Parity Pipeline

Genre

Synopsis

My father Sol Waksman, an immigrant and son of Polish Holocaust survivors, has made his home in Fairfield, Iowa, the center for the Transcendental Meditation movement, for over 40 years. Sol is a seeker - what drew him to meditation was the need to fill a hole inside of himself. Always, he has been driven to better understand and challenge himself - which at times has involved activities such learning how to shoot a gun, but now more often involves pickleball. 

I wish to travel to visit Poland, where my grandparents were from, and a place we have never been. My dad mostly is uninterested - it was a place that killed our family. Why would he want to go back there? After my father experiences a health scare, the time to take this family trip becomes more pressing. He agrees to it, mostly for my sake. In the end, he does become curious to better understand himself - a common thread that once fueled his meditation practice and the big decisions he made to follow it. 

We travel to the villages in Poland where my grandparents are from. We visit graves of family members, and the streets where they walked. We visit the displaced persons camp where my father was born in Germany and where my grandparents met. Having stood on the grounds of the largest genocide in human history my dad learns a simple lesson: he understands his parents in a way he never could before. He calls himself self absorbed and selfish, and wishes that he had asked them more questions about what they went through. We visit my grandparents’ graves in Queens, NY. My dad tries to forgive himself for his selfishness, and in his way, makes it up to his parents.