Making Waves

A documentary chronicles the exceedingly unconventional life of one of surfing’s first families. A ride on the wild side with ‘Doc’ Paskowitz.

The family that surfs together… For some of the children of Doc Paskowitz, right, life chasing the perfect wave didn’t prepare them for the challenges of adulthood.

by Curt Schleier
Special To The Jewish Week

In the opening scene of “Surfwise,” a new documentary about him and his family, Dr. Dorian Paskowitz puts on tefillin in preparation for his morning prayer. But don’t let this fool you. While the 87-year-old gent looks as though he might be a minyan-maker at a fading Lower East Side shul, “Doc” Paskowitz may have been America’s first beatnik.
Paskowitz was Kerouac before Kerouac; he went on the road, frequently to places where there were no roads. He lived an unconventional lifestyle that hippies would emulate decades later. And in the process, he raised what is probably the most famous family in the history of surfing, and he is credited with bringing surfing to a Jewish state that hadn’t reached its 10th birthday.
The

film, which has its U.S. premiere May 9 at the IFC Center, is a mix of recent interviews with Paskowitz and his family — shot in Hawaii, California and Israel — with archival footage of the family over the years. It offers stunning surfing footage — Paskowitz still hits the waves today — but the film is more than a “surfing movie.” It is the story of a man determined to live his (and his family’s) life his way — come heck or high waves — and the high costs of doing so.
Consider that Paskowitz, his wife Juliette and their nine children (eight boys and a girl) lived in a 24-foot trailer and traveled, usually up and down the West Coast, in search of the perfect wave. All the kids were home-schooled and raised on a strict dietary regimen.
But Paskowitz insists he wasn’t a hippie. On the contrary, he says in an interview with The Jewish Week, “I conformed. I was traditional. I followed the rules of what I thought most human beings did. Most people in the world eat a lot of fruits and a lot of vegetables and just a little bit of meat. Some of those rules were unnatural to the environment I was in, so I looked like an oddball. ... This documentary, this director that made [the film] just wanted to make me an oddball, an eccentric.”
That last sentence, by the way, is not an exact quote. In fact he uses a euphemism for love making when referring to the film and another for an illegitimate child when talking about the director. All this despite the fact that he hasn’t seen the film and has no intention of doing so.
(The film’s director, Doug Pray, couldn’t be reached for comment. One of Paskowitz’s sons, Moses Paskowitz, maintains that his father cooperated with the filmmaker all along, but the two got into a dispute after filming ended. Moses wouldn’t say what the argument was about.)
If not a hippie, Paskowitz is at the very least a free spirit, and the film tells the story of how that free spirit evolved. Paskowitz was born in Galveston, Tex., and learned to surf when he was 11. When his father’s dry goods business went bankrupt during the Dust Bowl years, the family followed “the Okies towards the west,” he says.
The family moved to San Diego, which was fine with the young Paskowitz because he’d seen a picture of three surfers riding a big Pacific Ocean wave and he’d pushed his parents to resettle there. Surfing consumed him. He was, as a result, a poor student. But he became interested in science in his senior year in high school. After a couple of years at San Diego State and a respite surfing in Hawaii, he landed at Stanford, where he finished college and attended medical school.
Ironically, his mother was “the only Jewish mother in the world,” who became upset when her son announced he wanted to be a doctor, Paskowitz says. A believer in a holistic approach to curing illness, she railed at him, “How can you do that to me? They’re thieves. They’re drunks.”
In the end, Paskowitz and medicine didn’t agree. “I’m not a very bright Jew,” he says. “I’m the dumbest Jewish doctor in the world.”
So after serving the Navy in the last year of World War II, he returned to California and spent most of his time surfing — stopping occasionally to fill in for physicians taking vacations to earn some money. He eventually wound up in Hawaii, working as a public health officer. During this period he went through two wives and a lot of angst. His second wife left him in 1956 when he was 35.
“I was really very, very down,” he says. “I was having panic spells. I couldn’t sleep. I was unraveling, so I said I was going to try to make a man of myself. That was my problem; I’m not a mensch.”
Paskowitz went to Israel and attempted to enlist in the paratroopers during the Suez War in ’56, but the military people just laughed at him. “The colonel said, ‘Do you watch a lot of John Wayne movies?’ I said, ‘As a matter of fact, I do.’ He told me to go to Cyprus for a couple of weeks, meet a couple of Polish girls and come back. The war will be over by then.”
Instead, Paskowitz spent most of the conflict on a kibbutz planting cabbages. But he also spent much of the next year on the beach in Tel Aviv where, he claims, he introduced the first surf board to the Mediterranean.
After a year in Israel he returned to the United States, where he met Juliette while bar hopping. They lived in his Studebaker while they traveled into Mexico and elsewhere, got married in 1958 and, in short order, had nine children.
Their life seems idyllic. Who wouldn’t want to live on a beach, spend most waking hours surfing and not worrying about homework? But the film shows that appearances can be deceiving. One son complains that the children’s upbringing did not prepare them for the real world. His daughter claims she was traumatized by the sounds of her parents’ lovemaking.
Nonsense, says Paskowitz. “Scarred for life? I just pray your daughter has the sex life my daughter has.”
Despite his tendency to be opinionated and unedited in what he says, Paskowitz has a serious side. He has spent much of his time lately promoting his book, “Surfing and Health” (available at www. Alohadoc.com), about a combination of exercise and diet that leads “to a superior state of health, not just an absence of disease.”
“How tall are you?” he asks a reporter. “How much do you weigh?” You sense his disappointment over the phone. “You gotta promise me you’re gonna read this book,” he says. “You gotta promise.”
For all his bluster, Paskowitz is serious about his faith. When the kids were growing up, on Friday night — wherever they happened to be — they’d gather on Friday night to light candles and have a Shabbos meal. He also lays tefillin every morning. He was moved by a photo he saw of a Nazi murdering a young mother and child. And so every morning as he straps on the phylacteries, he says “‘God bless you, mommy and baby.’ And then like every good Jew, I say, ‘Keep me alert so I can be of service.’”
He says the same blessing for the three men in the picture who are digging the woman’s grave — and probably their own — as well as for Anne Frank and the black-hand children, the ones “who used to take the ashes out of the furnaces.”
And then, after morning prayers, if the waves are running, Doc Paskowitz takes out his surf board and goes out into the ocean, in search of the perfect line. n
“Surfwise” opens nationally Friday, May 9 at the IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. (at West Third Street). For tickets, visit movietickets.com.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization