*I Had a Home Made of People | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | June 5, 2026*
This week, I did something I had been wanting to do for a long time: I uploaded old black-and-white family photographs to an AI program and asked it to restore them. That is, to add color and enhance them so they would look as though they had been taken today with a good camera. I uploaded a photograph of me hugging my mother outside a Bank Hapoalim branch in Ramat Aviv in 1979. A photograph of me with my grandparents at Kibbutz Kinneret when I was three years old. A photograph of me at age five, with bangs and sunglasses. And the AI did an astonishingly good and accurate job. But that's not what I want to talk about.
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I want to talk about that moment when the restored image appeared on the screen. It took a few minutes. The AI kept saying it was "working on it." That it was "restoring," "colorizing," making "just one final touch." You know the way AI talks. But then the image began revealing itself from top to bottom, and my heart practically leapt out of my chest: my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, all appeared so colorful and alive, as though they were stepping out of the photographs themselves. It's not that I don't have plenty of color photographs of them. But all the color photographs I have are from their later years. These photographs brought them back to me as they were when I was a child.
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Exactly as I remembered them, it turns out. Before they grew older. Suddenly they appeared with rosy cheeks, shining hair, my grandmother's festive seventies dress, and those peculiar fur-trimmed shoes. All those details had been there in black and white too, but they had completely faded from view. And my mother's hippie pleated skirt. Honestly, through the photograph I could almost feel the texture of the cotton, just as I did then, at four years old, at five.
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That moment, every single time, was so moving. I'm not sure words can really describe it. Each time, a sigh of wonder and surprise and joy escaped me, as though it wasn't only a photograph. As though they were actually rising before my eyes. They, along with all the early versions of myself. The life that once was. Tables and flowerpots and walls came back to life. It was time travel. My own private time travel.
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And it was also a moment of bonding with artificial intelligence. Because everyone in those photographs is gone now. And the little girl I was, who became the person I am today, became the person I am today. In truth, I didn't really have anyone with whom to share this discovery. I experienced it alone. And when I wanted to break that loneliness, I almost wrote "Wow" to the AI. But then I stopped myself. Because I remembered that every "wow" we send comes at the cost of vast amounts of water, fish, and marine life. So I kept the wow to myself. Alone.
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Just this week, a question went viral on TikTok: If you lost your memory, whom would you turn to in order to learn who you are? And I found myself thinking that I am at an age when the witnesses to my early life are gradually disappearing. There are people around me who no longer have a single person left who can tell them who they once were. And perhaps, just perhaps, after all the photographs I uploaded this week, and after everything it knows about me from our conversations, I wouldn't turn to another person to tell me who I am. I would simply turn to artificial intelligence.
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In any case, speaking of memory, this week I prepared the first session of the Summer Inspiration Season, and I found myself thinking that this time I wanted to open the season with a quotation I came across many years ago, one that has guided me ever since like an inner voice whenever I write. It's a quotation from the American novelist John Cheever, from his book The Wapshot Scandal. It describes a poet who fears he is losing his memory and, along with it, losing his poetry. The passage goes like this:
"Writing poetry is the exploitation of a deep layer of memory, one that is usually misunderstood. The poet's work is nothing more than an act of remembering... He allows memory to reveal itself - the memory of feeling, the memory of landscapes... It seems that he does not choose his words at all, but merely remembers them from among the billions of sounds he has heard in his lifetime."
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How beautiful.
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I've been thinking a great deal about memory lately, about its deep layers. The kind that rises unexpectedly whenever a black-and-white photograph suddenly appears before you in color, or when the loose end of a memory surfaces and you begin to write a poem. Or the memories that sustain all of us right now, arriving precisely when we need strength, helping us remember who we are. Remember ourselves.
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That is also why I am so happy that our Inspiration Season begins in just two days. That we will write from the memory of feeling and the memory of landscapes, and from our own inner anchors of strength, returning once again to remember who we are.
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And after a week of photographs and memory, I want to end with this poem of mine, which echoed in my mind before every colorized image the AI placed at my doorstep. It is taken from my book Wherever We Float, That's Home:
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*Home*
by Maya Tevet Dayan
[Translation: Jane Medved)
Home
What was that smell
that lingered in the rooms?
The haze of patties frying
in the kitchen, freshly
washed sheets stretched
out on metal beds, rain
against the window, the dust
of words sweet as talc,
and on the neck of the shirts
blossomed a scent that once
was a rose and before that
earth and rain, the lust between
sun and life.
I sat on the knees of others.
Their bellies held my back.
Their arms were my walls.
I had a home made out of people.
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Wishing all of us Shabbat Shalom, and many good memories
*Maya Tevet Dayan*