gideon was a child and continued while Gideon became internationally known and his book was translated into nine languages.

The Zikhron Property and Tentpeg

In 1976, their friendship is tested by the proposed sale and development of Gideon’s property in Zikhron. A telegram from Zakheim offers forgiveness and a fresh start, reporting that a purchaser will pay twelve for the property, allow Boaz Brandstetter to remain there, and that Zakheim will withdraw his resignation if Gideon agrees. In a later letter, Zakheim says the offer has risen to thirteen, describes it as final, and warns that it will be withdrawn if Gideon does not answer within a fortnight. The changing offer places a concrete deadline inside their emotional conflict.

Gideon apparently suspects Zakheim of selling him to Michel Sommo. Zakheim counters that he has been trying to bring Sommo into their own business arrangements and restrain him by tying him to Zohar Etgar. He describes Sommo’s new apartment in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, his plans to buy a car, and his partnership with Etgar in Tentpeg, an investment company backed by religious investors and discreet support from Paris. Zakheim reports that Sommo has turned the Jewish Fellowship organization into a reconnaissance or security unit serving the company, while the partners have persuaded revenue authorities to recognize the enterprise as a charitable orphanage. His account presents business as both an opportunity to preserve Gideon’s assets and a way to direct Sommo’s ambitions.

Zakheim admits that the arrangement involved transforming Sommo’s zeal rather than simply rejecting it. In his telling, he worked to make Sommo a more cautious, calculating religious partisan instead of an impulsive militant. The hundred thousand Gideon had placed at stake, he reports, is now generating returns and may soon double. Zakheim says he acted because he did not want Gideon to squander his fortune on grandiose projects or become involved in the exploitation of orphans. His own interest is plainly entangled with the deal: he speaks of their past partnership and of renewing their former business success, while also insisting that friendship and conscience kept him from abandoning Gideon to a disastrous decision.

Caretaking, Illness, and Continuing Loyalty

Zakheim’s most intimate letter returns to Gideon’s anger and to his own persistence. He recalls that Gideon once pulled out his hair, smashed toys, or bit the back of his hand when enraged. Now, Zakheim says, Gideon curses and fires him, then turns back to him with apologies, money, and requests for help. He reads this cycle as an attempt to purchase forgiveness after trampling those closest to him, but does not use that judgment as a reason to withdraw. When Gideon asks him to find Boaz and assist in setting up a hippie colony on the abandoned family land, Zakheim goes to Zikhron, pleads, pays, and works to pacify the local police. He also reminds Gideon that he has been investing about two hundred and fifty dollars a month in Gideon’s Goliath, and points to the funds available in the William Tell account following the Magdiel-Toulouse deal.

The reprimand is inseparable from fear for Gideon’s health. Zakheim recalls feeling sympathy for him at a meeting in London and says he is distressed by what Gideon has done with his life and how he is planning his death. He describes Gideon’s illness as though it were a missile directed at himself, but this is Zakheim’s anguished interpretation, not an independently established explanation of the illness. Beneath his accusations of lunacy and extravagance is the older memory of a solitary child who called him Uncle Malfrend, climbed onto his lap, and searched his pockets for chocolate or chewing gum.

In a final practical demonstration of care, Zakheim cables Gideon at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. He says that a clinic, private doctor, and nurse have been arranged should Gideon decide to come, and that he has instructed S. Zand Private Investigations Ltd. to drop Sommo and Boaz. Zakheim will invest Gideon’s cash in Tentpeg but will not touch the real estate. He acknowledges Gideon’s wish to keep his condition from Ilana Sommo and Boaz Brandstetter, and says that Dorit and he will leave for New York at the weekend to be with him. Even while leaving room for Gideon’s instructions, he closes with an offer of physical affection. The final measure of Zakheim’s loyalty is thus not a reconciliation conclusively secured, but a set of arrangements made before one is certain Gideon will accept them.

Narrative Significance

Zakheim’s letters give the friendship a history long enough to complicate every accusation of betrayal. He is a shrewd operator, capable of manipulating negotiations, managing money, and mocking religious or commercial pretensions; he is also the adult who once arranged a child’s victory at cards and the friend who kept receiving Gideon’s packages while serving abroad. The recurring movement from complaint to recollection and back to practical assistance reveals how little separates their emotional and material lives. Money can be a tool of control, but in Zakheim’s account it is also the medium through which years of care have been enacted and renewed.

His correspondence also makes loyalty an active, argumentative practice. Zakheim does not merely forgive Gideon in silence: he demands acknowledgment, recounts his own sacrifices, corrects false assumptions, and asks whether they are still friends. Yet he keeps acting on Gideon’s behalf while the answer remains unsettled. His blend of exasperation, self-dramatization, ethical unease, and tenderness makes him more than a dependable aide. He is the keeper of a shared past who tries to prevent Gideon’s present anger and illness from erasing the history that binds them.