This Blog just became less bloggy and more of a personal history

Above is a postcard I sent out announcing my engagement. The Hebrew reads: “My son is a hunter. He’s been out hunting for several days.” I’m not sure if this meant something about finding a wife, or if I just liked the picture. Despite this trove, many things have been lost to time. 

I was given the gift of all my correspondence that I wrote to my family from about 1985 to 2001. Most of the first letters were written when I went abroad to Guilin, China during my junior year at college. After college I lived in Taipei, then moved to Israel in 1994.

My family gave me such great feedback about writing letters that I put my good energies into sharing my life and observations. I’m humbled that not just one, but a few family members saved my writings. My family reacted to what I wrote, taking my views seriously, making me feel like an important foreign correspondent.

I’m not being coy when I talk vaguely about my family, but many do not want their names, image, or any photo or artwork of theirs appearing on the internet. I will abide by their wishes.

The way our system worked, I would send a letter to a relative who would then photocopy the pages and send them to the others. Many of the letters will be hard to read because of faded thermal paper and bad dot-matrix printers. Getting married, the universality of email, living a set life, were all factors that ended the family letter system.

Now it’s easy to see how I became a blogger, having this background in which I shared photos and details about my doings. I’m going to begin putting my correspondence on the blog to preserve and organize these writings. 

This period represents for me the divide between old-world and new, analog and digital. Now I do all art, photos, and drawings, on digital platforms. I feel a need to get this material on the internet, otherwise, I’ll burying it in storage and never see it again. I did this with my photos and the result was that I viewed them more often. Perhaps I’ll dig a gem out the faded relics.

Also, over these years I sent copious amounts of postcards. I have enjoyed photography since my early years, so with the prints I rejected I would send them as postcards. Many of the cards have an interesting look to them, making me nostalgic for the printed work.