A Writer's
Apology
It all began on December 15th, 1989.
That was our third day in South America, in
the beginning of a long trip. It was the day of the first democratic
elections in Chile
after 16 years of Pinoché's dictatorship. The
events of that day, and the night that followed, were so intense, that I felt
the urge to share it with as many people as possible. I sat down to write a
long letter, in the old fashioned way (i.e., pen and paper, with no editing
capabilities). That letter described our adventures and impressions. It became "Travel Story no. 1",
and it was followed by eleven others. I sent those letters to my family; my
mom always made a copy to Judith Nessyahu, the
mother of my trip companion, Haimi. All of our
friends would go to Judith's house to read those letters. When we landed in Israel on June 11th, 1990,
Judith was waiting outside the terminal with a book in her hand. Those were
my twelve letters that she typed on her PC and printed! That book became very
popular among my friends who kept telling me that I should publish it. I was
reluctant to do so.
Three and half years
later I arrived in Los Angeles
for a three year assistant professorship position at UCLA. Very soon I
understood that the need to share, to write and to communicate with friends
in Israel
and elsewhere calls for a new series of letters. Those were already Emails,
in English, and my "audience" grew slowly and steadily from a dozen
or so, to over four dozens at the end. Later on, whenever I traveled to an
interesting country (namely, not in Europe
or in North America), I did the same thing.
I enjoyed very much writing those letters, and my readers (at least those who
were not deterred by the length of those letters) seemed to have enjoyed
reading them. The compliments were numerous and sometimes overwhelming.
Everyone agreed that "I should do something with my writing".
So after the trip to China, where
my letters became longer than ever and the responses were stronger than ever,
I decided to try and restore all of my letters. The letters from South America posed the hardest challenge. I had them
on a 14-year old floppy disk. Leah Epstein, my colleague, still had a PC that
could read that thing. But then I got those undecipherable Hebrew Wordmill files that no contemporary application could
read. Using my skills as a cryptographer, I was able, after weeks of hard
work, to decipher all of those files. After accomplishing this, the
restoration of the rest of the letters was much easier.
So here are all of my
letters from my travels. That's as much "published" as I am willing
to go. I would like to thank those of you who were my audience and I intend
to keep on traveling and writing.
March 2004, Givatayim.
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South America (12/1989-6/1990)
(in
Hebrew)
The Los Angeles Letters (1993-1996)
Mexico (12/1994)
Japan (7/1995)
India (7-8/2000)
Costa Rica (12/2001-1/2002)
China (9-10/2003)
New Zealand (11-12/2004)
India (8/2005)
Brazil (4/2008)
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