Weekly Unscrolled Torah Portion: Ki Tetzei
“My grandfather just told me he wanted to explain something to me. He knew I’d seen him in women’s underwear and wanted to explain who these clothes belonged to. Sam looked me in the eye. Well, you can guess. They belonged to his first wife. The one who died. The one who was killed. It was her favorite pair of shoes. Years and years after she died, I guess, some relative of hers tracked down Max and gave him the clothes and a couple of other trinkets of hers…‘I love your grandmother more than anything. When I’m missing her, I put on her clothes. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but when I’m in her clothes, I feel her close to me, like I can still smell her, can still feel her touch.’”
Davy Rothbart is the creator of Found Magazine, an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, a contributor to This American Life, and author of the bestselling essay collection “My Heart Is An Idiot.” His work has been featured regularly in GQ and The New York Times, and his documentary, Medora, about a resilient basketball team in a dwindling Indiana town, is now on Netflix. He also runs Washington To Washington, an annual hiking adventure for inner-city kids.