Mother-son relationship between Ilana Sommo and Boaz Brandstetter

Ilana Sommo and Boaz Brandstetter’s mother-son relationship is marked by prolonged separation and angry estrangement, but neither distance nor uncertainty about Boaz’s paternity extinguishes Ilana’s efforts to protect him. The relationship moves from her repeated attempts to keep him safe and close to a tentative family rapprochement, then into a later arrangement in which mother and son both care for Alexander Gideon.

Separation and the early bond

After Alexander Gideon forced Ilana and Boaz out, Ilana took her young son to stay with her sister and brother-in-law at their kibbutz. They had no other place to go and little money. Ilana remained there for six months, then returned to Jerusalem and found work in a bookshop; Boaz stayed at the kibbutz for five more years, until he was thirteen. She visited every three weeks, a routine that kept the connection alive while mother and child lived apart.

Ilana’s marriage to Michel Sommo deepened the distance. Boaz did not visit them in Jerusalem, and when they told him their daughter, Yifat, had been born, he ended the call abruptly. He called his mother degrading names, repeating language Ilana associated with Alexander. The hostility did not mean that every trace of tenderness had disappeared: when Boaz returned one winter night at thirteen and a half, he insulted Michel and spoke contemptuously to Ilana, but then touched her hair and remarked kindly on the baby. Ilana remembered the change in his voice as painful precisely because it briefly opened a gentler possibility inside their conflict.

Protection, schooling, and custody

When Boaz announced that he would leave the kibbutz unless he could attend an agricultural high school, Ilana placed herself between him and the door. She agreed to his request, even as Michel insisted that Boaz apologize and ask respectfully. The family secured a place for him at Telamim Agricultural High School through Michel’s brother. At Boaz’s request, Ilana and Michel did not visit; they paid the fees and kept their distance, hoping to respect his terms.

The school years brought repeated warnings rather than reconciliation. The headmistress reported that Boaz had been violent, disappeared at night, accumulated a police record, and been placed on probation. When the school decided to expel him after an altercation with a teacher, Ilana went there at once. Boaz refused to see her and sent word that he wanted nothing to do with her. The school’s account proved less straightforward than its initial description: following an exchange with the teacher, Boaz had retaliated after she struck him. Ilana pleaded for time to find another arrangement, and the school gave her two weeks. Michel offered to let Boaz stay with them, although the family lived in a cramped one-and-a-half-room flat, but Ilana believed her son would refuse. Her appeal to Alexander arose from a practical impasse: other vocational schools were unlikely to accept Boaz with his record and probation officer.

Their separation was also bound up with the disputed question of Boaz’s paternity and custody. In 1968, the Rabbinical Court found that Ilana had admitted adultery and ruled that she forfeited her marriage settlement and maintenance. The Jerusalem District Court recorded that the blood test was inconclusive; both Ilana and Alexander declined a tissue test, and Ilana withdrew her maintenance claim. Their declaration that neither had further demands against the other did not settle the emotional or parental consequences. Ilana later explained that she had opposed testing because, if it established Alexander’s paternity, she feared he would use the result to obtain custody and leave her money in place of her child. She wanted financial support, she said, but not at the cost of losing Boaz. The test never resolved the question, and Alexander continued to deny paternity.

Renewed contact and a changing household

Ilana’s letters to Alexander describe a relationship in which financial help and parental feeling remain entangled. When Boaz disappeared from the family with whom he had been staying and sent word that he intended to seek work aboard a ship, Rabbi Bouskila broke an oath to contact Alexander and asked him to help search. The rabbi framed the appeal as a matter of life and death, not a request for money. In another appeal, he connected Alexander’s financial contribution to the proposed redemption of Alkalai House in Hebron with hopes for Boaz’s safe return. Such appeals show how Boaz’s welfare became a point at which family responsibility, religious obligation, and money converged.

Later, Ilana told Alexander that Boaz was safe and that his police record had been closed through Michel’s connections and the support of the Sommo family’s friends. Michel was slowly finding a way toward the boy. He persuaded Boaz to visit the family in Jerusalem, where Boaz and Michel competed for Yifat’s attention. After the Sabbath, Michel prepared a meal for them, and the family went to a late cinema show. Ilana watched the small domestic scene with amusement: it contrasted sharply with Boaz’s earlier refusal to enter their home and suggested that the boy could form a connection with Michel without first resolving every grievance with his mother.

Memory, care, and the later family bond

In recalling Boaz’s childhood, Ilana holds his tenderness and his anger together rather than reducing him to either. She remembers his model airplanes, the games they played, the garden he made for a tortoise, and his small hands on her car’s steering wheel. She also remembers a frightening family confrontation in which Boaz tried to intervene when Alexander was harming her, and the lasting damage that followed. The memories make the mother-son bond more than a story of separation: Boaz had been exposed to the adults’ conflict, yet even as a child he tried to protect his mother. Ilana’s recollection also includes her own failure to protect him from the violence around them, a painful counterweight to her later efforts to intervene on his behalf.

In the final period at the family estate, the relationship takes on a quieter, practical form. Boaz helps restore the neglected grounds and makes a walking stick for the seriously ill Alexander. He also carries Alexander upstairs at night after the young people at the house have spent the evening with him. Ilana, who has chosen to stay and care for Alexander, takes over when Boaz leaves, bringing medicines and preparing for the night. Their shared care does not erase the earlier rupture or establish that every wound between mother and son has been repaired. It does, however, place them in the same household and in a common practice of tending to someone whose history has divided them.

Ilana’s relationship with Boaz is therefore defined less by a final declaration of reconciliation than by repeated acts made under difficult conditions: visiting him at the kibbutz, agreeing to his demand for school, pleading against his expulsion, seeking help when he disappears, and making room for a renewed family visit. Its changes are real but incomplete. The novel lets practical care carry the weight that easy forgiveness cannot: mother and son remain marked by estrangement, yet their lives continue to meet in acts of protection, hospitality, and shared responsibility.