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IN MEMORIAM
Judy Davidson, ERETZ
Editor
Judy was born one
day before me and she never let me forget this. “I am older than you,”
she always would say when we had an argument. We worked together for 25
years, functioning like a husband-and-wife team, as my wife Dita said.
We complemented each other as we built a magazine that somehow spoke to
tens of thousands of readers around the world. The result of our
collaboration is 105 issues of ERETZ Magazine and over 1,000 articles.
Judy Davidson and her mother Sarah. (Meir
Zarovsky)
We were famous for
our arguments. “Difficult terms should be explained,” Judy always
insisted; “People have dictionaries to look up terms,” was my constant
retort. Punctuation was another point of discord, especially that comma
before “and” in a list – Judy wanted it in, I claimed that it was
redundant. Confirming that we had every detail exactly right was another
sore point. Judy wanted precision. The most famous argument that we had
was over the rank of the assistant who had helped Captain Warren, of the
British Army, in discovering the famous underground shaft in the City of
David in Jerusalem. The sources from the 19th century referred to the
assistant, a Mr. Brittles, once as a corporal and another time as a
sergeant. “So what was he?” Judy demanded. “Leave him as a sergeant,” I
fumed, “we have to close the magazine.” But Judy did not give up. A week
of research unearthed the fact that Brittles had been promoted from
corporal to sergeant because he had accompanied Warren on the famous and
dangerous climb.
Judy worked in
spurts. She preferred to work during the night. She found all the
activity in the office during the day disturbed her concentration. And
so, after everyone had gone home, she used to sit in front of a computer
until the late hours of the night, going over the magazine, refining the
texts, rewriting, checking facts, and making sure that everything was in
place. She was known for her brilliant titles and her sense of humor,
which never left her, even during her last hours.
Last December, she
was hospitalized and a malignant tumor was found in her brain. “I hope
they won’t take out my sense of humor,” she quipped before the operation
to remove it. Though the operation succeeded, and left her sense of
humor intact, other problems surfaced. She continued to work through it
all, setting up a computer and internet connection near her hospital
bed. Everything will be fine soon, she believed, and I will be back on
the job like usual. We believed it too. We were expecting Judy to return
any day, to walk into the office and find her sitting at the computer in
the late hours of the night.
She died suddenly.
She slipped silently away into the night, on a Thursday night, as if she
had just finished editing another issue of ERETZ Magazine. Judy had no
surviving family. There is no one to sit shiva over her, no one to
recite the Kaddish, no relative through whom her memory will be
preserved. But her memory will live on with me and in the pages of ERETZ.
She was my companion in English writing for over a quarter of a century.
May her memory be blessed and remembered in the pages of life.
Yadin Roman |
