Volodya

Volodya is Alexander Gideon’s father, a once-formidable presence whose later life is marked by institutional care and severe confusion about the people around him. In Ilana Sommo’s account of visiting him in 1976, he moves between moments of courtesy, moral seriousness, and disorientation. His failure to recognize Ilana, and his conviction that she is his dead son’s widow, turn the visit into an encounter with memory that remains emotionally forceful even as it becomes unreliable.

Identity and Family Background

Volodya’s importance is inseparable from the childhood Alexander Gideon spent in the family’s isolated Zikhron estate. Alexander grew up without his mother, siblings, or a human friend; the one companion recalled in Ilana’s account was his father’s small rhesus monkey. The estate was not merely a family home but the setting of an early and defining loss, one that remained part of the history Ilana associated with Volodya.

Alexander’s mother died one winter night when she was inadvertently left alone in her bedroom. The day nurse had gone home and the night nurse had not yet arrived. Volodya was away fetching a boatload of iron girders from Italy. Ilana remembers the room as a small attic bedroom with a view of the sea, and recalls the mother’s photograph in Volodya’s library, flanked by candles and accompanied by a vase of everlasting flowers. These objects connect the bereavement to the house’s domestic life; in the later account, Ilana can only speculate that the photograph and its arrangements have long since disappeared.

The Sanatorium Visit

In a letter dated 15 August 1976, Ilana recounts traveling from Zikhron to Haifa to see Volodya at a sanatorium on Mount Carmel. She finds him alone at a table in the garden, dressed in a stained gown, with cake and yogurt before him and an oleander spray in his hand. His appearance retains something imposing: he rises slowly and bows to her twice. Yet his greeting is mistaken. He addresses her as Madame Rovina and thanks her for coming to his funeral, treating the visit as an occasion after his own death.

Ilana has brought chrysanthemums from the Central Bus Station. Volodya takes them, places one in his buttonhole and the rest in the yogurt glass, then later throws them aside. The small ceremony of receiving the flowers and the abrupt rejection of them belong to the same unstable meeting: he can respond formally to Ilana while misconstruing who she is and why she has come. His offer of champagne, made over the yogurt, similarly shows how ordinary social gestures persist even when the shared situation has become confused.

Memory, Confusion, and Moral Judgment

When Ilana asks after his health and the pains in his shoulder, Volodya denies having pain and assigns it to someone else. He refers to a man he has heard is alive and has spoken on the radio, but the conversation does not establish clearly whom he means. The exchange makes his confusion apparent without reducing him to silence: he continues to answer, but the identities and circumstances he invokes do not settle into a coherent account of the present.

At another moment, Volodya asks whether Dostoevsky could be pardoned, contrasting the writer’s religious standing with his treatment of his family and the suffering of a dying child. The question shows a moral preoccupation that remains sharply expressed amid his disorientation. Ilana’s account also records his sudden chuckle, followed by seriousness, and his recitation of a passage about autumn, approaching snow, and riding away. He loses his way in the recitation and falls silent. The movement from fluent declaration to interruption gives the scene a form of its own: memory surfaces in fragments, and its emotional force outlasts its continuity.

His Relationship with Ilana

After Ilana reminds him who she is, Volodya briefly seems to recognize her. He identifies her as Ilana and calls her his son’s widow, then speaks as if his son and the people at Simferopol had all been killed. This is not a reliable account of the present; it is a mistaken history into which he places the visitor. His recognition is therefore partial and unstable: he recovers her name, but not the actual circumstances of her life or her relationship to Alexander.

Within that confused account, Volodya turns to questions of life, death, and responsibility. He says he threw away his revolver and regards that act as final, then urges Ilana to live and hope. He offers her a dust-stained chrysanthemum and cautions her not to get lost in the snow. The gesture is modest, but it gives the visit a closing act of care: even while treating her as someone from an imagined past, he directs a wish for survival toward her.

Narrative Role and Significance

Volodya’s appearance brings the family’s past into the present without restoring it. Ilana’s recollection of Alexander’s mother’s death and lonely childhood meets the living, diminished father who once belonged to that history. The visit does not resolve the old losses; instead, it shows how they remain active in the way Ilana understands Alexander’s family and in the memories Volodya can no longer reliably distinguish from present reality.

The scene also sets conflicting forms of persistence beside one another. Volodya loses track of names and circumstances, yet retains gestures of politeness, moral questioning, and a final concern for Ilana’s safety. His confused image of a dead son cannot be treated as fact, but it reveals the emotional landscape governing his encounter. By ending with the flower and the injunction to live and hope, the account gives his disorientation a human counterpoint: memory fails, while the impulse to offer another person a small act of kindness remains.