How My Father Impacted My Writing  

How My Father Impacted My Writing  

It’s another early morning at my writing desk. The house is quiet. The coffee is cold. Two months ago, my father was admitted to the hospital and never came home. Each time I write I come to the same scene: the moment when I shouted for a hug on the other side of the glass window. I’ll never forget how he pushed together his mittened hands with all his strength. That was his final goodbye. Three days later, he was gone. 

I’m doing a la Wild Writing 15 minutes session without stopping: “You’ll never know the world without you. The world keeps going.” I’m jotting down the things he’d want to know more about in my world: the woman who walks up and down our street, shouting the most mundane things into her cell phone, how strong are the wooden beams of our succa, the price of oil and gas. We could be talking on either continent: Israel, USA.

Ever since my father tragically passed away from Covid-19 on August 14, 2021, there have been many times when his voice comes in and out of my head. I hear the lessons, the words he’s trying to tell me. And I hope I’m doing justice to his memory by whittling these experiences down to three main areas of influence. 

Be a Keen Observer

My father and I didn’t always say much to each other. Sometimes we were busy taking in the world around us. 

Observing the mundane in details: the woman walking her dog, my teenage son then infant mouthing words – that’s how we got by. Your world slows down when you take in the details. 

There’s a whole world in his art because of those details: the swirl of specific shapes and colors in “The Twelve Tribes of Israel,” a glass themed commissioned piece at a synagogue in Queens that practically towers you. Or a large striking brown lined canvass that resembles a family huddling together that accompanied my childhood. Many years later I will learn it’s the four of us. 

Advocate Others and Yourself

My father plays a very strong role in my first award-winning book, Accidental Soldier: A Memoir of Service and Sacrifice in the Israel Defense Forces. Readers have told me he comes across as a wise person who ultimately helps me achieve emotional freedom away from my mother’s fears and phobias of Israel. 

In his midtown office, he says, “if you stay in New York City, you’ll turn out to be exactly like your mother.” I had to literally join an army across the world to achieve this prized independence that would help me become my own person. 

Later in my writing years, I had to push through self-doubt to advocate for writing about that young nineteen year old who felt shame about leaving my Mother. To this day I believe my father encouraged me to see how the kernel of an idea can develop into possibilities.

Write What You Know

Now that I’ve written two memoirs about serving in the Israel Defense Forces and a more recent one called Sand and Steel: A Memoir of Longing and Finding Home about leaving Israel for the United States, I’m convinced that the well-known advice “write what you know” also implies to making sense from the “emotional miles” you’ve walked. 

Leaving my heart home of Israel, dismantling relationships are my living stories. My father too, never forgot the land where he was born – the holy city of Jerusalem. I see the influence of Jerusalem emerging through the grey, white and black square cutouts that has followed me since childhood.

Maybe you can see the influence of this holy city in his art, too. 

Final Words

It’s not really the craft of his art that impacted me, but what he stood for as a person. And how he processed the world. 

In Judaism, it’s customary to say to a person whose loved one has passed, “may his/her memory be for a blessing.” Through my father’s art I hope to find a reason for my life as a creative. Through his handiwork, I hope to find peace. 

Of course my heart rips open for the father I lost under such tragic circumstances. But my heart is filled with immense gratitude for the rich upbringing I had as an artist child. 

His massive legacy will live on in me forever. May his memory be forever for a blessing. 

—

Dorit Sasson is the award-winning author of Accidental Soldier: A Memoir of Service and Sacrifice in the Israel Defense Forces and the newly released Sand and Steel: A Memoir of Longing and Finding Home. 

She’s the owner of SEO Business Magic and works with authors, entrepreneurs, companies, and small businesses, to increase online visibility with leads and conversions.  

SAND AND STEEL, Dorit Sasson

What’s it like to be lost between two worlds, only to find a home in neither? In this new memoir, Israeli-American author Dorit Sasson draws on the narrative she began in her award-winning debut Accidental Soldier: A Memoir of Service and Sacrifice in the Israel Defense Forces, detailing her journey to understanding what it means to exist between two different worlds.

When Sasson, a native New Yorker, returns to her kibbutz in Israel following the second Israeli-Lebanese war, she is confronted with the shocking reality of a country altered by an economic depression and social change. Faced with an uncertain economic future, Sasson convinces her husband to leave the country and kibbutz that have turned their backs on them and emigrate to the United States in search of a brighter future. In order to welcome the American dream of professional freedom that awaits her, she must leave the land she loved and fought for as an Israel Defense Forces soldier. But when she arrives, she finds herself more torn between two worlds than ever, changed by her time away from the United States and out of place in a country that is not all she remembered it to be.

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Category: On Writing