Snow and Black-and-White Imagery

Snow and Black-and-White Imagery is the recurring visual language through which Ilana Sommo pictures Alexander Gideon during their estrangement: alone at a desk, surrounded by snow, firelight, and a world drained of color. The image is not a reliable portrait of his circumstances. Its force lies in how it turns distance into a scene that can be revisited, disputed, and partially inhabited by both correspondents. As Alexander corrects the details, the image changes without disappearing; its monochrome still gives shape to the coldness and attraction their letters cannot resolve.

The imagined room

In her first letter, written after seven years of silence, Ilana imagines Alexander in a long, book-lined room at a black desk. Beyond the window stretch dazzling, arid snowfields, without hills or trees; a fire burns to his left, while an empty glass and an empty bottle sit on the desk. The whole scene, including Alexander himself, appears in black and white. She casts him as monkish, ascetic, and haughty, as if austerity and emotional reserve were visible features of the room.

The scene is explicitly an act of imagination, not a report of what she has seen. Ilana even pictures Alexander crumpling her letter and shooting it onto the fire, certain that he distrusts her and wants nothing to do with Boaz. The imagined gesture gives physical form to the silence between them: her words seem already rejected before the letter can reach him. The fire is both a detail in his supposed room and the destination she fears for her message.

That invented interior also reveals the limits of Ilana’s view. She can picture Alexander’s isolation in elaborate detail, but she cannot know where he is or what his days are like. The stark composition makes him legible as an image while keeping him inaccessible as a person. The snow’s blankness and the room’s few carefully placed objects substitute for knowledge she does not possess.

A portrait repeated in letters

In a letter dated 19 April 1976 and addressed to Alexander’s Illinois address, Ilana returns to the same scene. She imagines the black-and-white room, the desk, bottle, glass, fire, and snowfields as a capsule in which Alexander travels continually from continent to continent. Even when she admits that she has no request and is writing only to talk, the repeated image supplies a setting for that desired conversation. It makes an absent addressee seem present, while emphasizing how little she knows of his actual surroundings.

Ilana’s recurring portrait is not merely a fixed visual convention. She imagines that his contemptuous expression has the power to make her melt, and describes her response as a mixture of surrender and hatred. The frozen image thus carries a contradictory emotional charge: Alexander is distant and cold, but the very distance intensifies her attachment. The letters’ black-and-white world contains opposing impulses rather than a simple division between feeling and its absence.

The image persists even when Ilana recognizes that their established silence might resume. She describes an elusive light over a marsh that neither correspondent can stop watching, then treats the current letter as a point from which there can be no return. Against that uncertain, flickering possibility, the snowbound room offers a stable picture of separation. Its recurrence makes the relationship’s return to correspondence feel less like a clean reconciliation than a renewed exposure to the old attraction and injury.

Correction, and the willow outside the window

Alexander’s reply replaces Ilana’s imagined room with practical corrections. He describes a disciplined solitary life: going to bed at ten, rising at four to work on an article or lecture, reading hundreds of pages, and taking quotations or footnotes from his reading. He has a walking stick bought in an antique shop in Brussels. The details do not confirm the frozen scholar in Ilana’s picture; they give him an ordinary schedule and a body moving through an actual life.

Most pointedly, Alexander says that his home has central heating rather than a fireplace, and that outside the window there is no snow. It is May, and the view is a neat English lawn, a forsaken wooden bench, a weeping willow, and grey sky. He also says that he expects to return to Chicago and that he has been forbidden to drink or smoke for more than a year. In place of Ilana’s fire, whisky, and empty glass, he offers an altered still life: lawn, bench, willow, and a medically constrained routine.

The willow becomes a possible revision of the motif rather than its cancellation. Alexander accepts that black and white can remain, but asks that Ilana use the idea with restraint. His response suggests that her invented scenery has aesthetic appeal even as he refuses its factual claims. The exchange makes the image shared property: she supplies the composition, he corrects its objects, and both continue to write within its visual terms.

The image outlasts the correction

Ilana does not abandon the snowfields after Alexander’s reply. She continues to see him at a window overlooking brilliant, treeless plains merging into grey fog, all rendered like a woodcut in the heart of winter. Against this, her own surroundings are insistently summery. In Jerusalem, the days blaze, and Michel Sommo works with three laborers digging foundations for an extension built with Alexander’s money. Beyond the fence lie fig trees and an olive, while the wadi, the Arab quarter, goats, dogs, and the muezzin bring a particular inhabited landscape into view.

The contrast is more than a difference in weather. Ilana’s Jerusalem has work underway, neighboring houses, animal sounds, and a changing day; Alexander’s imagined landscape remains stripped of hill, tree, and bird. She tells him that summer has arrived and that he has not. The repeated winter picture therefore marks his absence from her present, even as the letters keep him imaginatively at her window. It also places the money he provides beside the life continuing without him: his contribution helps build an extension, but does not make him part of the scene.

Alexander’s own later description of himself complicates the portrait again. At a high window on the twenty-seventh floor of a Chicago office building, he is thinner and balding, dressed in dark blue corduroy trousers and a red cashmere sweater. His brow is against the glass; his hands are clenched in his pockets, and he eventually crosses his arms around his shoulders in an embrace that suggests having nobody. He still recognizes the black-and-white image, but this scene introduces colors Ilana’s composition suppresses.

Outside, the dusk is orange, the lake and clouds are transformed by the light, and wind drives fog against the surrounding towers. The water’s foaming surface seems to be changing into slate or granite, while the windowpanes chatter in the gusts. A strange bird is swept toward the window in spasmodic circles. In this vivid, unstable setting, Alexander thinks of death not as a threat hovering ahead but as an event already in progress. The scene does not erase the snowbound image; it reveals what that image leaves out: color, motion, bodily tension, and a world that resists its clean, frozen outline.

A shared image of distance

The motif’s development follows the correspondence itself. Ilana first uses snow and monochrome to give shape to a man she imagines rejecting her; Alexander answers by correcting the room and offering the willow, then appears in a Chicago scene whose color and agitation exceed her original composition. Yet Ilana continues to picture him in winter. The mismatch is meaningful: the image is not a shared factual account but a repeated medium through which separation becomes visible.

Its black-and-white clarity also sits uneasily beside the relationship’s contradictions. Alexander is isolated, but he reads and answers; he rejects Ilana’s invented details, yet acknowledges their expressive force; she resents the coldness she attributes to him, yet remains drawn toward it. Snow makes distance seem absolute, while the letters themselves keep crossing it. The motif’s central tension is therefore between the frozen portrait and the acts of revision that prevent it from becoming final.