A few months ago, I livegrammed the decades-old products in my parents’ cupboard. Here they are in one place. Above, Weight Watchers Buttery Spray, 1987.

Jell-o Pudding & Pie Filling, date unknown:

29-cent pack of Jell-o Americana Tapioca Pudding:

Imitation Rum Extract, 1976:

Hudson Brand Citric Acid, unused, date unknown:

French’s Imitation Butter Flavor:

79-cent Poppy Seeds from defunct grocery chain:

Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer, date unknown:

A tin of Hershey’s Cocoa:

And lastly, a 1968 economy pack of Carnival Straws:

A letter to my high school class on the eve of our reunion:

Classmates,

Elliott Malkin
Class of ‘91

Niles West High School is in Skokie, Illinois, once home to the highest concentration of Holocaust survivors in America.

Photos by my brother Benjie Malkin, who was a senior when I was a freshman.

If you’ve seen the video about my mother’s birds, you’ll recognize Jerry Cohan, the man who famously had a love affair with Zeus, the parrot. A number of people have asked me how he and Zeus are doing — I’m sad to report that it’s been almost a year since Jerry died.

When my mother decided to give Zeus up for adoption in 2008, there was little question he would go live with the Cohans. Jerry and Lydia were our longtime family friends and neighbors and had raised numerous parrots and parakeets over the years. They were bird people, like us — here they are with baby Winston some 30 years before:

When Jerry became sick in his final year, Zeus let Jerry handle him in an unprecedented way and spent his days at Jerry’s bedside. Later, in the months after Jerry’s death, Zeus would peer over the top of the stairwell and look for Jerry in his old spot downstairs. We could only assume that he expected Jerry to return. What we couldn’t do was tell Zeus that Jerry was gone for good — you just can’t explain that to a bird.

Zeus still lives with Lydia and Winston in Lincolnwood, Illinois.

I thought I knew everything I could possibly know about my great-grandfather Hyman Victor. He’d been the sole object of my genealogical fascination a few years ago, and I was pretty confident I’d exhausted all my sources about his life.

Until this summer, when I got an email from a woman named Sandy Leff, the granddaughter of Hyman’s third (and final) wife Anna Rubin. Sandy told me that her father, now 88, was in the flea market/schmatte business in Chicago. His basement was full of items collected over the decades and a friend from the flea market was helping them clear it all out.

In the process, they came across a box containing a menorah, a tablecloth, a prayer shawl, a yarmulke, candelabras, three prayer books, and two tickets to high holiday services in 1969. It also contained a union card and dues book for Hyman Victor, so she knew the contents must have belonged to her grandmother and had been sitting in the basement since her death in 1970.

Sandy remembered Hyman. She knew him from the age of eight, when he married her grandmother, until his death when she was 12. On a lark, she typed Hyman’s name into Google and found my website about his life. Then she emailed me, introduced herself, and said she wanted me to have the documents. It was basically the fulfillment of a geeky genealogical fantasy.

The documents were in fantastic condition. I always knew that Hyman was a carpenter. I didn’t know he was a lifelong member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America. The dues book shows he joined in 1914, a year after immigrating to Chicago from the Pale of Settlement, and remained a member up until his death in 1960. The union, I imagine, would have provided him access to jobs, some degree of legal protection, and eventually a pension.

When Sandy and I spoke again it was clear she’d caught a bit of the genealogy bug. She found more documents: the ketubah for their wedding, Anna’s naturalization papers, and a series of handwritten Yiddish letters, which neither of us can read. She also produced a rare photo of Hyman, seated next to Anna some time around 1959.

All in all, an amazing and unexpected contribution to my collection, and an uplifting turn of events in light of Hyman’s recent gravestone photo theft. So I thank you, Sandy. May you find more historical treasure in your father’s basement.

For more about the offspring of Hyman Victor see:
A Letter From Vietnam.

The other day I tossed eight years worth of my used prescription medicine bottles (and five years worth of empty inhalers) into the recycling. I’d been clearing out my closet for an upcoming move and finally concluded I would never make the art projects I’d always imagined I would with this material. So I took these photos and officially terminated the collection.

And a good thing. Because I did some googling after the fact and found better examples of the work I’d always envisioned: a tower of drugs by Roxy Paine, and pill bottle chandeliers by Jean Shin. So good riddance, empty medicine bottles. You weren’t terribly original to begin with.

A few days ago I received an email from a guy I didn’t know named Bob:

I think this was done by your mother.
www.shopgoodwill.com/auctions/Orange-Nude-by-R-Malkin
Might want to pick it up. Very good work and it caught my eye.

He included a link to a Goodwill auction where I immediately recognized one of my mother’s early drawings, at least 30 years old judging by the style. It was being auctioned out of Portland, Oregon – odd given that my mother, Roberta Malkin, has lived and worked her entire life in Chicago.

I thanked Bob for the tip. He replied:

I thought from the signature it may have been a Peter Z. Malkin, a pretty interesting fellow who caught Adolf Eichmann. His cover was that he was an artist. From the thumbnail I could tell it was very good work. If you really want it bid high. It may be sniped at the very end.

Bob was right. I wanted to recover it. There were only a few minutes left in the auction and just a single bid at $25, so I put in a bid for $100.

With just 7 seconds remaining I was outbid at $101. Disappointed, I told Bob what happened. He responded:

I told you someone would come over the top. Contact Portland Goodwill and keep an eye out for it on Ebay. The winner thinks they bought a Peter Z. Malkin. Tell your mother for me that she does fine work, her use of color and the fine detail in abstract is very unique and caught my attention and obviously of others. If you do not get it then at least feel good with that issue.

Out of curiosity I asked Bob if he was an art dealer or collector:

Just a hustler, tryin to make a buck. My son and I chase art. I am in NY and he is in Virginia. Too many people now know about the Goodwill site. You would not believe some of the artwork that shows up there. A lot of fakes. Goodwill gives their honest opinion but they make mistakes, mostly in identifying the artist. They are good on the condition which helps. The upside is that they are not setting a value and letting the market decide. No one is stealing fine art from them any longer like in the past. Good luck.

At that point I called my mother and told her what occurred:

I then contacted Goodwill at Bob’s suggestion:

Dear Goodwill, I was informed by a shopgoodwill user that a drawing by mother from the 1970s was being auctioned on the site. I signed up and made a bid significantly higher than the last. I was outbid by $1 at the last moment. I know that this person won the auction fair and square. I just ask if there is a way for me to contact the winner directly so that I may offer to purchase it from him.

Goodwill responded:

Thank you for your email. We apologize, however, we would not be able to share the other buyers personal information. We can certainly pass your information on to them, however. Please let us know the exact message you would like to send them, as well as your contact information, and we will pass it on to the other buyer. Thank you for your support of our mission.

So I asked Goodwill to pass this message on:

Dear Winner of the Orange Nude by R. Malkin (auction 6007440),
My name is Elliott Malkin. I am the son of the artist who made that drawing and I’m interested in purchasing it from you for a reasonable sum. I see that you paid $101. Please contact me at [elliott at dziga dot com] and maybe we can work something out. Best, Elliott

One week later…

Dear Mr. Elliott Malkin,
I’ve been waiting for the shipment of your mom’s drawing to arrive. That’s why I haven’t responsed to your inquiry earlier. Now that it’s arrived, my first impression of it from the shopgoodwill site was right. The drawing is impressive. Compared to her drawings that you’ve posted on Flickr, no doubt, it’s one of her best works. I like it very much and usually would keep it until a more favorable market condition to sell. Since you’ve made an effort to contact me, I would like to give you another chance to repurchase the drawing.
West

I took a few more days to think about it. Then I wrote back:

West, Thanks for getting in touch. After some thought, I’ve decided not to make you an offer. I realized that I’m more interested in fostering a market for my mother’s work than owning any particular piece. To that end, I’ve made a blog post chronicling the recent history of the drawing: dziga.com/goodwill-hunting, and I encourage you to flip it on eBay. I will gladly support the auction in any way I can and continue to publicize my mother’s work in a broader sense. Hopefully you will make a handsome profit. Let me know how it goes.

And that’s where I left it. Maybe you’ll find it on eBay some time.

A front page article in The Times on Friday describes widespread winter storm damage to eruvs across the northeastern United States, including extensive damage to the eruv that outlines much of Manhattan.

For those unfamiliar, an eruv is a symbolic boundary – a wire – that is strung between utility poles around the perimeter of an orthodox Jewish area. Intact, it allows Jews to carry objects outside of their homes on the Sabbath – a “magic schlepping circle” as the writer Calvin Trillin liked to call it.

Back in 2006, I created the laser eruv, a wireless version of the boundary not susceptible to the kind of damage mentioned in the article. Like a conventional eruv, it works by symbolically converting the space within its boundaries into the shared private space of the community, expanding the definition of home where some carrying on the Sabbath is allowed.

Rather than wire, each side of my eruv consists of a single laser shot directly into the lens of a small surveillance camera across the street, creating an image like the one above, a so-called bloom of laser light. If a beam is interrupted, the surveillance camera registers the absence of its bloom, easily pinpointing the portion requiring maintenance.

For more on the eruv, see my previous work A Street History in Semacode. This video from 2006 explains the laser eruv in more detail:

More about the eruv:

• Eruv Storm Damage in The New York Times
• In Praise of Loopholes
• Jewish Ideas Daily
• The Manhattan Eruv
• The New York City Eruv Code
• Eruvim in Modern Metropolitan Areas
• Talmudic Places in a Postmodern World
• Between City and Desert

Related Work:

• How to Zap a Camera
• Notes on Social Architectures as Art Forms
• On Drawing Lines on a Map
• Sophie Calle

Thanks to David Neff for engineering and photography.

I visited Jewish Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago today to find that my great-grandfather Hyman Victor’s gravestone photo had been stolen, without a doubt sold for scrap metal. A sad conclusion to the story of his life I spent a lot of time reconstructing. As you can see in the background, my grandmother Ethel Malkin and great uncle Sol Kapp’s photos are also missing, along with many others in this section. (That’s my dad Leonard Malkin behind his grandfather’s gravestone in the photo.)

Hyman’s gravestone photo as seen in 2008:

On my most recent visit to Chicago my dad opened an old shoebox and removed a letter from his cousin Jeffery Gurvitz, who died fighting in Vietnam at the age of 24.

My dad and Jeff grew up together on the south side of Chicago (both were grandsons of Hyman Victor), and they later spent a year as roommates down at the University of Illinois. When they graduated, my dad maintained his 2S student deferment. Jeff served in the army.

A few years later, just three months into Jeff’s deployment, soldiers visited his parents to report that Jeff was missing in action. They returned the next day to say that he was dead.

This all happened before I was born. But my dad mentioned Jeff on occasion, and I grew up knowing I had a cousin who died fighting in Vietnam.

When I was older, my parents and I attended the Chicago premiere of Regret to Inform, an Academy Award-nominated documentary by Jeff’s widow Barbara Sonneborn. The story of Jeff’s death features prominently in the film, and it includes excerpts from an audio diary he recorded in the field:

Pretty soon I’ll be going out into the field. To be perfectly honest with you. I’m going to a unit that is doing a fair amount of fighting, as you’ll read in the newspapers. But I don’t think you should worry about it, because I think I’ll get through it just fine.

Just today there were 4 men walking through a rice field. We had a team out on a hill spotting for artillery, and they saw them. One of them was holding what could have been a weapon, or it could have been a hoe or a rake or something else. From the distance you’re at it’s hard to tell. And I know for myself I can’t see killing a man for holding a hoe or a rake. And if it was a weapon, why, I wanna be damn sure before I kill him. Damn sure.

Just two weeks before his death, Jeff wrote my dad this letter:

Life here is dreary. The war – thank God – is remote. I have yet to fire my weapon in anger. When contact comes it is quick and violent. But you can understand that the pressure is not as bad as I had envisioned.

Jeffery Gurvitz Memorials:

• Vietnam Veterans Online Memorial Wall
• University of Illinois Veterans’ Memorial Project
• Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund