Photographs with the Missing Head
Self-reflection — a history based on a critical examination of myself and my family
For as long into the past as I can remember, a glass-framed black-and-white photograph hung on the wall above my grandparents’ bed, which I could almost reach when I stood on top of the bed. In a large chest of drawers, more photo albums were kept in the bottom drawer where the past could be paraded in disjointed events before my eyes.
The photo above the bed featured the head of a younger version of my mother next to the head of an unfamiliar man who closely resembled my uncle. Boobe’s eyes welled up whenever she looked at the picture and then at me. Everybody cried around me: an uncle who came from America to visit every two years, my uncle and aunt who lived in Binyamina, Boobe’s sister who lived in Haifa, and my cousins. What was this sadness about? I waited for some sign to explain the offenses they believed I had committed against them.
I was a walking question mark.
Was it a weekend or a summer holiday? Who could remember now? But I recall my older cousin’s question, uttered so suddenly that the oddity of it struck me. We had been sitting in the kitchen, illuminated by a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling by an electric wire. The air in the room was warm and fragrant with my aunt’s rhubarb pie. Outside, heavy rain drops fell against the kitchen window and struck the ground. My cousin’s deft fingers were braiding my long, curly hair.
Do you want to go to the cemetery? she asked.
Later — a week, or two, or a month — my cousin and I walked to the cemetery. After a short walk through thorny weeds, we stood in front of a grave upon which stood a headstone, skewed by time and weather. I knelt to place the wildflowers we had gathered along the way on the grave. Then I saw the inscription on the stone read my grandparents’ last name.
I looked up at my cousin with questioning eyes.
“Ask Boobe’,” she said. “She’ll tell you.”
One late July evening, my grandparents and I sat on the porch. The air was warm. Insects buzzed in the darkening day. My grandfather held a Yiddish-language newspaper. The pages flapped gently in the warm breeze.
“Zaide’,” I said. “Why is the newspaper listing people's names? Is someone looking for them?”
He peered at me, rimless glasses perched on the tip of his nose. His blue eyes were sharp, clear eyes that looked. An army of furrows had settled deep in uneven lines across his forehead.
“Many people lost their family members during the war,” Zaide’ replied in Yiddish. “Survivors have no other means by which they can discover if their families are alive.”
My grandmother nodded.
“Truth is often painful, but I hope it alone will save us,” my grandfather continued. “It is important for you to know the truth.”
At that moment, I thought I might understand something about my history by asking about the mysterious grave.
I never dared ask.
Many years later, I could acknowledge the persistent guilt I felt toward my family—the family I would need to leave in order to discover myself. What compounded the guilt was the suspicion that in leaving them behind, I would also leave my identity in a perpetual state of imposed exile.
In those earlier days at my grandparent's house, I wandered among the ruins of my family’s past as my eyes relentlessly traveled to the wall with the picture of my mother and a dark-haired stranger.
I knew my parents were lying when they said the missing head in the picture albums was a dear friend who had died. Then why cut out his existence? If he was dead already, why annihilate his memory further?
Indeed, the albums contained vanished family members, but the missing head, mostly next to my mother’s smiling face — their bodies tilted toward the center of their gravity, remained their deepest secret.
Information came in bits and pieces; I greeted each with increasing disbelief, each a separate blow. Their words furthered feelings of pity for unknown ancestors whose Litvak tribulations had been foreign to me. Yet my connection to them was deeply entrenched. There were hushed and unfinished stories about atrocities in concentration camps and missing family members. Many vanished; few survived. My grandparents lost a daughter and her six grandchildren. My mother lost her parents; my father’s mother and younger brother were murdered, and a slew of cousins and friends.
The missing head, with the rest of the body intact, remained a mystery until I turned thirteen.
There will always be a certain incident that will remain more prominently than anything else during my childhood. If it had only happened a few years later, or even a few years earlier.
The two of us, Boobe’ and I, were sitting on a stoop. Insects lurched wildly against us. A gray cat gazed at me warily from the edge of the garden. ‘You are old enough to know the truth,’ Boobe’ said, enunciating each syllable slowly with an unsteady, remote voice.
I leaned forward.
Her words had a persistent stubbornness that kept entrenching me deeper and deeper. I was bathed in sweat and dazed by the heat; my clothes hung limp against my skin. No longer was I secure in my commonplace aspect, secure in my lackluster nonentity.
These words offered the knowledge I craved for myself, but now unsure, I wanted to know. Except that, there could be no going back—nothing to go back to. I had become what the world outside made me; I had to live in this world as it existed.
I was thirteen years old, for heaven’s sake! What was I to do with this information? ‘He’s been killed,’ she said. ‘And he was only twenty-four years old. He had just arrived in Palestine with a young bride and a seven-month-old daughter. He’d survived the hardship of war, somehow secured a passage to the promised land, had been drafted to dig foxholes shortly upon arrival, and had been killed doing so. He’d lived in Palestine for two weeks,’ she said. ‘And your mother was left alone with you.’
I shouted out, ‘No! No! That is not true!’
I was wiped clean as a slate, emptied of history. My grandmother had taken it upon herself, against my parents’ wishes, to reveal the family’s secret. My father was not my real father.
Until then, I could not understand why Boobe was my grandma. She was not my mother’s mother, nor was she my father’s. My father had his own stepmother. His mother had disappeared into some concentration camp.
For years to come, I imagined my real father, constantly comparing everybody’s features with the man’s features in the one saved photo. What was he like? He, of course, was kind; his eyes filled with the light of kindness. My birth father became a being of enormous dimensions, a creature moving among the stars. He, of course, was generous: he loved to share and guide; he would have taken great pleasure in initiating his daughter into entire domains of which she knew almost nothing. I had made myself according to the limitations I understood.
So it was that long ago, the death of my father, Boobe’s son, my mother’s husband, and her first cousin had imposed the verdict of silence.
The father, whom I never knew, was my mother’s husband and first cousin. That made Boobe’ and Zaide’ my mother’s aunt and uncle, my uncle and aunt once removed, and my grandparents.
And there is an irony here, as well. My parents’ attempt to obliterate my father’s existence had failed since the father I never knew lives in my son’s face — my son, who is now older than my father.
An excellent read, and thank you for sharing
I am happy that your curiosity pays off in the end, and you know the real story behind the man who was your real dad. We all have family secrets exposed to us at one time or another, which confirms our membership in the family.