A Story to Be Told

Day 115 – my father is 83 years, he was born in another country, he went through the holocaust, where all his family was murdered, he escaped, immigrated to this country fought in the Independence war, got injured… in short he has a story to tell. The problem is that he doesn’t know how to do that. I bought him a computer few years ago, but this didn’t help. He can’t find his voice. He keeps telling again and again the same 10 stories and never goes past that. And the problem is that if we will not intervene he’ll die one day and his story will die with him, the story of a whole family who got destroyed. I think about it a lot and it really makes me uneasy. Today I had a great idea. If he cannot do that, I am going to do it for him. I tried to get those stories before but I gave him a free reign and it didn’t work. So this time I am going to build a set of leading  questions and will not tell him that it is his story I’ll just ask questions and record the answers and will write the story from this raw material. I will call for specific memories. About his first day in school or his best friend or his grandparents, and just build the puzzle from there. And I will not ask chronologically so it will be my way and not let him drag his feet his way. I am giving myself now 2 months to assemble enough materials for a book, another 2 months to edit it and two weeks to print, all so it will be ready for his 84^th birthday at the beginning of October. I am very excited about this idea; I believe it can actually work. If it will, I think I have done something wonderful not only for him, but for his lost family and for all of us his descendants, so we’ll finally have something about our heritage and about him. And one day, when he is no longer with us let this be part of his legacy. I will talk to my mom tomorrow to get all what we already have in writing and I’ll take it from there.

I am so thankful about this wonderful idea, as I said before, I am really worried that he will not leave us any of that and too soon the story will start to lose some of its detail, and many of the stories we never even heard. I am thankful for the class I took yesterday since this, in part, is how I got this wonderful idea. I am thankful that I have enough time until his birthday, that it’s actually a realistic timeline. I am so looking for tomorrow to start working on this book.