Volodya Gudonski

Volodya Gudonski emerges through Alexander Gideon’s childhood memoir as a father whose authority shaped both the physical world of the family estate and the habits of the boy growing up there. He is not given an independent voice in these recollections: Alexander’s remembered scenes define him through his commands, his treatment of the household and its grounds, and the martial discipline he passes on to his son.

Identity and Family Setting

Alexander’s memoir identifies Volodya by his place in the family: he is the father whose presence organizes the childhood home. The recollections are addressed to Michel Sommo, so Volodya’s portrait reaches the reader indirectly, through a son’s attempt to set down a reliable account of the past. The result is not a complete biography but a carefully assembled domestic history in which small details of management and punishment disclose the reach of paternal authority.

The estate stood apart from the town, with its orchard and laborers’ huts at the edge of the property. Volodya had built five or six huts from corrugated iron and cement blocks for Circassian laborers whom he brought from Lebanon or Galilee. Their isolated accommodation, and the distance between the house and the town, place the family household within a wider structure of labor and separation. At night, the workers’ singing carried across the grounds, while the house remained surrounded by wilderness and the sounds of animals.

The House and Its Grounds

Volodya’s rule extended to the garden’s appearance. Alexander remembers seasonal wild plants growing there, but his father despised them and cleared them in favor of rose beds filled with rare varieties ordered from distant regions. The contrast is characteristic: the garden’s spontaneous growth yielded to a deliberate, cultivated display. The same memoir describes a boy making small cities and forts from mud, then destroying them with pine cones, while his father’s preferences shaped the larger landscape around him.

Animals and objects also mark the limits Volodya imposed. Alexander collected creatures in jars and cans in the cellar; his father killed the boy’s rhesus monkey, after which Alexander raised a structure over its grave. That memorial had itself become a ruin by the time the memoir was written, and Boaz used the place to keep a tortoise. The sequence links Volodya’s household authority to the later generations who inherit, reuse, and alter its remains.

The house itself was large and irregular, with twisting passages, spiral staircases, storerooms, hidden spaces, and a concealed tunnel running from the cellar to a garden pavilion. The tunnel was blocked with earth in Alexander’s account. Such details make the estate more than a backdrop: it is a material expression of the secluded family world Volodya controlled, one whose labyrinthine spaces preserve traces of both grandeur and neglect.

Discipline and the Making of a Son

Volodya’s most direct influence on Alexander was the training he prescribed. When the boy was nine, his father sent him to Haifa twice a week for private boxing lessons. At ten, Alexander learned from him how to take apart and reassemble a handgun, and father and son soon held shooting contests in the lower part of the farmyard. Volodya also initiated him into the use of daggers, several kinds of which were displayed on a wall in the library. These lessons made weapons part of ordinary family instruction, linking paternal education with preparedness for violence.

The memoir also recalls that Alexander set fire to scraps of paper by focusing sunlight through a piece of glass. His father stamped out the fire and punished him. Elsewhere, a childhood friend recalls Volodya roaring at him and cursing him in Russian; the friend caused a short circuit with a broken iron, plunging the house into darkness. Together, these episodes show that Volodya’s authority was felt not only by his son but also by a child admitted into the home. They establish a household in which anger could abruptly dominate ordinary play and companionship.

Guests, Workers, and Neighbors

Volodya’s estate connected private life with the surrounding region. Arab peasants arrived on late-summer mornings with produce and other goods. Alexander remembered his father making derogatory remarks about them while also acknowledging their agricultural usefulness; the recollection exposes a paternal outlook that combined reliance on local labor with a sharp hierarchy between landowner and worker. The household also received camel caravans bringing building stones or watermelons, part of the daily traffic that entered the otherwise isolated estate.

At night, Volodya entertained British officers, Greek and Egyptian merchants, and Lebanese real-estate agents. Their male gatherings took place in a richly furnished salon, where drinking, card-playing, and conversation sometimes gave way to drunken sobbing. The parties reveal another side of the estate: it was secluded from the town yet open to commercial and colonial-era networks. The fine furnishings later disappeared during years of desolation, and Boaz replaced the marble floors with concrete, making the house’s changing fortunes visible in its materials.

The family’s dealings with its neighbors could also turn confrontational. Alexander’s memoir recalls that Volodya eventually sent Circassian laborers on a night raid against a neighboring kibbutz. The account places the estate’s labor arrangements within a conflict that reached beyond its boundaries, though it does not supply enough detail to establish the raid’s full circumstances or outcome. Volodya’s household authority thus appears alongside his capacity to mobilize people in a wider local dispute.

Later Acts and Narrative Significance

Volodya’s influence extends beyond Alexander’s early memories into the family’s later story. Alexander recalls that his father bought Boaz a mountain in Tibet, officially named Boaz Gideon Peak. The gesture joins the family’s expansive sense of property and inheritance to a gift for the next generation, although the memoir gives no further account of the purchase or its practical consequences.

As a character, Volodya is defined by the tension between cultivation and force: he orders rare roses while suppressing other growth, hosts elaborate gatherings in a remote house, and trains his son in weapons. The memoir’s accumulation of specific rooms, tools, animals, workers, and lessons makes his authority legible through what he arranged and what he forbade. Because the portrait is mediated by Alexander, it offers no direct account of Volodya’s private motives; its emphasis falls instead on the durable effects of his rule, preserved in the son’s memories and in the estate that later generations inherit and remake.