|
|
A former ABC-TV network executive, Yale Roe, at age 43 decided to stop the world and get off. With his wife and four children he moved to Israel where he didn't know one person or even know the language.
The year was 1972 "I was looking for meaning in my life" Roe says. He found it. The following year Israel was caught up in the Yom Kippur war. During the war Roe filed reports that were published in the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun Times. Meanwhile his filmed news stories were televised on ABC Television.
Before moving to the Middle East Roe grew up middle class in the Middle West, with a M.A. degree in International Relations from Northwestern University. He had planned to join the State Department when a writing job opened up in a new business called television. He was offered forty five dollars a week. He took it. "My mother used to say that I may not be right, but I'm fast," Roe recalls.
Doing the unpredictable was the predictable for Roe who three years before his move to Israel was one of twelve young Republicans from the North Shore of Chicago who ran for the Congressional seat vacated by Don Rumsfeld who had resigned to join the Nixon administration. Roe was one of the eleven who lost.
Meanwhile he had written two books about the television industry and spent a dozen years as what he calls "a migrant worker for ABC's TV station division," being sent from Chicago to New York, back to Chicago, then to San Francisco and finally to the network in New York. The Television Dilemma received positive reviews in the New York Times and other newspapers nationwide. The Business of Broadcasting became a standard text in universities. After fifteen years with ABC,Roe returned to the Midwest and Winnetka , Il to become vice-president of a privately held broadcasting company.
Roe's improbable move to Israel continued the zigzag nature of his life. He had never produced a film before he got there and went on to produce documentaries that won numerous awards and were seen around the world in up to eight different languages.
Roe's memoir tells the story of how he, his San Francisco wife, and four children between the ages of four and twelve adjusted to their new life and his personal love affair with his new ancient homeland where, he writes, "people are so close to death that they live closer to life." Caught up in war and terrorism he discovered within himself a deeper appreciation of his own religious roots and the history of a people who were his people.
