A Puzzling Family Photograph

Sixteen people, dressed formally are lined up in someone's back yard. The clapboard siding of the house, with only two windows, provides the background in the upper right of the sepia picture, and the rear entrance – a short flight of stairs and wooden railings leading to an enclosed back porch with a single window, is the background of the left side of the picture. The people are on a not particularly well tended lawn. The season is probably springtime, not too hot for the men and the older boys to be wearing dark jackets and ties.

A matriarchal figure sits on a chair in the very center of the picture, she is holding a baby, probably a grandchild, and the baby is the only one in the picture whose face is out of focus, because it moved. A young couple stands to right of the matriarch. They look very serious, and the man's arm is around his wife's shoulder. To the right of the woman, separated from her, stands a boy in his early teens, wearing a dark jacket, tightly buttoned, a tie, and knee-breeches. His hair is carefully slicked down and neatly combed. He has a pleasant smile and his eyes are partially closed, perhaps because he is facing the sun. His arm is around a slightly younger girl wearing a white dress, high buttoned white shoes, and her hair has a bow in it. Her eyes are also slightly narrowed.

These two people are my uncle Bill and my aunt Ethel, long dead like, I assume, everyone else in the picture. Seated on the grass, directly in front of my uncle Bill, sits a pretty boy dressed in white, a child of about three, my uncle Bobby. He is holding what appears to be a toy pistol, which is surprising, because I don't think I ever knew a man as mild as my uncle Bobby. Next to him sits my mother, also in white, who must be around four. She seems to be holding some flowers, and she looks a bit annoyed. My uncle Seymour, who was a couple of years older than she, is seated next to her with a kind of rascally expression on his face, which my two cousins, his sons, inherited from him. My mother was born in 1910, so the picture was probably taken no later than 1914.

To the left of the matriarch, three children are seated on the grass. They seem to be a bit older than my mother and my two uncles. Chances are these are people whom I met when I was a child, but I have no idea who they are. Behind them stand two adults and two older children. A thin, strong-looking man with a thick head of black hair, wearing serious looking wire framed glasses, stands with one hand on the back of the matriarch's chair and the other on the shoulder of a girl of about eleven, presumably his daughter. He is wearing a dark, three-piece suit, and his expression is intense, like a revolutionary Jewish intellectual. His daughter wears a white dress. Her left arm is around her father's back, and her right hand rests on her hip. Her elbow is out, and she has an even more mischievous expression than my uncle Seymour. A dark woman, probably her mother, stands next to her, and her arm is around a boy of twelve or so, wearing a double-breasted jacket, a tie, and knee-breeches, like my uncle Bill, probably his cousin.

The picture intrigues me partly because I can't identity the people in it, though I'm sure they're fairly close relatives of mine. But I'm not even sure whether the two men standing at the side of the seated matriarch are her children or her sons-in-law. Why, I wonder, weren't my grandparents in it with their children? What brought these people together in that back yard, probably in a New Jersey town? I assume it was taken by a professional photographer, though there were roll film cameras at that time, and a member of the family might have taken it. Maybe a whole bunch of other pictures were taken on the same day – all of them gone.

Without doubt the picture tells a success story. Jewish people who had come from the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth century managed to establish themselves in the United States and produce a crop of healthy-looking, well-dressed, American children. It also shows family cohesion, the desire to preserve a moment when they all came together, evidently to celebrate some important event.

More than a century has passed since the picture was taken. All the sixteen people in it lived lives and had stories, somehow present in the fraction of a second when the film was exposed. These people are remembered, possibly dimly, by those who knew them when they were alive, but today we, who remember them, are all older than the people in the picture were when it was taken - except for the matriarch in the center.