For over ten years, from the time I moved to Israel until it became too much of a burden for his deteriorating health, my father sent me a weekly type-written letter. Those letters, that consistently filled up both sides of an almost margin-less page, were, along with the ones I sent back with almost the same frequency, our ongoing a-synchronous conversation that seemed to cancel the distance of thousands of kilometers and an era when long distance phone calls were still considered a luxury.

Dad's writing was associative. He would often start by reporting on a topic in the news, and then reflect on it from his own perspective and experience, frequently bringing in stories and recollections from his childhood. (He was also a master of the technique of copy and paste before the computer and the possibility of being digital made that technique commonplace. In his professional writing he would type out independent or unconnected sentences and thoughts as individual lines on a page, and then separate them physically by tearing (well, it wasn't exactly cutting) them with a ruler. Those individual thoughts would be spread out over his and Mom's bed, and then he would begin the process of pasting them into coherent wholes by choosing each sentence that he wanted and connecting it to the others with scotch tape.) His letters created a coherent world that I had the honor to enter each week.

Dad would conclude each letter with the admonition "write on", a play on the popular cry of agreement from the sixties "right on". This attempt to continue that writing, to transport it into a format made possible by technologies he didn't live to use, to perhaps create a world as rich as the one he was able to create in his letters, is dedicated to his memory.

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