I Pity the Poor Immigrant

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I remember taking my father to lunch at an Italian restaurant on 76th Street a few years ago, after my first book, a memoir of my brief marriage, had come out. It was October, and a waiter circulated among the tables with a plate of white truffles beneath a tiny bell jar so that when he lifted it you could take in the aroma before he shaved the truffles over small plates of risotto in black squid ink. Eighty dollars each, those small plates. I can recollect the pungent taste, the Sangiovese in our glasses. It was a daughter’s gesture of affection or self-aggrandizement — these things were always murky between my father and me.

“You remember things,” my father said. “I have the opposite problem. I live in the present too much.”

It’s been almost a year now since my father and I last saw each other. I should tell you that this is a recurring pattern in the story I’m about to tell — fathers and their children drifting apart, losing contact. Perhaps losing contact with my father was some unconscious fear or goal on my part when I flew to Israel for the first time in the spring of 2009 to investigate the murder of an Israeli writer named David Bellen. I went to cover Bellen’s murder, but after my return I learned that the story led elsewhere. It led to a woman from my father’s past named Gila Konig, who was born Tsilya Konig somewhere in Hungary, and who when I saw her briefly gave me her part of this story. Not that what she gave me was sufficient, only tantalizing. Gila Konig, like David Bellen, once lived in Tel Aviv. She is also now dead. My father isn’t speaking to me anymore. These are some of the limitations of my sources for this new book.

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