This is the reason why we transmit to our children the first name of our parents. For those shall never be "forgotten".
My daughters have long asked me : Father, tell us....
My daughters are brighter than I am, because when it is time to ask, rare are the young ones who ask, and when we want to know our parents', grandparents ' history, there is hardly no one around to answer...
I guess we won't write a biography or memoirs compared to those who made history, but the most important difference is that our life, our memory belong also to our children. It is, in fact, their history actually. They do not descend for the majority of them, from a celebrity. For them, History they wish to know first is theirs. "Do know where you come from for you to know where you go!"
Modesty, lack of time,"vertigo of the white page", too much to tell, afraid that it might be "literary", I have never done it. But time, healer and destructor , doesn't pay for us.
So there is the image , the sound.
G-d knows I'll do anything to see and hear, once more, my parents talking to me. As, I am convinced, all of us who haven't the privilege to have them anymore around. Although the image, the sound do not replace them,ever,but, when the spleen "low and heavy weight like a cover" as Baudelaire says so truly, remembering them reassure, sooth us.
My children and I have started and shot "the film of my life", first chapter of theirs'. As the "Memorbücher",those books of memoirs of the Eastern jewish communities which, generation after generation, were writing down the "shtetll" history, we have written, with my story, the first pages of theirs. I'll always deplore it is the first because, apart my emotion to evoke them, my own parents only have a very small part in it. My children and grandchildren will never know them, hear them, unfortunately, only through my own emotion and shall only discover through some old pictures...
My children have understood the meaning. It was a moment of intensity; we were moved and some tears dropped out at the end of the film.
Long after I'll be gone, at least I would have given to my children and to theirs the possibility to know or discover, the one who had started the " film of their life".
It is all yours now to start it