Zakheim & di Modena

Zakheim & di Modena is the Jerusalem law firm through which Manfred M. Zakheim conducts much of his documented legal and advisory work. Its significance in the novel lies less in courtroom action than in its position at the junction of private correspondence, investigative reporting, family disputes, and politically charged property plans. The firm’s office becomes an address for messages that otherwise might not reach Alexander A. Gideon, while material assembled through Zakheim’s instructions turns personal history and political activity into a dossier for scrutiny.

Identity and Setting

The firm is identified as a lawyers’ office at 36 King George Street in Jerusalem. Its name appears on correspondence addressed to Zakheim, and Zakheim is repeatedly identified as a lawyer associated with the practice. The evidence does not describe its internal structure, its staffing, or the precise division of work between Zakheim and di Modena; its institutional presence is instead established through letterheads, addresses, and the actions Zakheim undertakes in his professional capacity.

That documentary form matters. The firm is not presented through a scene of lawyers arguing a case, but through the routes by which letters and records move between people who are estranged, suspicious, or unable to communicate directly. Its address supplies a stable point of contact amid changing locations: a letter to Alexander A. Gideon in London, a report originating in Tel Aviv, and correspondence about family and property matters in Israel all pass through or are associated with the Jerusalem office.

Correspondence and Mediation

Zakheim’s office serves as an intermediary in the strained relationship between Alexander A. Gideon and Michel-Henri Sommo. In one letter, Sommo explains that he is sending his message through Zakheim because the lawyer refuses to disclose Gideon’s address. The firm is thus not merely a name on a business document: its control of contact information affects whether an estranged party can reach Gideon directly. Sommo’s message combines urgent concern about Boaz Brandstetter, who has disappeared after leaving the family with whom he was staying, with reproaches about Gideon’s past conduct and financial obligations.

The correspondence also makes the firm a channel for requests involving money and a proposed tissue test to establish paternity. Sommo argues that Gideon’s contribution to the family and to the redemption of Alkalai House in Hebron should be understood in relation to past wrongs and present responsibilities. A subsequent telegram from Gideon instructs Zakheim to find Boaz and says that an additional fifty thousand dollars will be available if Sommo arranges a tissue test, with Gideon to take a parallel test in London. The office therefore stands between personal accusation and practical negotiation: its documented role is to convey instructions and communications, not to resolve the underlying question of parentage or the parties’ moral claims.

The firm also receives and transmits a formal request made after a telephone conversation between the Sommos and Gideon. That request itemizes sixty thousand dollars for mortgage repayment and an additional room and a half, another comparable sum for the futures of the son and daughter, and a further ninety-five thousand dollars toward purchasing and renovating Alkalai House. The letter presents the Hebron property as a Jewish holding seized during the 1929 Palestine riots and says the effort to recover it would proceed by paying full market price rather than through violence. The firm’s correspondence thus records how household needs, provision for children, and a religious-national land project are gathered into one financial appeal.

Investigation and the Documentary Dossier

A particularly substantial part of the firm’s documented work is the investigative material Zakheim commissioned concerning Michel-Henri Sommo. A report by S. Zand Private Investigations Ltd., prepared on Zakheim’s instructions, was delivered to the client on March 26, 1976, and enclosed with a letter from Zakheim dated March 28. The report explicitly describes itself as a rapid preliminary inquiry rather than a comprehensive investigation. Its provisional status is important: it offers leads and observations, while acknowledging that further work would be needed to establish a fuller account.

The report surveys Sommo’s family connections and political history. It finds close relations with his extended family but describes strained relations with Boaz, who had refused for several years to visit the household in Jerusalem and was on probation from May 1975. It also records Sommo’s intermittent membership in the Herut Bloc and the National Religious Party, his role in organizing the Moledet group in Jerusalem in 1964, and his political activity around the Six-Day War. After the war, according to the report, he joined the Greater Israel Movement, left it in 1971, and later helped found the Jewish Fellowship Movement, where he remained on the executive committee. The report links that organization to demonstrations over troop disengagements and attempts to purchase land near Bethlehem; it says Sommo was interviewed by police twice but was not charged and was not personally found to have taken part in violent lawbreaking.

The report further notes Sommo’s published advocacy for encouraging Arab residents to leave through financial inducements. It treats his restored French nationality and a brief trip to Paris as unresolved matters: it describes the unusually rapid restoration and says investigators could not determine the purpose of the trip or what lay behind the episode. These are findings and suspicions contained in a preliminary report, not independently established conclusions supplied by the narrative. By commissioning and circulating the report, Zakheim’s office turns political affiliations, family circumstances, and opaque travel into material relevant to a private dispute.

Earlier Court Records and Family Claims

The materials Zakheim sends to Gideon also include marked extracts from two 1968 decisions concerning Gideon’s divorce from Halina Brandstetter-Gideon. The Rabbinical Court decision records a finding of adultery on the wife’s admission and the resulting loss of her ketubah and maintenance. The Jerusalem District Court record concerns her maintenance claim for herself and her young child. It notes that Gideon disputed paternity, that the blood test was inconclusive, and that the court advised tissue testing; both parties declined that test, after which the wife withdrew the claim and the court struck it out following their declaration that they had no further demands on one another.

The firm is not shown conducting those 1968 proceedings. Its relevance is that Zakheim selects and underlines excerpts from their decisions before enclosing them in a later packet for Gideon. The records place the present argument over Boaz’s parentage and support in the shadow of an earlier marriage in which paternity, maintenance, and the refusal of tissue testing had already been legally contested. The packet lets the past enter the present not as neutral background, but as documentary evidence assembled for a new and unsettled family conflict.

Property, Politics, and the Firm’s Limits

Zakheim’s correspondence with Sommo extends the firm’s reach from family matters into politically charged land transactions. In a letter responding to Sommo’s proposal concerning the Territories, Zakheim challenges the scale and cost of paying Arab owners and relocating them, while also discussing Gideon’s possible sale of property in Zikhron Yaakov. He discloses information from the investigative report about a Paris trip, a French backer, and negotiations with a religious order headquartered in Toulouse over land west of Bethlehem. In Zakheim’s account, the proposed transaction would connect land near Bethlehem with an exchange involving property within the pre-1967 borders and Gideon’s property in Zikhron Yaakov.

At the same time, Zakheim states that ethical and practical considerations make it preferable for him not to manage Sommo’s private affairs or represent his organization. He offers advice without a fee, while making clear that this is distinct from undertaking formal representation. That distinction limits what can safely be attributed to the firm: the correspondence documents Zakheim’s access to information and his personal advisory role, but does not establish that Zakheim & di Modena formally represented Sommo or the Jewish Fellowship Movement. Across the dossier, the firm’s narrative function is therefore both substantial and bounded. It provides the address, professional channel, and documentary machinery through which disputes become legible, yet the decisions, political commitments, and unresolved suspicions remain those of the people whose letters and records it handles.