A Distant Memory About an Emigre

A slightly updated memoir about a telling incident, now 54 years ago…

Pilgrim on a Long, Long Journey

“I believe that we write about, and out of, our obsessions, the things that haunt our souls, things we never get over.” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3299998?seq=1). So said Randall Keenan, an American Author.

Today I think about Irish whiskey, four leaf clovers and a touch of the Irish. That Irish blood is shared by my spouse and our two adult children. They have a touch of the UK running through their veins as well.

My DNA harkens far south of there to East Asia. I am 100 per cent Ashkenazi Jew. Israel is just in my blood. I felt the connection when my spouse, Kristine, and I visited that blooming, desert land in 2019.

But something of the UK still haunts my soul which dates back almost 60 years. It was September, 1967. It wasn’t a draft physical for which I was in line. It was a medical school physical, prior…

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Food for the Soul

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.” Joyce Carol Oates, an American novelist of renown, who has written 58 novels in the last 58 years, as well as, non-fiction.

I believe our soul consists of our conscious and subconscious minds. The finest writing seems to well up from the writer’s subconscious. It is the place, per some psychologists, where we make our decisions. It is the place through which each of us can enhance our self-understanding.

Studies have shown that reading fiction is good for the emotional well-being of the reader. I suspect the same is true for memoir. In fact one of our best memoirists, Dani Shapiro, has said of writing memoir “It’s like stitching together a quilt, creating order that isn’t chronological order—it’s emotional, psychological order.”

May your soul be filled to the brim with God’s love expressed to you, in part, through the stories of others.