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The letter, scrawled on yellow legal paper, arrived at the Dornstein house in the last days of December 1988. David Dornstein, a 25-year-old aspiring novelist, was writing from an Israeli nature preserve dubbed the Garden of Eden, and the lush setting inspired his typical grandiosity. ''Dear Family,'' he began, ''I have walked through the Gates of Heaven and have entered Paradise....'' The letter was dated Dec. 12. Nine days later, traveling home on Pan Am Flight 103 from London, David was blown up in the famous Libyan terrorist bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. His memorial service had already been held when this eerie last letter finally made it home to Philadelphia.
His younger brother, Ken — 19 at the time, now 37 — still has that letter, immaculately preserved in one of 15 or so big black binders devoted to David's life. In fact, Ken has nearly everything David wrote. It's all here — the 30 journals, the voluminous letters and stories — in Ken's top-floor study at his house outside Boston, near where he works as a series editor for PBS' Frontline. From David's body of work, Ken has crafted his memoir, The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky, an incredible tale of two brothers that is haunted — as Ken was — by David's outsize personality, his unrealized potential, and his early death.
''When he died, this became the only record,'' says Dornstein, referring to the mountains of pages that surround him in his study, ''and I felt I had to make something out of it. I just felt somehow that my life was less meaningful if his could come and go without a trace.'' In addition to David's writings, the study is crammed with even more evidence of Ken's painstaking work: A diagram of a Boeing 747 hangs over his writing desk, a bulky topographical map of Lockerbie pinpoints exactly where many of the 259 bodies fell, and a file box labeled RECOVERED AT SITE contains the still-preserved personal effects found with David's body — his muddied copy of Baudelaire, his near-empty pack of Dunhills, his squeezed-down tube of Tartar Control Crest.
By all accounts, David Dornstein loomed large. In college at Brown, ''he was essentially a campus celebrity,'' says Jonathan Karp, who edited both David's ''wonderfully provocative, self-involved, and humorous'' columns for The Brown Daily Herald and — amazingly — Ken's book for Random House. ''David represented extremity in the way he lived and the values he aspired to as a writer. I think to a lot of us he represented the ideal of what an artist should be.'' Another close college friend of David's, the actor Tim Blake Nelson (Syriana), calls David ''the most well-rounded intellectual'' he's ever met, and describes his spirit as ''distinctively and boundlessly American.'' Adds Nelson: ''He was like Kafka, Lenny Bruce, and Robin Williams balled up into a single person.''
