(2007) "We were the most conventional of people," says Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz, 84 years old, slender, deeply tanned and wrinkled, in his home on Waikiki Beach, Hawaii, of his family of nine children and wife Juliette, with whom he traveled in a 24-foot camper to go surfing, to catch the energy of the sea. The Paskowitzes became the best known family of surfing.

A graduate from Stanford Medical School, Dorian first got on a surfboard at San Onofre Beach, California, in 1934; he went to Israel after a successful medical practice caused him anxiety, panic attacks, and insomnia, where he introduced surfing to Israelis in 1956: "Surfing recreates you." There after a woman taught him cunnilingus he launched into research with one hundred female partners, rating his sexual experiences with each. When he found the most compatible mate, he married Juliette (about 25 years his junior), his third wife.

Having given up his medical practice, unchained to a mortgage or bank, they traveled and raised their children: David, Jonathan, Abraham, Israel, Moses, Adam, Salvador Daniel, Navah (only daughter of this marriage, having had two girls from a previous union), and Joshua. Continuously on vacation, formal "education be damned," said the paterfamilias of his gypsy band, unattached to materialistic comforts. They faced hardships, privations, and challenges; Dorian free-lanced in places needing medical care while refusing to take more in compensation than was necessary for his family's survival.

He observed how animals, such as apes, raised their young (breast feeding for two years); they ate soups, seven-grain cereals, and fish. They shared everything and loved one another; in fact, Dorian and Juliette were completely uninhibited in copulating every night in close quarters with their kids. For a long time as a teenager, Navah admits, her parents' sexual appetite diminished her desire for sex. Dorian, however, attributes much of Americans' screwed up attitudes toward sex - including pornography, promiscuity, domestic violence - to unhealthy repression of natural urges and feelings.

His brother and sister ("self-serving what he wanted") recall Dorian as having been a rebellious sibling, a bohemian, the original beach-boy bum. His children when they began to mature resented not having had proper schooling, resulting in conflicts in society when they were on their own. Competitive within the family, some ran off at the first chance to be on their own, fleeing the dictatorial and controlling grip of their father, getting involved in music, movies, and professional surfing. Dorian opened a surf camp in Mission Beach, Calif., which became a thriving business for Israel, Joshua, and Abe.

Of his children's complains, Dorian says they became "lazy" after having received such a richly emotionally fulfilling upbringing, confusing education with knowledge (which he feels he provided); though he admits to certain inadequacies (failures aren't so much to be avoided as is success) on his part.

The author of Surfing and Health, Dorian speaks of religiously adhering to a proper diet (no fats or sugar), exercising, resting, and maintaining a positive mental attitude: being healthy isn't defined as lacking disease - he enumerates his numerous ailments - but achieving a "superior state of well-being." Though he defined God as "a round peg in a square hole," with his family he practiced a hybrid of Jewish rituals, reminding them of their horrors of the Holocaust.

At the conclusion of director Doug Pray's documentary, Doc and Juliette await the arrival of their grown children, the spouses, and many of their 17 grandchildren for a family reunion in Hawaii.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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