Relationship between Alexander Gideon and Ilana Sommo

The relationship between Alexander Gideon and Ilana Sommo is defined by a paradox: their marriage has ended, but neither the separation nor the years of silence have made it emotionally past. Their history joins an abrupt domestic rupture to a prolonged dispute over Boaz Brandstetter, while their letters reveal opposing forms of dependence—Ilana’s openly avowed longing and Alexander’s admission that he remains unable to leave their bond behind.

Marriage, expulsion, and separation

Ilana’s account begins with Alexander expelling her and Boaz. With nowhere else to go and no money, she took their son to stay with her sister and brother-in-law in a kibbutz. After six months she returned to Jerusalem and worked in a bookshop, while Boaz remained at the kibbutz for another five years. Ilana visited him every three weeks. This arrangement marks the practical aftermath of the marriage: mother and son were separated from Alexander, and Ilana rebuilt her life without his support.

Ilana later married Michel-Henri Sommo and had a daughter, Madeleine Yifat Sommo. She says Boaz resented the marriage, called her a whore, refused to visit the Jerusalem household, and hung up when told that his sister had been born. Those details belong to the larger family history, but they also show how the rupture with Alexander continued to govern Ilana’s life after she formed another household. Her account links the old marriage to present family pain without suggesting that the new marriage erased the earlier attachment.

Paternity, custody, and fear of losing Boaz

The conflict between Alexander and Ilana persisted through uncertainty about whether he was Boaz’s biological father. Ilana says that Alexander denied paternity, that a blood test had yielded no unambiguous result, and that she opposed a tissue test. She later explains that her lawyer warned her that if the test established Alexander’s paternity, a court might award him custody after she acknowledged adultery. Boaz was eight at the time. Her stated choice was not to win a case at the cost of losing her child; she hoped for maintenance, but not on that condition.

By the time Ilana writes again, the legal separation has also settled into an emotional impasse. She acknowledges that the divorce released Alexander from responsibility for Boaz and from obligations toward her. In her view, he could answer her appeal through his lawyer by repeating his denial of paternity and pointing to the inconclusive test and her refusal of further testing. This imagined formal reply captures how their private history has become a dispute conducted through legal claims, money, and silence. Ilana presents herself as having little reason to expect help, even as she continues to address Alexander directly.

Silence and renewed correspondence

Ilana describes Alexander’s silence as lasting seven years. She says that for seven years she tried to withstand it, using the sounds of her new home to keep it at bay, but gave in during the eighth. Her letters about Boaz contain accurate information, she later insists, while also serving as a deliberate trap: she expected Michel, not Alexander, to rescue Boaz, and believed Michel would act rightly without Alexander’s money. The appeal therefore works on two levels. It raises a genuine family crisis while testing whether Alexander will read, respond, or remain absent.

That account complicates any simple reading of Ilana’s appeal as a request for rescue. She says that she knew Alexander might not know how to help, and that his usual means of influence were his cheque book, telephone calls, and access to powerful contacts. Her expectation that Michel would handle Boaz’s immediate troubles coexists with her decision to write to Alexander. The correspondence reopens contact without resolving the distrust that made contact so charged in the first place.

Attachment after the marriage

Ilana describes her bond with Alexander in language that makes emotional separation seem almost impossible. She portrays him as the enduring object of both hatred and longing, and interprets his silence not as indifference but as a concealed response to her. That interpretation is hers; the letters do not establish that she can know what his silence means. But Alexander’s own account gives the attachment a measure of reciprocity. He says that the bond has persisted throughout his life and that he has not managed to escape it. He also describes the two of them as mutually caught in the same relation, turning Ilana’s claim of continued entanglement into something more than a one-sided confession.

Ilana’s description of her marriage to Michel-Henri sharpens the contrast without making the relationships interchangeable. She casts Michel-Henri as a father, child, and brother in different aspects of their intimacy, while insisting that Alexander remains her husband in an enduring, almost imagined sense. The contrast is not a legal claim: the marriage to Alexander is over. Rather, it shows how Ilana’s inner account of attachment refuses to follow the formal chronology of divorce and remarriage. Her language gives the former husband a continuing sovereignty over her desire, even as she recognizes the life she has built with Michel-Henri.

Money, family, and the continuing bond

Material claims also remain part of the relationship. In a letter following a telephone conversation with Alexander, Michel-Henri requests funds to settle the family’s mortgage, add living space, provide for the children, and purchase and renovate Alkalai House in Hebron. The request distinguishes the family’s concrete needs from the unresolved emotional history, but it also places Alexander in the position of a potential source of support after the divorce. The evidence records the request, not whether he granted it.

Ilana later reports that Michel-Henri came to regard Alexander’s money and property as nearly available to the family, whether Alexander might leave them to Michel-Henri, Ilana, or Boaz. This is presented as Michel-Henri’s expectation, not as a promise made by Alexander. Its significance lies in the way the former marriage continues to enter the household Ilana shares with her new husband: Alexander is absent from daily life, yet his wealth, his possible generosity, and the history of his obligations remain subjects of anticipation. The relationship’s decisive condition is therefore not reconciliation, but persistence. Divorce, a new marriage, disputed paternity, and years without a reply have altered its outward form without extinguishing its emotional and familial consequences.