A Book Review (of sorts)

Reclaiming Icarus: Reading The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky

I had never heard of David Dornstein until days after his death. It was Mr. Stefanisko, my 11th grade history teacher, who gave this person life and death in my mind. It was the last class of the day, shortly before Winter Break, when Mr. Stefanisko came into the room. His beefy face was damp and his eyes were unnaturally puffy and red.

After a few moments of catching his breath, he spoke. “I am assuming everyone in this classroom has paid enough attention to current events to know about the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103.” We all nodded, but our teacher stared beyond us all. “The school has just received the news that David Dornstein, one of my very best students, was on that flight. He was flying home from Israel, and he apparently had a copy of his first novel with him, the only copy.” Mr. Stefanisko’s voice broke with the last of his control, and he sobbed openly in front of the room. I sat in the front row, close enough to touch him, but I sat still in my seat, taking in the current event that was the explosion of an airplane over Lockerbie, Scotland, and giving it a name. It was then that I realized that this David Dornstein must have been Ken Dornstein’s brother.

Ken Dornstein graduated from my high school just as I moved to CHS to start my sophomore year, but my parents were teachers at the school and had given me copies of Ken’s work from the school newspaper. His final piece comparing writing the perfect college essay to eating frog’s legs was a study in pretzel logic. My grief in hearing about the older brother was the thought that he may have been as brilliant a writer as the younger one.

These were the thoughts that went through my mind when I found Ken Dornstein’s The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. I quickly made the purchase, ran home and flew through the first section. The emotional recall that Ken was able to bring from himself pulled out that memory of Mr. Stefanisko breaking down in class, and I left the book on my shelf for over a year.

This was a mistake.

There are many lessons to be learned in this memoir of two intertwined brothers. From the stoic standpoint of a writer, this is a brilliantly researched and faithfully written piece of nonfiction. Every quote made in the book is substantiated by an immediate source, most often David’s own fanatical journal writing. Ken makes much in early sections about how David wrote about his predictions of an early death in an air accident. This unsettling but almost romantic image is tempered by the remembrance that David’s predictions coincided with the death of a beloved local celebrity in a skydiving accident. The link is substantiated in David’s journals, and Ken is able to move forward in his research rather than being bogged down in the tragedy.

Ken’s connection to own his grief and his obsessive need to “find” his brother lead the surviving brother to start “The David Project”, where he spent years reading through David’s journals and interviewing those who had any kind of influence on David’s life. Through a chance encounter on a train, Ken became reacquainted with Kathyrn, David’s college girlfriend. This meeting would lead to a complicated relationship that runs parallel to “The David Project”. Ken’s mixed feelings of love for Kathryn and guilt for stealing her away from a brother who could not claim her made for a story equally compelling as his emotions regarding the truths he continued to uncover about that brother.

Simply put, there was no novel.

This truth was one that had me run to the phone to call my parents. Did Mr. Stefanisko read this book? Did he know that “The Tragic Twist” reported about his star student was an unfounded myth? Sadly, they let me know my favorite history teacher is in a nursing home with dementia and probably would not even remember that David, Ken or I ever existed. Mr. Stefanisko had always had a touch of madness to his teaching persona, so this did not surprise me.

The madness of the teacher may also explain his emotion connection to his student. While Ken moved through David’s journals, he was able to piece together a story of a mentally tortured older brother he did not know. David suffered as he felt an artist should, but his writing did not grow as he thought it would. The elder brother’s mental health devolved over time, which the younger brother traced back to a possible molestation in David’s childhood. In this passage from David’s journal, he realized that he needed professional help:

YOU NEED TO STOP WRITING IN THIS NOTEBOOK, DAVID… Your life is not the biography of your life that you imagine. You can’t live a book. You can only live a life and if you’re lucky on day you will write the book of your life. But it needs to be done in that order…

Ken continued to research and write David’s life while living his own. He graduated from Brown in his brother’s footsteps and moved to California, then to Boston, where he moved in with Kathryn. His search for remnants of David took Ken to Lockerbie, The Hague and Israel, where he spent time with Rina, David’s last love before he boarded Pan Am 103. What Ken found was the real tragedy in David’s life was not his shocking death, but that he left Israel and Rina behind.

I emailed Ken Dornstein shortly after reading The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky:

When your book about David came out, I bought it immediately, but it took much time for me to get past that first chapter. I picked it up again on Monday and dealt with people asking what was making me tear up, then giggle. For me, it answered the biggest question about the Dornstein Family: would Ken keep writing after he left CHS?

Within a few days, Ken wrote back, remembering my family and our high school teacher:

Thanks so much for this thoughtful, sweet message. Just thinking of Mr Stefanisko being hit with that awful news creates such a sad scene in my mind. I'm glad you got some amusement from the book, among all of the bittersweet parts of it--most people don't know it's okay to laugh in some spots because of the gravity of the topic.

I'll do my best to keep writing, although my day job keeps me quite busy.

All the best,

Ken

Ken is definitely busy. Aside from being a Senior Editor and Producer for Frontline, he and Kathryn married and have two children. Neither are named for their late uncle.