Note to the Reader:
This essay was conceived and partially written as part of a writing group exercise with the amazing Maggie Frank-Hsu, who convened the group virtually all last year and gave us prompts to write for an hour, such as this one: Flip open the book nearest you, read the first line you see, and use a phrase from that line as your title and in your essay somewhere. The book I chose was Blue Highways by William Least-Heat Moon. I hope you enjoy this short essay about the emotional experience of looking at a photograph of long-dead ancestors. Love, Mariya
I look at a digital photograph my dad took of a physical photograph from the late 1920s, pulled from the collection of his cousin Ethel. The photograph itself looks incredibly careworn, with dogeared corner creases in both bottom corners, a white border, and crazing or cracking in spiderweb formation across the top third of the picture swinging up to the top border. There is a big horizontal crease, with some crumbling of the actual photosensitive emulsion, across the center of the picture, which is positioned vertically.
It’s a posed shot, from before my father was born, of four of his family members. Sepia in tone, it shows a seated elderly man with a long, flowing white beard, deep-set eyes, and a black fabric cap on his head and a full-length loose fitting traditional dress outfit in matching black fabric. (What is this traditional dress, specifically? I cannot place it. Google, which I’ve found to have become wildly unreliable in the last year or two, suggests that it is either traditional Romanian Jewish patriarchal dress or maybe my great grandfather was a Cossack. It obviously must be the former.) He sits with one hand in his lap and the other holding the head of a cane, which rests between his knees. His posture is terrible. He hunches. The chair he is in has wooden spindles across the back. This is my great-grandfather, Shloyme (Shlomo), dressed in what must have been traditional Jewish patriarchal dress for the Eastern part of the Pale of Settlement.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Creative Aid Society to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.