Reading My Father's Correspondence

by Oskar Greenblatt

One of my late father’s eccentricities was that he didn’t keep copies of letters he had written. A particularly sad example is the missing letter he wrote to the famous author who was the subject of his master’s thesis. The author replied in great detail, and it is frustrating not to have the original questions to which he was responding. There are surviving letters from friends, colleagues, and relatives with references to something he wrote to them, all very mysterious because whatever it was will never be revealed. A few of Dad’s letters written to an old army buddy survive because the buddy wrote his replies on the back, and those were saved. Uncharacteristically, he saved a carbon copy of a letter he had written to a shoe company regarding the purchase of three pairs of shoes, size 7EEE.

6S

Oskar Greenblatt spends too much time organizing old documents.