KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
Convincing my father to undertake this project was no simple matter. Clearly, some of his memories are extremely painful. Also, the work would be time-consuming and considerable. There would be interviews, edits, questions, and interactions with friends, es- pecially around contradictory recollections or unflattering mem - ories; all of these would be draining. For quite a while, serious medical problems prevented my father from feeling up to the task. Fortunately, after a series of major medical procedures and opera- tions, all of which turned out successfully, my father was ready to proceed. I was fortunate to come into contact with Kitty Axelson-Berry from Modern Memoirs, which is specifically in the business of writ - ing and publishing commissioned personal memoirs. Although the project I had in mind was of a different scale and scope than those the company had undertaken before, she enthusiastically agreed to work with my father and me. While I certainly wanted to capture my father’s personal story in his own words, my goal was to cre- ate a document involving a high level of research and scholarship. Personal recollections, particularly after sixty years, can fade, and my father’s perspective of pre-war Ludvipol was primarily that of a ten- to thirteen-year-old boy. As the father of two ten-year-olds, I had a sense of how he must have perceived his daily life at that age. I also wanted to be sensitive to the innocence and poignancy of his retelling of his childhood, given how tragically things turned out for his family. Therefore, extensive interviews with my father’s contemporar- ies on three continents were conducted in a variety of languages. Historical archives were researched to capture the context of the places and periods. All of these materials were then compared to clarify what actually happened or, where facts could not be estab- lished, to describe the range of possibilities. In that process, many facts were clarified and old memories were revived, resulting in a richer, deeper, and more accurate stoiy. This book is notable for what it does not contain. Readers who story.
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