AJN reconnects The Wire creator with his family
AN appeal to AJN readers by The Wire creator David Simon to help track down the family of a long-lost cousin has brought to an end a decades-long mystery.
AN appeal to AJN readers by The Wire creator David Simon to help track down the family of a long-lost cousin has brought to an end a decades-long mystery.
Sydney-based teacher Shirley Casper contacted the legendary show runner after reading the story in The AJN last week and identifying her late father Yossi Weiss, who arrived in Sydney from Europe after the Holocaust, as Simon’s long-lost relative.
Simon, who also created critically acclaimed TV dramas Treme and Generation Kill last week told The AJN a search for Weiss had led him to Australia.
Weiss emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1949, and set up a garments factory in Sydney with his wife called White Rose Garments in Railway Square.
“I saw the piece and the details are just so spot on. It was a very easy thing to say: ‘yes this was us’,” the teacher at Kincoppal-Rose Bay School, who has one sister, told The AJN.
According to Casper, Simon had been in contact with her brother-in-law, Alan Gold, co-author of the recently published work Bloodline about the history of Israel, but had failed to make the connection.
Casper said she had been in email contact with Simon over the past week and that she has been helping to fill gaps in the knowledge about his family and describing in detail her father’s history and character.
“He was quite a man of presence,” Casper said of her father. “And he was very active in the community. He was the founding president of the Cremorne Synagogue for 15 years until his death. He was very community minded, involved with JNF and UIA and B’nai B’rith. He had many leadership roles.”
She confirmed Simon’s belief that Weiss had visited relatives on his mother’s side in New York, saying that her father went on a business trip to New York in early 1964, where he visited his cousins.
“For him, that must have been an absolutely amazing thing having survived without anyone at all,” she said.
“He didn’t talk a lot about his family. I think it was just too difficult.”
Simon said the material gathered about his family may be the makings of a book, an essay or another TV series.
TIMNA JACKS
The Wire creator David Simon.
comments