With a plan in place, the group prepared to leave Kodak. Before they did, Phil Chamberlain signed an affidavit attesting to the fact that he had developed the original film, that it had been given the perforation identification number 0183, and that it had not been damaged in any way during processing. It was witnessed and dated by Richard Blair. Then the two Dallas police officers drove Abe and Erwin, with the unslit 16mm original film, back to the Jennifer Juniors factory and dropped McCormick off at the Dallas Morning News offices. According to Erwin, when they went upstairs, “there was not a soul. Everybody had left, and that never happened before. The place was left completely alone. We couldn’t believe it.” He recalls that they were still “in a daze,” but they closed up the plant and had a drink before Abe said that they had better get over to Jamieson. Erwin drove them. He remembers that it was dark by the time they arrived, and as they approached Jamieson, someone from the Dallas Morning News “came out of the shadows” offering to pay $200 a frame for several frames of the film. Erwin later said, “Zapruder said, ‘No. I don’t even want to talk about it.’ And [he] did not really want to sell it. He wasn’t looking, I think, to benefit. He was trying to help out the Secret Service.”
The technicians at Jamieson produced three copies of the film, as agreed on the phone with Kodak. When asked in an interview whether there was any possibility that additional copies were made that afternoon, Bruce Jamieson laughed. “There were absolutely only three copies made and that’s the only possible way they could be made. There was no way anybody could, could do all that. And I’ll tell you: Zapruder—Zapruder would not let that film out of his sight. Zapruder went in the darkroom with the printer operator while he made the three copies and it never left his… never left his possession.” As at Kodak, and presumably at the direction of the attorney who was advising him, Abe had Frank Sloan at Jamieson sign an affidavit attesting to the fact that only three duplicates had been made.
At that point, Abe and Erwin got back in the car and drove from Bryan Street back to the Kodak plant so that the duplicates could be processed and printed. At Kodak, the three duplicates—Copy 1, stamped 0185 (one notch below optimum), Copy 2, stamped 0186 (optimum), and Copy 3, stamped 0187 (one notch above optimum)—were processed. None of them contained the visual information between the sprocket holes. The original film seems to have remained unslit, while the three duplicates were slit into 8mm strips that were spliced together. This time, production foreman Tom Nulty signed three affidavits to guarantee that the copies had been processed and were not “cut, mutilated or altered in any manner during processing.” But he wanted to show the film to his colleagues. Erwin later recalled “standing at Kodak, and we were eating from a huge vending machine where they had chili and beans and stuff like that in cans. And we stood there in the back and watched them show it to those people… I mean… everybody went gasp, like that, when the final shot came.”
By the time they were finished at Kodak, it was nine o’clock at night. In keeping with his promise, Abe and Erwin drove to the Dallas Police Department on Harwood Street with the original film and the three duplicates, which would come to be called the “first-day” copies. When they arrived, it was chaos in the station. Erwin described the scene as being “like a zoo. People were yelling and screaming and standing on the desks, and they were moving Oswald from one room to another, so we jumped up on the desks and watched. And there I saw Forrest Sorrels.” Perhaps because he had his hands full with Oswald, Sorrels did not accept the film himself but asked them to bring it to Agent Max Phillips at the Secret Service offices on Ervay Street. They did. Although no one in the Secret Service had seen the film yet, and no one knew what it might contain, the Secret Service retained Copy 1 in Dallas, while Copy 3 was put on a plane that very night, bound for Chief James Rowley at Secret Service headquarters in Washington, DC.
Erwin drove Abe to his car, which was parked in a lot in downtown Dallas, and dropped him off there. When Erwin reached home, he found three men, whom he later described as “the scruffiest-looking people I’ve ever seen, cameras hanging all over them, beards,” at his door. They turned out to be photographers from the Saturday Evening Post. They offered him $10,000 cash to take them over to the Zapruder home to make an introduction that night, pressing him insistently until he made them leave.
Abe, meanwhile, got in his car and drove back through the deserted streets of downtown Dallas, the city he loved and his adopted home. He was finally alone: One by one, all the people who had surrounded him that day—Lillian and Marilyn, Darwin Payne and Harry McCormick, Forrest Sorrels, the Dallas police officers, all the technicians at Kodak and Jamieson, and even Erwin—had gone back to their lives, their official responsibilities, or their own private grief. And the hubbub—the debate over how to process the film and what to do with it, and the first hints of the media frenzy that would become deafening over the next several days—had died down to silence. As he drove, his camera, the original copy of his film, and one duplicate sat quietly on the seat beside him.
When he had woken that morning, Abe Zapruder had every reason to believe he knew where his life was headed. But in a matter of seconds, the fate of the Kennedy family and the nation had veered wildly off course, and his own life intersected with both, never to be untangled again. Now he found himself responsible for a home movie of the assassination of the president of the United States. I am sure it was a burden that he felt keenly in that moment. It was already a profoundly personal situation, fraught with grief over the president’s death, anxiety for the Kennedy family, revulsion at the film’s violence, discomfort with the prospect of financial gain, and deep uncertainty about what to do with it. When I think about Abe Zapruder at that moment, I am aware of how his formative experiences, his interests and values, his family life and his politics must have influenced the way he thought about that burden and the decisions he made about it from that time forward.
Abraham Zapruder’s early life was shaped in large measure by the forces that shook Imperial Russia in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Born on May 15, 1905, he was the last of Chana and Israel Zapruder’s four children. He grew up in the town of Kovel, district capital of Volhynia in Ukraine, part of the vast Russian empire ruled by Czar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra. His father was a carpenter, remembered as an exceptionally difficult person who couldn’t get along with anyone. His mother was a very beautiful woman with a bad heart—small wonder, when the particulars of her life come into focus. She was married off to Israel Zapruder—almost certainly under the auspices of a matchmaker, as such things were done in those days—and gave birth to her first child, Sarah Ida, when she was just fourteen years old. In 1900, their first son, Morris, was born; three years later, Fannie came into the world, followed by Abraham. Israel left the family in 1909 to establish himself in America, leaving Chana alone to care for four children under the age of twelve.
World War I broke out in 1914, when Abraham was nine. Major battles were fought in and around Kovel, devastating the city’s infrastructure and bringing chaos and economic uncertainty. As frightening as the war must have been, the repeated and vicious anti-Semitic pogroms—hundreds of which took place in Ukraine between 1905 and 1920—must have been still more terrifying. At any time, on any pretext, Russian gangs could sweep through the villages and towns, assaulting and murdering at random and with impunity. They carried out mass rapes, sometimes in public, and other unspeakable acts against Jews. No one who endured such searing hatred and unpredictable violence could ever forget it.
In spite of this, when in later years Abe told his daughter, Myrna, about Russia, he did not talk about war or pogroms. Perhaps he suppressed those memories. Instead, he told her about the family’s poverty and his own relentless hunger. He and his siblings had little to eat, sharing soup made from a single potato and fighting for the skin that rose to the top of a pot of boiled milk. Abe remembered another form of deprivation, as well. He yearned for an education but found himself s
hut out due to quotas limiting Jewish enrollment in Russian schools. Instead, he was sent to cheder, the traditional Hebrew school for religious instruction, known for its strict teachers and agonizing days sitting on hard benches studying Torah and Talmud. This was not the education he wanted. He was curious and inquisitive, fascinated by how things worked. He did not want to prepare himself for a lifetime of study and prayer, immersed in Jewish law and religious dialectic; to the contrary, he wanted to escape his parochial circumstances by investigating everything he could about the wider world. He had a creative side, too, which found expression in his longing to play music. I grew up hearing the story of how he would stand underneath the window of a wealthy little girl, listening to her music lessons and dreaming of learning to play an instrument. His curiosity and ambitions could never be satisfied within the confines of his life as a Jew in Imperial Russia.
Meanwhile, Israel Zapruder was naturalized as a US citizen in 1915; by 1918, he had dutifully registered for the draft and also to vote. Finally, nine years after he left Russia, he sent for his family. There is no clear, coherent story about how Chana and the children made it to America or the tragedy that befell them before they reached the United States. I remember being told when I was a child that my grandfather had a brother, whose name no one seemed to know, and that he had died before the family left Russia. He was described as sickly, with a club foot, so I assumed he died of illness before they tried to emigrate. Later, I learned that Abe told Erwin that his brother had been murdered. “The Polish guard killed his brother,” Erwin said. “Took him off a train and killed him right in front of his eyes.” Lillian’s remembered version of the story was both more and less specific: that “they”—it is not clear who—seized Morris because he looked Jewish, but that Abraham, being fair-skinned and blond, was left alone. However, Myrna remembers Abe telling her that he was the one pulled off the train, right in front of his sisters, who were hysterical with terror, but that somehow he was allowed back on. Perhaps some combination of all these stories is true. And while I am constitutionally inclined to want exact details and historical verification, such an impulse will never be satisfied. The times were far too chaotic for that.
Piecing together the scant surviving documents and the historical record, it seems that Morris was killed sometime between 1915 and 1918, when the family left Kovel. Israel had listed him with the other three children on his 1915 US naturalization certificate but, years later, when my grandfather’s first cousin Herschel Czyzyk wrote a letter to Abe, he recalled only three siblings leaving with their mother for America. “Your mother, Chana, my aunt Chana, left Kovel at the end of World War I with her three children,” he wrote, “two girls, Ida the eldest, the younger one Fannie and a little boy, Avreml. [They] went to our [Israel] in Brooklyn.” There is no mention of Morris. Given the history of the time, he was almost certainly a casualty either of the war or, more likely, one of the many anti-Semitic pogroms in Ukraine.
Another story I remember from my childhood is that after leaving Kovel in 1918, the family was “thrown from the train” in Warsaw and remained there for two years. The train, as the locus for so many terrible events in the family history, seems to stand for all the precariousness of their circumstances and the inherent dangers of trying to leave. Even if they were headed for a better future, the journey was far from simple and the outcome not assured. I don’t know why they remained in Warsaw for two years or what they did during that time. I know only that in 1920, Chana presented herself at the US Consulate in Warsaw to fill out papers for an emergency American passport, to which she was entitled as the wife of a naturalized citizen and which would ensure her safe passage through Ellis Island. In the picture attached to the passport, she is thin and gaunt, hollow eyed and exhausted, wearing the haunted expression of a mother who has been through war, pogroms, displacement, the loss of a son, and God knows what else. Scrutinizing the page, I notice three Xs on the line where her signature should have been. I realize with a jolt that on top of everything else, she could neither read nor write.
Chana, with Ida, Fannie, and Abraham, finally boarded the SS Rotterdam on the Holland America Line—with her emergency passport—on July 3, 1920. Morris remains the brother who did not get away. It took nine sickening days at sea, crammed into the steerage of the boat with 2,500 other passengers, before they steamed into New York Harbor on July 12, 1920. Abe remembered the journey as a terrible trial, with people constantly vomiting and no fresh air. They were herded through the immigration screening ordeal at Ellis Island and somehow were reunited with the father and husband they had not seen in eleven years. From there, he led his family through the chokingly crowded streets of Jewish Brooklyn to their new home.
Abraham Zapruder had escaped the violence, discrimination, and limitations of Russia, although its imprint on his psyche would never entirely fade. As he faced a new life in America—even with the uncertainty and challenges ahead—the horizon of possibility stretched out in front of him. It was his right to cast off humiliation and poverty and to claim a better life for himself. As family lore has it, he wasted no time exercising that right. With his first paycheck, he went out and bought himself his first musical instrument, a beautiful violin.
When I wanted to know what Abe was like as a young man and hear stories about my grandparents’ early courtship, there was really only one person to ask. Alice Feld is a tiny, wiry New Yorker in her nineties who still takes the bus to Lincoln Center to hear concerts and has no patience for stupid questions. She is funny and frank, and generous beneath her tough New York shell, sitting with me for several hours, reaching back in her memory to recall the past and share it with me. I began our talk by asking her to introduce herself, for the record. “I don’t hear so well,” she tells me. “All right,” I say, speaking up, “I’ll talk loud.” “Well, not so loud,” she says firmly.
Alice and my grandmother Lil were best friends from childhood, living in adjacent tenements on Beaver Street in the heart of Jewish Brooklyn. Lilly Schapovnik, born in 1912, was the middle daughter of three, between elder sister, Anne, and younger brother, Morris. Her father, Samuel—slim with a dark mustache and round wire-rimmed glasses—was a quiet, gentle bookbinder and not, as it turned out, much of a breadwinner. His wife, Esther, was short and stout, with a firm but kind expression, her hair pulled back into a coil behind her head. She was a “balabosta,” an excellent cook and impeccable homemaker who worked as the building custodian to make the rent. After Esther cleaned the building, she would return to the family apartment on the lowest level of the building, change her dress, sit in her rocker, and listen while Alice read poems to her. “And like a jerky kid, I was delighted,” Alice told me.
Soon after arriving in the United States, Abe and his family came to live in the same tenement as Lilly at 84 Beaver Street. Alice remembered him vividly from this time, standing on the street with a small group of friends, talking politics. Unlike many Jews of this period, he was politically progressive but no left-leaning Marxist. As much as he hated the Czarist regime under which he grew up, he equally loathed socialism and communism, equating them both with Russia and all the ignorance, violence, and repression he had experienced there. Later in his life, when people would extol the virtues of communism, he would shout, “You don’t know what you are talking about! I lived there. I know!” At the same time, he was not much of a Zionist. While he was deeply attached to his Jewish identity, he did not see his future in Palestine. He wanted to be an American through and through, and he loved his adopted home, embracing all that it had to offer. Alice saw him as a “respected gentleman,” and he and his friends were the “elite.” “They were not well educated but they were cerebral,” she says.
Pictures from the midtwenties, some five years after he arrived, show him surrounded by friends in the country in Ferndale, in the Catskills, where they camped, canoed, climbed trees, and dressed in silly costumes. He is smiling, holding a banjo on a ferry-boat, arms slung around two bobbed-haired
women dressed in knickers, and grinning at the bottom of a pyramid of friends. He had clearly embraced his new life with gusto. Still, Alice remembered that the scars of his early life remained with him. “He had a struggle without an education because he had a brain, but there was no going to school,” Alice says. “He was past the age where you go to school. So here was this man that was caught between two cultures. It was a wonder that he stayed as calm and cool and pleasant as he did. It must have been very hard for him.”
Like Alice, Lil must have seen Abe on the street, standing and talking politics with his friends. But, unlike Alice, Lil did not keep her distance. “By the time she was fifteen, there was no one in the world but Abe,” Alice tells me with a knowing smile. Photos of their courtship in the early thirties show them in a canoe together, embracing on a campground, smiling for the camera. It is clear that they suited each other. Theirs was a big love that endured for the thirty-seven years of their marriage.
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