My father's best gift

For so many of the diaspora, the Holocaust was a call to keep their faith close, a light by which to define them, when so much of who they were had been taken away. For my dad, the early trauma had the opposite effect, seeing him drift away from religion altogether. As a young man, he wondered how to uncover life's meaning when there was a god who could sanction such atrocities. But he kept a tight hold on his cultural heritage, a strong seam of which ran through his life. Instead, he discovered a sense of safety and found solace in science: he was a keen astronomer, a militant atheist and rationalist. Some might consider this an interesting counterpoint to a career built entirely around the arts; first briefly as an actor, then later as a film director (he said he was a terrible performer).