A Tangled Tree: My Father’s Path to Immortality
Aiyanna Sezak-Blatt, Author
By Gina Malone
Aiyanna Sezak-Blatt’s book about her fascinating father, Moshe Blatt, is one that, as early chapters relate, he did not want written—or at least not in the way she was telling the story. “I am disappointed in you,” she recalls him saying. “I asked you to write my life story, mine. That’s all I asked you to do.”
Her narrative begins with memories of her own childhood with this free-spirited father and touches on love, family and forgiveness. “The complexity of family, and the challenges of accepting people for who they are, are universal themes that I hope will connect with a wide array of readers,” she says.
Readers learn of Blatt’s birth in 1939 as his parents fled Poland and of his bohemian life right up to the present day that finds him living on a sailboat docked in Nawiliwili Harbor in Kauai for part of the year and in California for the rest.
“After some time and distance, my father and I were able to reconcile,” Sezak- Blatt says of the rift caused by remembrance. “After all that we’ve been through, all the tears, laughter, storytelling, after all the anger and hurt, we’re even more connected. Perhaps we finally see each other.”
A Tangled Tree: My Father’s Path to Immortality, memoir/creative nonfiction, June 2017, softcover, $18, by Aiyanna Sezak-Blatt and published by Logosophia, LLC, Asheville.
