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. Might want to pick it up. Very good work and it caught my eye. Bob

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.

Bob continued: 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. I signed up, bid $100, and with 7 seconds remaining lost it.

Bob: 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.

I was frustrated about the auction but thanked Bob for giving me the tip. Out of curiosity I asked if he was an art dealer or collector.

Bob: 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. I wrote:

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

And that’s where things currently stand.

A front page article in The Times on Friday describes widespread winter storm damage to eruvim across the northeastern United States. For those unfamiliar, an eruv is a symbolic boundary – a wire – that is strung between utility poles around the perimeter of an orthodox Jewish neighborhood.

In 2006 I created the laser eruv, a wireless boundary not susceptible to the kind of damage described in the article:

The eruv that circumscribes a large chunk of Manhattan from river to river between Harlem and the Lower East Side was damaged in 18 places last week by the combination of wet snow, high winds and falling branches.

Until it is repaired, observant Jews inside the eruv cannot carry objects outside of their homes on the Sabbath. Carrying anything outside, even house keys, is considered work, a violation of the sacred day of rest. The eruv gets around this restriction by converting the space within its boundaries into the shared private space of the community, essentially expanding the definition of home where some carrying is allowed.

To ensure its function, the entire perimeter of an eruv is inspected prior to every Sabbath. This is not necessary with the laser eruv. Each laser is shot directly into the lens of a small surveillance camera across the street, creating images 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. These images can be broadcast to a monitoring facility or out on the web and examined before the setting sun prohibits the use of electronic devices.

For more on the eruv, see my previous work A Street History in Semacode.

More about the eruv:

• Eruv Storm Damage in The New York Times
• Jewish Ideas Daily
• 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.

Hyman’s gravestone photo as seen in 2008: