Israel Through the Eye of Joseph and the Words of Stephen

Prologue:  What We Choose to Dream

Why? Why did I leave you many years ago? . . . You thought, the boy seeks something, seeks such a special subtlety, that color descending like stars from the sky and landing, bright and transparent, like snow on our roofs. Where did he get it? How would it come to a boy like him? I don't know why he couldn't find it with us, in the city—in his homeland.

—Marc Chagall

“Letter to My City, Vitebsk”

The question Chagall poses above is one I thought I’d answered for myself decades ago.  To find that particular color descending like stars from the sky, to find my own metaphor for that color, I knew early on that I would have to leave my own homeland.  What neither Chagall nor I knew when we were young was that the special subtlety we both sought was already all around us—for him, in the bright, almost transparent snow on the rooftops of the city of Vitebsk in Belarus; for me, in the glimmering gold rippling through wheat fields north of the small farming community of Yukon, Oklahoma.  What we would learn in the early years of our separate adulthoods was that this special subtlety could be glimpsed, by each of us, only from afar. 

What I mean to discover in the pages that follow is a new ghost in an old man’s dreams, an unanticipated follow-up to Chagall’s original question:  How far must one go in order to see one’s own life as clearly as possible?  For example, if a man travels east toward the rising sun, approximately one third of the circumference of the earth, would that be far enough to reveal the final subtleties, the ones so special they have remained invisible through his travels over six decades?  What if, at the end of his journey, his viewpoint is the holiest place on earth, the place where believers claim gods and prophets are born, die, and ascend to heaven?  Will an honest, open-minded man finally perceive the color that is so subtle and bright it’s transparent?  Or will the entire journey be merely another dream of his own choosing?

To help me pursue these questions, I’ve chosen to travel with my friend and fellow explorer, fine arts photographer Joseph Israel Robinson.  Joseph was born in 1946 in a displaced persons’ camp near Zeilsheim, Germany.  His parents were Ephraim Meyer and Sarah Spiegel Robinson, survivors of the Holocaust who two years later chose to immigrate with their three young children to the United States rather than to the newly founded state of Israel, where a new war was raging.  In these pages, Joseph seeks to illuminate his own past in the ethnic and spiritual homeland of all Jews, a homeland whose soil he felt against his toes for the first time at the age of 66.  That touch marked the beginning of Joseph’s aliyah, his return to the Land of Israel from exile, which under Israeli law is the right of every Jew.  The diaspora, or dispersion of the Jews, began in the 6th century B.C. with the destruction of the First Temple and the conquest of the Kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians.  For two and a half millennia, the Jewish sense of home has been shaped by two factors:  the laws and cultural practices the dispersed people took with them, made manifest in the Torah, and their desire to return to the Promised Land.  Joseph Israel Robinson’s aliyah is a story that is familiar to many.  It is also unique, as we will see.

Joseph’s way of seeing is different from my own, grounded in angles of light and shades of color through a glass lens, rather than in the signification of objects and experience through words.  From October 2012 through June 2013, Joseph mapped the state of Israel with his Nikon, producing 38,000+ pictures, which will be the image source for “the eye of Joseph” portion of Israel Through the Eye of Joseph and the Words of Stephen.  Sometime in the spring of 2014, after a nearly year of digital editing and archiving, Joseph will set that massive task aside to accompany me on my own first trip to the Holy Land.  Together, we will create strings of images and words that tell our separate but companionable stories that compose this book.

As we set off on this journey it is my hope that somewhere in the mysterious intersection between the visual and verbal image we will stumble upon the invisible pathway where colors descend from stars.

Steve Heller, MFA, EdD

Professor & Chair

Creative Writing Department

Antioch University Los Angeles

Past President, Board of Directors

Association of Writers & Writing Programs

Award-winning author of

The Man Who Drank a Thousand Beers

The Automotive History of Lucky Kellerman

Father’s Mechanical Universe

What We Choose to Remember

And many other published works