Collecting the Fragments of Life to Piece Together the Puzzle of His Life

Boxes, envelopes, newspaper clippings, cassette tapes and home video tapes were an inseparable part of our lives as children, and also in later years, in my parents’ home at 73 Ahad Ha’am Street in Tel Aviv.

My father was a collector. He clipped each and every article he had written and published, first in Haaretz and later in Maariv, and pasted them into albums. When my sister Tali began writing for Davar, in the early 1980s, he also clipped and kept her articles. On audio cassettes he recorded radio programs and classical music. When home video entered the living room, he began recording television programs as well — programs I took part in, programs Tali took part in, speeches, concerts, operas and plays.

Yes, yes. The apple and the tree.

When I received a Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder with an iron microphone for my Bar Mitzvah, I would sit for hours recording hit parades and important news broadcasts.

My father died in the winter of 1997. In the apartment at 73 Ahad Ha’am Street, the boxes and crates in which he had collected his life over the years remained.

I knew they were there; I assumed I knew what was inside them. I never asked him about their contents.

During the years when my father stayed at home more and more, I was in the United States; when he could still go through the things he had collected with me, I always had something more important to do; when I began to take an interest — he was no longer with us to answer my questions.

After his death, my mother packed up the house and moved to a new apartment. The boxes moved with her and were kept in the utility room, next to the washing machine.

And then there was a small flood from the washing machine.

When we took everything that was on the floor out of the room, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity and sort through the contents of the boxes.

The first were two large cardboard boxes.

In the first cardboard box I found a torn paper bag containing five letters, written in small letters on transparent tissue paper, in pencil, in Yiddish. Black-and-white photographs of relatives in a distant land whom I did not know. Passports with the emblem of the British King on the cover.

And one large envelope...

Inside were dozens of colorful postcards. Postcards collected in American hotels in the late 1950s. Postcards my father wrote to a six-year-old boy, a two-and-a-half-year-old girl and a young mother while he was on a coast-to-coast tour of lectures and performances with a select group of young Israeli artists, marking ten years of Israel. The trip was planned to last five months and extended to nine. Tali and I were left with Mother

Denver, Birmingham, Chicago and New York, November 1958 to the end of January 1959

Following in His Footsteps – “Cast a Giant Shadow” Is Not Just a Film Title Professor Bernhill told us in the final class of the semester, just before graduation, at Syracuse University in upstate New York:  “If you really want to make television, go to New -York City and fight for a job at one of the three major television networks. If you want to stay on the periphery — don’t waste your time, go sell shoes...” One morning in the spring of 1980, I showed up at the office of Geraldo Rivera, a legendary journalist in New York in the late 1970s, at the ABC News studios in Manhattan.

My father was a collector

When I rummaged through the boxes back then, it became clear to me that they contained not just a collection of things my father had kept.

These were signposts my father had left behind, scattered along his way.

Now, almost thirty years after his death, Yaeli, Tali and I, as if we were Hansel and Gretel, set out in my father’s footsteps, collecting the fragments of life and trying to piece together the puzzle of our lives — his life.