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Her one photo, kohl-eyed, and he's bent close, alive
The Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester has a stunning exhibit: photographs taken in the ruins of the hospital buildings on Ellis Island between 1998 and 2003. They are the closest I know to true spirit photography; they glow like old stained glass, some of the most beautiful images I have ever seen and the most haunted. Lead paint has ruined to the bluish violet of winter dusk and flaked down to cover the floor like rain. Ivy bursts in through a half-sashed window, holding the barren frame in place against a flame of late sun. The Statue of Liberty is reflected, small and exact as an icon, in the mirror over a rust-drained sink in the tuberculosis ward. I had not even known the museum existed; I found it through a mention in the Boston Globe. Go, if you can. Look, if you don't believe me. My great-grandmother Ida Friedman came to this country with a man who in some stories is her fiancé, in others her lover; all the way from Vishnevets in the Ukraine, but at Ellis Island he was sent back because of his health. He might be one of the ghosts in these rooms, whose absence is as tangible as a presence. The air is charged with them. I only marvel that they cannot be seen.
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We have places like that in my family history. I'm not sure anyone knows where one of my great-grandfathers came from, beyond the immense generality of Russia—he made that portion of his past disappear so completely that Russian was never spoken in his household, Yiddish only sketchily, and he never brought any of his family over. The one story we have claims that his father was a rabbi who had abandoned his congregation and his family. He was sixteen when he came over, maybe. His last name is unusual verging on unheard-of. You could make yourself reappear like that. And a century later when your descendants want to know who you were? America gonif!
Her sisters also settled in Chicago with her, but her brothers (and her mother, too, I think) died in the camps.
Do you know their names?
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Yes, I know what you mean. I think my mother's father was from Minsk, but that's all I know about the pre-America part of his life.
Do you know their names?
Only their last name, which was Abend. I've seen photos of them, but I can't recall my grandmother or her sisters ever mentioning their lost family members by name.
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