I was twelve years old, maybe thirteen. I had lost the life I knew only two years before and was slowly starting to realize that I will never have it back.
With my mother working full time to support us, we began to spend almost every Sabbath by my grandparents. My sister and I would pack our cardboard box filled with Barbies and Barbie clothes. I would pack a few MAD magazines and Archie Comix and off we would go to my mother’s parents in Brooklyn, who were recent immigrants from Israel.
I loved to read and when I finished devouring my comic books and magazines, I’d search through their collection of books, none of which were for kids. I’d read encyclopedia’s cover to cover, Readers Digest and books on Astrology or Psychic Dreams (which belonged to my grandmother.)
One day, in my quest for something to do, I came across an old dingy box filled with photos. Many were old and faded, with faces from the distant past. I wondered if these were my relatives who perished long before in the holocaust. There were photos of my grandparents in their younger days. My grandmother looked so sweet and angelic, my grandfather so young and handsome. I especially got a kick out of seeing my mother as a baby, and then seeing her as a teenager in seminary wearing her short uniform skirt. There were pictures of my sister and I as babies, smiling with pure joy. And my eyes welled up when I saw my mother holding me when I was a baby. She must have been 22. She could never have predicted the impending horror that lay ahead for her.
I looked through these pictures with a heavy heart, knowing those care-free innocent days were forever gone. At the same time they brought me a measure of comfort. We were once a normal, happy, healthy family. We once experienced the unadulterated joys of childhood, before it was taken away. These pictures were a testament to my past life and for that they became even more precious to me, especially since we seemed to have stopped taking pictures. Life was just too painful during that time period to try and preserve it. It was almost as if my mother could not bear to document the undoing of our lives, so much so that even family pictures seemed fake, and there were other priorities, like paying the never-ending bills and trying to find answers to what happened to my father while holding onto our house. Yes, taking pictures were a thing of the past, and continued to be so until I purchased my own camera at 14 and started taking pictures of my own.
Looking through the 10-15 pictures I could find that were of my family, it hit me. If these pictures remain in this dingy box, never preserved and protected, surely they will fade, rip, crack and even get lost! I couldn’t allow for that to happen.
That evening I found an unused photo album and carefully put together a beautiful scrapbook for my grandparents. I made sure to begin with my grandparents, using their earliest pictures. I told a story, starting with their wedding and devoting a section for each of their six children and then their children’s children. It took me hours to sort through the box, and bags. I chose the best pictures and in the end I had an album to be proud of. My grandparents were ecstatic, since they had neither the time nor patience to do this, and I was just happy that my pictures would survive and I could always find them and look back at happier times.
Now fast forward almost two decades later. I’m 30 with three children of my own. It’s Sunday and we decide to make the “long” trek to Brooklyn from Long Island to visit my grandparents who I have not seen for a while. While sitting in their living room, still furnished exactly the same I realize that nothing has changed in 20 years. Suddenly I remember the dingy box of photos and I wonder if it’s still in the same place. Sure enough it is. My Grandmother, after all these years, has never gotten around to putting any of the hundreds of photos she’s collected over the years in albums. There they are… the photos of distant relatives, but even more faded and worn then when I found them years before. And wait…stuffed in the back of the box is an old, worn out album, its pages coming apart. It’s the album I made back when I was a child, and though the pages are yellow and the binder is broken, my pictures are still in there, perfectly preserved. I can now look through them with a whole new set of eyes. The eyes of an adult and mother. It’s amazing to see pictures of me the same age as my children are today. And my mother…I have finally reached her age in the pictures. She looked so beautiful, full of hopes and dreams. I am now able to understand the meaning of these pictures, not just as snippets of moments in the past but as symbols of what we had, what we lost and now that we all have created our own families, how we survived and thrived.
Today I have dozens and dozens of albums, covering every possible moment in my family’s life. My children will be able to see almost every second of their development, every significant and not so significant moment of their existence, both on photo paper and on digital film. My prayer for them is that they can look back at the abundant documentation of their lives with only fond memories with none of the heaviness that I experienced looking at my childhood photos. As for the tattered album I helped create, I am so grateful that I had the foresight as a child to save my pictures from wearing and tearing and even disappearing forever. I take them home with me, promising my grandfather that after I scan them onto my computer so I can print them for myself, I will make sure he gets them back safe and sound.
After all, they are as much his memories as much as they are mine.
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