Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  By 1930, Israel had purchased a four-unit apartment building at 1522 Park Place, where he and Chana lived with their children and families. Ida had married Joe Feld and they lived in one of the apartments, and Fannie and her husband, Sam, were in another. When Abe and Lil married, they would occupy the fourth one. Also in 1930, a New York Times reporter wrote an article poking fun at Israel Zabruder’s [sic] excessive use of the city’s ambulance service, titled, TAKEN TO HOSPITAL 13 TIMES; SETS AMBULANCE-RIDING RECORD. According to doctors at Bellevue, who provided a helpfully detailed list of his ailments and dates of his visits, Israel suffered from neuritis, vertigo, fainting, epileptic seizures, hemiparalysis, hypertension encephalopathy, transitory confusion, and psychosis. No wonder he was described as “difficult.” He was obviously physically and psychologically sick, the latter of which surely went untreated, leaving him to suffer and inflict his suffering on his family and others. I am equally pained for his son, Abe, thinking of what he had to endure with a frail mother gradually succumbing to heart disease and a father whose problems were likely only dimly understood.

  Still, life moved forward, and Abe and Lil were married in her parents’ apartment in June 1933. They took their honeymoon at Niagara Falls, where a photograph shows Lil dressed in a slim white frock with a ribbon at the waist and flat walking shoes, while Abe is, as always, in a suit and hat. They also visited the Chicago World’s Fair (“A Century of Progress”), where they are pictured in raincoats and galoshes, smiling broadly at the camera, ready to go spelunking. How Abe must have loved all the evidence of inventions, technology, and ways of improving the lot of the common person.

  The birth of his daughter, Myrna, may have been the catalyst for his switch from still photography to home movies, since his earliest reels date from about mid-1934, when she was four or five months old. Like all new parents, he wanted to capture every millisecond on film, no matter how uneventful it might be. He filmed her lying in a pram outside, squinting at the sun. He filmed her having a bottle, having a bath, and being fed in her wooden high chair by twenty-one-year-old Lil. He filmed her as she crawled, then cruised, then walked. On Myrna’s fourth birthday, her little brother, Henry, entered the picture. Soon Abe was filming him, too, a hugely round baby grinning toothlessly in his carriage; later, he follows his toddler son around the playground as he plays in the shadow of his adoring big sister.

  Myrna and Henry grow up in these home movies. And I see in them not only my family—so many of them gone now—but the world they inhabited back then. Abe was a devoted amateur, carrying his camera everywhere, taking pains to capture not just the big moments but all of it—the Brooklyn city scenes with the children on tricycles and roller skates in front of their home on Park Place; the broad paved avenue of Eastern Parkway, lined with park benches where the old people sat and talked and where the children would fly down the street, stopping just short of their father, squinting and smiling at him through the camera; the birthday parties with children in silly hats and a mother slicking down her son’s hair, forcing him to smile for the camera; the crowded beach at Far Rockaway, the grown-ups sitting around laughing, tossing a ball, dipping the children in the water. There is Lil’s younger brother, Morris, before he went off to fight in the war, and a young, beaming Alice smiling and waving.

  From time to time, Abe steps out from behind the camera. In the thirties, he is young and handsome—fit in his swim trunks, bare-headed and wearing wire-rimmed round glasses. He grins; he talks to his daughter; he points at the camera; say hello, he tells her, wave to the camera. At the beach, he carries Myrna on one shoulder, then sits on the sand next to Lil, talking with friends, gesticulating wildly with his hands, emphatic, enthusiastic, full of energy and life.

  At the same time, life was not as perfectly idyllic as it appeared in the home movies. In 1936, Chana’s frail heart gave out when she was just fifty-four years old. It was a terrible loss for Abe. On top of that, America was in the grip of the Great Depression, and Abe lost his job and then got very sick with pneumonia, having to be carried off to the hospital on a stretcher. After he recovered, he got a job in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and lived there for a year, while Lil held down the fort in Brooklyn. She was not happy living in such close quarters with her husband’s family. Unlike Abe and Lil, his father and sisters were greenhorns, using Yiddish with one another and speaking English with a thick, recognizably Jewish inflection. Abe would chide his elder sister about her English pronunciation, telling her, “Don’t say ‘heggs,’ Ida. It’s ‘eggs’!” But it was more than just a crowded family life and a clash of cultures. Abe’s father and sisters’ worldview had been forged in Imperial Russia; it would always reflect the confines of that time and place. Lil, in particular, wanted a different environment for her children.

  Her chance to escape came in 1940. A redheaded dress designer named Elroy, whom Abe had known from a factory in New York, called him from Dallas. She had gone out there to work for a women’s apparel company called Nardis, owned by brothers Irving and Ben Gold. Ben, formerly a taxi driver in New York, was a visionary, coming up with the idea of dressy garments that were washable, and pushing the business toward polyester knits, which were a novelty in those days. They became well known for manufacturing dresses from botany wool—a wool from merino sheep—during the war years. Elroy said, “Abe, come to Texas. We need a good inside man.” Lil immediately saw her way out and urged him to go look into the possibility. So he did, riding the train three days to Dallas and three days back. But when he returned, he told his wife that he didn’t think it was for them. He later said that when he saw the crestfallen look on Lil’s face, he knew he had made a terrible mistake. Luckily, Elroy didn’t give up. When she called back about a month later to see if he’d visit again to reconsider, Abe told her, “I don’t need to visit again. We’ll come.”

  It was the second time in his life that a strong woman paved his way to a new frontier and new possibilities. In August 1940, Abe and Lil, with six-year-old Myrna and two-year-old Henry, loaded trunks packed with their earthly possessions on the train that was to carry them on the three-day ride to Dallas, the land of cowboys and the flatland prairie. Sleeping in a Pullman car and stopping in St. Louis, the family arrived at Union Station in Dallas on a blazing hundred-degree Sunday. My grandmother was dressed to kill in gloves and a hat, heels and hose, and a fabulous suit cut from yellow shantung. For his part, Abe wore his customary three-piece suit, tie, and hat.

  At first, Ben Gold got Abe and Lil situated in an apartment in Oak Cliff, which was just over the bridge from downtown Dallas and decidedly unfashionable in those days. It was brutally hot and, while there was no air-conditioning, there were Texas-sized bugs—thousand-leggers, crickets, June bugs, and scorpions—the likes of which the family had never seen before. Life in the Southwest was strange and unfamiliar. Abe used to tell the story of leaving a store as the sales clerk called after him, “Y’all come back!” Puzzled by the phrase, he turned around and went back in.

  It didn’t take long for the family to move to the heart of the Jewish community of South Dallas, first on Park Row and then on South Boulevard. Years later, Myrna would remember it fondly: “It was a small city and all the Jewish community knew each other and it was just a wonderful, wonderful place to live. It wasn’t a metropolis of millions then.” The children attended Brown Elementary during the week and saw Hopalong Cassidy movies at the White Theater every Saturday, buying a kosher pickle at the deli next door. Soon, they joined the big reform congregation at Temple Emanu-El, located at that time in South Dallas. Back home in New York, Abe didn’t like the crowded, loud neighborhood shul. It probably reminded him too much of the childhood he wanted to forget. But Abe loved Temple Emanu-El. Meanwhile, Abe and Lil were busy with a nearly constant stream of parties, picnics, game nights, and other gatherings with the social circle of Nardis. Ben’s brother Irving had a farm, and everyone would go up on Sundays. Pictures from the time show Abe and Lil with Myrna and Henry smiling and
windblown in a heap of people. While Abe worked at Nardis, Lil occupied herself with the domestic sphere. She developed a reputation for her excellence in the kitchen, but when people complimented her, Abe would joke, “No, no, I’m the one! I’m the one who told her: Too much salt, Lil. Not enough salt!”

  The Zapruders were dyed-in-the-wool Roosevelt Democrats and patriotic to the core. When America entered World War II, Lil’s brother, Morris, went off to fight, as did her sister Anna’s husband, Isadore. In photos taken during those years, the children are dressed in little soldier’s uniforms, ones that Abe made for them himself. At the same time, they were embracing their new identity as Texans. Pictures show Henry dressed in full cowboy getup, complete with a fringed shirt, chaps, and boots, smiling under a cowboy hat and toting a silver toy gun. Later, Abe and Lil bought shares in oil, and the whole family would go “visit the oil lease,” as Lil described it on the back of several snapshots, smiling broadly before a giant oil tank on the barren prairie. Myrna remembers that they also occasionally went to check on Abe’s investment in a small herd of cattle; he would dress in cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat, and they called him Abie the Cowboy. It had taken only two decades for Abe Zapruder to transform himself from Russian immigrant to American patriot to Texan Jew.

  Life had its ups and downs in the 1950s, but the overall trajectory was upward, toward the middle class. Like many in the Jewish community, the Zapruders left South Dallas and moved out to a rambler on Marquette Street in the serene northern suburb of Highland Park in 1950. By this time, Abe had left Nardis and opened a new business called Chalet with Irving Gold. The business struggled to get off the ground and, in 1953, there was a labor dispute that resulted in a strike against Chalet and serious harassment of the family at the hands of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. The conflict was eventually resolved, and Abe was entirely exonerated of any wrongdoing, according to the National Labor Relations Board report. But the damage was done and the business folded.

  Before long, Abe was ready to take another run at it. This time, he partnered with Abe Schwartz to start Jennifer Juniors, which ultimately became known as Jennifer of Dallas. They started making their knockoff couture dresses in a loft on Jackson Street in downtown Dallas around 1954–55. Abe was later proud to say that, in the beginning, he cleaned the toilets and swept the floors himself. Abe Schwartz’s son Erwin came back from serving in the army in the Korean War and started working in sales, and in 1956, Lillian Rogers came on board. When Abe Schwartz died, Erwin took over his part of the business. They grew it enough to move from the narrow, cramped loft to a bigger space at 501 Elm Street, where they initially had only the fourth floor. Eventually, they took the fifth floor as well and put the sewing rooms upstairs, increasing their revenue threefold over time. Even as the staff grew, Abe continued to have a big hand in the designs, overseeing the management of the plant and nearly everything to do with the business.

  In the late fifties, Abe began training Lillian in every aspect of the business, teaching her the ins and outs, entrusting her with more and more responsibility. He had worked relentlessly for four decades, overcoming obstacles and setbacks and always pushing to build the life that he had dreamed he would have when he left Russia. He was looking forward to slowing down a little. He told her that he and Lil wanted to travel and he wanted to devote more time to his hobbies: tinkering around the house, playing his piano and organ, perfecting his pool game, playing golf, experimenting with his passion for home moviemaking.

  Given the Zapruders’ progressive outlook and liberal politics, it was no surprise that they supported Jack Kennedy when he announced his candidacy for the presidency in 1960. Abe admired the young senator and shared his political values, but I also have to believe that he liked the idea of the descendant of Irish Catholic immigrants ascending to the highest office in the land. It was not just that he could imagine a similar path for his own grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but also because, as a Catholic, Jack Kennedy was in a position to understand the experience of being in a minority, an outsider, discriminated against and misunderstood.

  He was not the only Kennedy fan in the family. In fact, the women in his family dressed exactly like Jackie, from the tailored suits and high-heeled pumps right down to the dark curled hair and the pearls. But their enthusiasm for the Kennedys was more about substance than style. During the Kennedy campaign in Dallas, Myrna had worked as a volunteer, and before the election she had gone down to South Dallas (by then no longer a Jewish neighborhood but a predominantly black one) to sell poll tax as part of the Democrats’ efforts to increase minority voter turnout.

  Henry, meanwhile, wrote a letter to Senator Kennedy in September 1960, ostensibly to ask a campaign question but clearly also to express his enthusiasm and support. In his short letter, he inquired about whether the senator supported the idea of a school for diplomats that would be funded and run by the federal government. In closing, he added this: “Just a note. I am an avid supporter of yours, from Dallas, Texas, and if there is anything I can do for you now, I would be more than happy to do it.” He went on to say that he could be reached at Harvard Law School, where he would be starting in the fall. He concludes by wishing young Jack Kennedy “good luck.”

  Years after reading that first letter, I stumbled on a second one while I was corresponding with the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. By this time, Henry was getting ready to graduate from Harvard Law and Jack Kennedy was president of the United States. He wrote:

  Dear President Kennedy:

  My boundless energy must be directed toward meeting the exciting challenges of the Sixties. On May 25th, 1962, I will be graduated from the Harvard Law School. From that time forth I want to engage in the opportunities and activities that you are directing. I deeply sense the crises confronting this Nation; I want to devote my energy and talent toward meeting these crises.

  You spoke of “… the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960s—a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils—a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.” You asked, “not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them.” I am part of that New Frontier, and I ask you, what can I do for America?

  I will be in Washington, D.C. on Monday and Tuesday of February 26th and 27th. Who can I see and what can I do?

  I was always told how much our family loved the Kennedys and how much my father admired the president. But it was not until I came upon these letters that I realized I had always heard those words in relation to JFK’s assassination and our family’s connection to it. It was as if the Zapruders had to apologize for the film by saying how much they had loved the president. These letters take me back to a moment when being a Zapruder meant nothing at all in relation to John F. Kennedy, offering independent evidence of what my parents had always told me. But there’s more to it than that. My father—so idealistic, so urgently hopeful—was twenty years younger than I am now when he wrote this letter. What it captures is his voice—his earnest wish to use his skills as a lawyer to work for the common good in the Kennedy administration. In this, the letters also give me a deeper sense of what he must have felt when our family’s fate got intertwined with Kennedy’s assassination, and what it meant for him when the film eventually became his burden to bear.

  Henry got a kind letter back from Lawrence O’Brien, who was a very influential and important aide to the president, but there was no job for Henry at the time. Instead, he traveled to England to do a postdoctoral year at Oxford University, leaving behind his girlfriend, Margie, who had completed her degree at Smith College and her master’s in Art History at Radcliffe by then. She spent a summer working at an ad agency on Madison Avenue (“with all the Mad Men,” she told me, “only I didn’t know it then”) and then she took a job in the registrar’s office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As Henry made plans to return from England, he wrote to Margie and asked her to meet him at the pier. That very day at lunch, he proposed, she
accepted, and they traveled down to Dallas soon after for an engagement party for which my grandmother cooked every last bite of food herself.

  For a while, it looked as if they might settle in Dallas. Then, shortly before their wedding, Henry and Margie were elated when he was offered a position in the Tax Division at the Justice Department in the Kennedy administration. He jumped at the chance.

  Henry and Margie were married on October 31, 1963, at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City. The bride’s father, Ben, worked for the government, and her aunt Sue was a famous New York voice coach. Her mother, also named Lil, was petite and incredibly lovely, with huge eyes, dark hair, and a reserved, mysterious smile. I remember poring over their wedding album when I was a child, taking in every detail of my mother’s white dress, the guests dressed in pink and red, and my aunts and uncles, so young and happy. Myrna stood up for my mother as matron of honor; her husband, Myron, and Margie’s brother Joe were groomsmen. Abe was best man, wearing a fine tuxedo. Margie’s going-away suit was an Italian couture outfit, a black-and-white houndstooth with a matching cape that she got from the samples rack at Jennifer.

  The young couple took a short honeymoon after the wedding and then settled into an apartment on G Street in Washington, DC, so that Henry could begin his new job. When the president and first lady came to Dallas, Henry was just three weeks into the job of his dreams, working for the Kennedy administration.

  CHAPTER 3

  FIRST GLIMPSES

  All through the afternoon and into the evening of November 22, as the horrified citizens of Dallas absorbed the news of the president’s murder, Lillian, Myrna, and Myron waited at the house on Marquette Street for Abe to return. They knew from his phone calls that he had taken a film and he was getting it processed, but they were so wrapped up in the events of the moment that they had not begun to grasp the implications of this fact. They just wanted him to come home so that they could grieve and comfort each other.