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.

 

 

 

 

 

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)