Max and Jennie retired in 1965. In August of that year, they moved from New York to a condominium in Florida with the help of some of their sons and their spouses.
The family documented the move by the unique, inventive means of recording informal scripts —they called them screenplays— of interactions among family members. The first screenplay documents the process of final packing-up at Max and Jenny's New York apartment. The second screenplay covers transporting Max and Jenny to the airport for their flight to Florida, the airport process, and a brief bit of the aftermath.
The homes of the Leavitt family were, at this point, spread across the globe: Paul was working in Germany. Ben and Florence were still on Long Island, as were George and Fran. Herb and Norma had moved to California. Saul and Evelyn, who had shared an apartment in Queens with Max and Jennie, moved to ????
The family was committed to keeping in touch. They circulated postal letters. To supplement these, the brothers and Max bought identical small tape recorders. Very often tapes, as well as letters, would be circulated so that everyone could keep abreast of the family news.
An unknown proportion of the paper letters and tapes were available to Lisa. who processed them into 32 dialogs labeled by month and year, the senders, and the recipients. For multiple messages within a month, lacking a specific day-date for any, these are presented here in the order as they appear in the original thesis, which may or may not represent their actual date-ordering.
IMAGE: (untitled) Max and Jenny seated on folding chairs
Images: Photomontage, 14 images, surrounding the text