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What Made Me Write About Old People and Their Caregivers?
The idea caught my attention back in 2015, When I walked down Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv.
I glanced at the benches on the side of the avenue.
Many elderly people occupied them or sat by them in wheelchairs, some covered with blankets. Nearby sat their Filipino caregivers, talking to each other or peeking at their cell phones.
From time to time they checked how their employer was doing.
The boulevard was crowded with people moving back and forth in their daily lives, and those old men and Filipinas were nearly an invisible landscape and a background to the urban scenery.
In the Busy Routine Even an Old Man
Could Disappear
That's when I started wondering what would happen if two people - an elderly man and his foreign caregiver - were to disappear.
It was not an apocalyptic thought taken from a science fiction book, but something that felt very realistic to me. It seemed likely that such a thing would happen in the flow of life and everyone's busy routine, and even more likely that no one around would notice it.
Not even the family and relatives of that adult.
And that's where I started.
I wrote the first chapter (which has been changed and edited several times since then, but its essence remains the same) in which two brothers-in-law come to pick up the grandfather for the Seder dinner but cannot find him. That first chapter rested in a virtual drawer for two years, and then I added the second chapter.
After letting the text sit for another two years, I decided that the story and the plot are too worthy to remain unknown, and the characters I created should be heard.
I devoted myself to the process and got swept up in the book's plot.
You are invited to dive into the special world of old people, and the women who hold their hand.
Tovit Neizer
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