making a history

            My father makes things.  He has, so far, been a cartographer, a filmmaker, a soldier, a photographer, an inventor, and a businessman.  He speaks four languages.  He is ambidextrous.  He has lived in all three worlds and has seen many of the faces of poverty and wealth.  My father has three names- one for each country he’s lived in.  Unconventional,  stubborn, eccentric, with a mode of problem solving that drives my mother crazy,  he is filled with stories.  This is one of them. I hope I get it right.

            My father was born in Tunisia, in Tataouine, back when it was a tiny village in the desert.  His father, my grandfather, ground wheat for a living.  They lived in a  hut with no electricity- mother, father and half a dozen siblings.  My father talks of adventures climbing palm trees, of hitting birds with his slingshot, of making fantastical shadow puppets with the kerosene lamps. He talks of speaking French in a grade school where the teacher smacked him for writing with his left hand, forcing him to switch.

            Now, my father never had a birth certificate.  He also grew up too poor to have a proper Bar Mitzvah.  But when the time seemed about right, he assembled his family in front of the temple, wrapped himself in a tallit, and took a photograph.  This was his Bar Mitzvah picture. 

            He saved the photograph for years, this near-perfect record of an event that never happened.  I’ve seen the photo.  It’s faded and yellowed.  My father is young and fresh-faced. He is surrounded by brothers and sisters and mother.  But no father. His father couldn’t be there, even for the photo.

            A lifetime of years went by.  My father moved to Israel, then to America.  He struggled and failed and struggled and won. He grew up and he grew old.  The world changed around him.  And when the age that we guessed for him reached about seventy, he taught himself Photoshop using tutorials he found on youtube, cursing at his failing memory, squinting at his notes. Then he scanned that old Bar Mitzvah photograph into the computer, and he scanned an old photograph of his father, and he Photoshopped his father into the photo.  There.

            He put this new picture into a digital folder with all of the other family pictures, so that when the screensaver came on and zoomed smoothly over pictures of his children at their weddings and fancy bar mitzvahs and vacations, his picture would have a turn, my father, fresh-faced and rosy, wrapped in a tallit with all of his family beside him, celebrating the joyous event of his Bar Mitzvah, outside a synagogue in the desert.