By submitting the above I agree to the privacy policy and terms of use of JTA. By the time I was 76, I thought I knew my father well. I also knew that loved the desert near his California home — that was where he would go when he and my mother had a weekend away. But I never appreciated what the desert meant to him. My father had an unusual life, so one day I decided to sit down and write a short essay about him. What about that story he told countless times of coming from Russia to Warsaw as a small child, in a wagon with his family, traveling through woods full of scary wolves?
Maybe he was actually born in Russia and grew up in Warsaw. He had written a memoir late in his life that I had read and then stuck on a shelf and forgotten about. Reading it again I found the answer to my question as well as all sorts of wonderful stories. Instead of writing an article, I set out to write a book. His adventures began when he was 3 years old and his family left Warsaw to escape the Germans and went to live in Moscow.
When he was 5 they moved back to Warsaw to escape the Russian Revolution. He was hardly a stereotypical Eastern European Jew of the early 20th century: His family was bourgeois and not observant; he spoke Polish with his parents rather than Yiddish; the only Hebrew he knew was what he memorized for his bar mitzvah.
He boxed, raced bicycles and got into fights; rather than attend his last year of high school, he played poker, made mischief with a group of youths, and failed the year; he never liked working indoors and was happy doing physical labor. Courtesy Dvora Treisman. Successfully repeating the last year of school, in fall he went off to university to study medicine at the University of Montpellier in France. It went well until they had to cut up a frog in the biology lab, and he decided medicine was not for him.
Happily studying agronomy, he explored Algiers and Algeria, and spent time with two new friends, one from Belgium and the other from Laos. One day in late spring he came down with an inflammation of the joints that left him immobilized.
