Benjamin Parket was born in 1933 to Polish Jewish immigrants in Paris. His life changed forever when the Nazis invaded France in 1940. The Courtyard, coauthored by Benjamin and his daughter-in-law, Alexa Morris, tells the story of his survival through the courage and generosity of his neighbors, who helped the Parket family to hide in the courtyard of their building beginning in 1942. The memoir also delves into the meaningful path that Parket’s life took after the war.
Following World War II, the Parket family began to rebuild their lives in France, but in 1949, they made their way to Israel on the ship Theodore Herzl, their immigration sponsored by The Jewish Agency for Israel. First situated in temporary housing, the Parkets ultimately settled just outside of Tel Aviv. Parket studied math and engineering in high school. In 1957, he traveled to New York and enrolled at Stamford University to study architecture soon afterwards. Although he planned to return to Israel immediately after he graduated, Ben met Orah, an Israeli American, and the two married in 1961. In 1979 Ben and Orah moved their family to Israel to support engineering projects in response to the Camp David Accords, and returned to California three years later, settling in an expat community of American Israelis in the Bay Area. In 2016, seventy-four years to the day that the Parket family went into hiding, Ben, Orah, their daughter, and her wife (the coauthor of this book) visited the apartment and courtyard where Ben and his family hid for two years.
The memoir ends with the author reflecting on “the countless things that had to go right for us to survive the war, it feels like a miracle. One wrong turn, one different choice, and everything would have changed.” However, his story is not simply a survival story of good luck. The Courtyard is a story of how goodness can prevail in darkness. It demonstrates that a life can be rebuilt after trauma and how one can look back at that rebuilt life with deep gratitude.
