This book would never have happened if it weren’t for my aunt Myrna Ries. She quite simply gave me everything I needed from the first minute to the last, including family papers and photos, answers to questions, her time, empathy, and a totally biased and often unrealistic faith in my abilities. In this respect, my Nana from Texas and my father, Henry, live on in her, and I heard their love and encouragement ringing through in her words and actions.
My older brother, Matthew, and my twin brother, Michael, listened, questioned, helped, supported, encouraged, and bolstered my work on this book in every way. They each brought their own exceptional creative, intellective, and artistic abilities to our conversations, and their contributions shaped the book in deeply meaningful ways. Above all, in this book, as in life, they have never failed me. I wish also to thank my sisters-in-law Jessica Michaelson Zapruder and Sarah Karlinsky, who are always loving and kind, and who have been rock solid in their conviction that I could and should do this work.
I have special gratitude for my mother, Marjorie Zapruder. She had her own burdens to bear that sometimes made it difficult for her to understand and accept the necessity of my writing this book. In the end, however, love prevailed. This is a testament not only to her values but to her devotion to her children, for which I remain eternally thankful.
My last and deepest thanks are reserved for my immediate family. My husband, Craig, has always given me the freedom and space to have a creative life, and that is a rare and precious gift. In spite of his own busy professional life, he picked up the slack for me more times than I can count and supported my work by quietly making it possible for me to do it without guilt or recrimination. I have counted on his patience and understanding and he has always lived up to it.
Finally, there are my children, Hannah and Toby, who may have made more keenly felt sacrifices during the writing of this book than anyone else, myself included. They forgave my absences, my travels, my distracted attention, and my disorganized approach to managing their lives. Not only that, they cheered me on, offering me words of encouragement, praise, hugs and kisses, and boundless, unfathomable love every single day. In this and a thousand other ways, they never fail to inspire me and I hope that I will always do the same for them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALEXANDRA ZAPRUDER began her career on the founding staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. A graduate of Smith College, she later earned her Master’s Degree in Education at Harvard University. She is the author of Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, which won the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category. She also served as the guest curator for an exhibition of original diaries at Holocaust Museum Houston. She wrote and co-produced I’m Still Here, a documentary film for young audiences based on Salvaged Pages, which was awarded the Jewish Image Award for Best Television Special by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture and was nominated for two Emmy awards. Alexandra has traveled around the country and spoken to thousands of teachers, students, and others about her work.
Also by Alexandra Zapruder
Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust
Reading Group Guide
Discussion Questions
1. How is this book on the JFK assassination and the Zapruder film different from others on the same subjects?
2. Did you know that the Zapruder film was a home movie and not the work of a professional news reporter? Did the fact that it was taken by an amateur private citizen affect how you thought about it?
3. “Your grandfather should have been famous for who he was, for being a good person and a funny, wonderful man, and not for the film.” What do you think the author’s mother means by this comment? Can you think of other individuals who have been thrust into the public eye who might have felt a disconnect between their “real” selves and the public perception of them?
4. Before his father ever filmed the JFK assassination, Henry Zapruder wrote to President Kennedy asking what he could do to be of service: “I deeply sense the crises confronting this Nation; I want to devote my energy and talent toward meeting these crises.” What does the tone of this letter suggest about the political climate of the early 1960s? How does it compare to the present day? How do you think the Zapruder family’s affection and political support for the Kennedys shaped their later responsibility for the film?
5. How did Abraham Zapruder’s status as an immigrant affect his experience of the JFK assassination and how he handled the film?
6. After learning how Abraham Zapruder struggled to reconcile the moral dilemma of selling the film, how do you think you might have behaved under those same circumstances? Are the considerations that Abraham weighed when making his decision a product of the time he lived in, or do they pertain to basic human values?
7. How did the private ownership of the film by LIFE magazine from 1963–75 affect the public perception of the JFK assassination and the conspiracy theories in particular?
8. “It is true that Abe Zapruder’s intersection with history is laced with coincidence and chance.” Can you think of any other momentous historical events that were brought about largely through coincidence or chance?
9. The author recalled that her father said of seeking just compensation for the eminent-domain taking of the Zapruder film: “I don’t feel that our family is in a position to make an $18 million donation to the federal government.” Did this quote make you see the Zapruder family’s situation in a new light?
10. The Zapruder film is often considered the first instance of “citizen journalism.” Can you think of other visual images or events captured on film by amateurs that became part of American memory and culture? If so, are they like the Zapruder film or different from it? How?
11. How did the controversies and dilemmas of the Zapruder film shape the way we handle and think about similar images? How have changes in culture, technology, and social norms influenced these debates?
12. Much of the early debate surrounding the film pertained to the graphic violence of the images—whether the public should be shielded from seeing a death caught on film, and whether showing the footage was respectful to the Kennedy family. Do you think LIFE magazine was right to withhold the images the way they did? How did that attitude reflect the times? Certainly, our approach to violence has changed. Have we gone too far? What is to be gained by witnessing extreme violence and does it help or hurt our society?
13. The Zapruder film—captured with state-of-the-art 1960s technology—was a central piece of evidence in the murder of President Kennedy that also raised questions about the reliability of visual images, privacy, and ownership of information. More and more, we rely on visual records from a variety of sources—from bystanders with smartphones to drones—to capture and record information. How might the controversies raised by the Zapruder film serve as a precedent for thinking about similar issues in our own time?
14. Throughout the book, the author fuses her personal family story with the public historical record of her grandfather’s film. How did having this dual perspective affect your understanding of the history and significance of the Zapruder film?
15. As the author writes: “What is the compelling lure that makes the assassination researchers, the film, art, and cultural historians, the writers and journalists, the academics and students and hobbyists and Kennedy buffs return to it as a touchstone time and again?”
16. The author writes that part of the Zapruder film’s public legacy is that “it is the most private and the most public of records…It lies in the arc of the film itself, the fall from grace, the unforgiving inevitability of it…He is alive and then he is dead…it holds in its terrible twenty-six seconds a painful, fundamental human truth.” Do you agree?
A Conversation with Alexandra Zapruder
Twenty-Six Seconds is quite different from your previous book, Salvaged Pages, which was a collection of young writers’ diaries from the Holocaust. How was your resea
rching and writing experience different? Despite their different subject matter, did you find any common threads running through them?
This is a big question and there are many parts to the answer. The research for Salvaged Pages was largely informed by the fact that it was the 1990s, before the creation of Google, which meant that the work of gathering the diaries from survivors and archives was time-consuming, laborious, and difficult. I was working with documents in multiple languages, in a subject matter that is vast and complex, and that can be emotionally overwhelming. Not only that but I was very young. It was a project that stretched my abilities in every way and ended up being a defining experience for me as a writer and a person. Among many other things, I learned that the long, confusing, even muddled period of absorbing new information and struggling to formulate original ideas is not necessarily a reflection of fatal flaws in the project (or the writer) but is an integral part of the creative and intellectual process.
The research for Twenty-Six Seconds was very different. Although the JFK assassination is an enormous topic, like the Holocaust, and it was certainly daunting to get my bearings in it, I was older and approached the work with more experience and confidence. Most research now is conducted online, which makes things faster and easier but also more dangerous, as it’s all too easy to be led astray into unreliable sources without realizing it—a fact that is equally true of research into the JFK assassination and the Holocaust.
But the biggest difference—beyond the fact that Salvaged Pages is composed of other people’s writings whereas Twenty-Six Seconds is entirely my own—is one of role and voice. For Salvaged Pages, I wanted to provide a framework that would allow the reader to experience the extraordinary value and meaning of the diaries without my getting in the way. In the case of Twenty-Six Seconds, there was no way to tell the story of the Zapruder film without putting myself and my family in the middle of it. I fought this for some time, wanting to take the emotionally safer path of writing a work of narrative nonfiction about the Zapruder film—something closer to the tone and style of Salvaged Pages. But eventually it became clear that this would not work. I had to delve into my own family’s past, and my own memories, in order to tell the story in a voice that was not only truthful and authentic but also uniquely my own. This was a difficult shift and required dealing with my family’s history of reticence and even silence around the Zapruder film. But in the end, of course, I think the book is better for it.
I do think there is one important similarity between the two books. In the introduction to Salvaged Pages, I wrote about Anne Frank’s iconic Diary of a Young Girl and how it was more often viewed as a symbol of lost lives than mined as a serious primary source of the Holocaust. I challenged this idea and reframed the diaries in my book as historical and literary records, unpacking them for what they could contribute to an understanding of everything from the nuances of daily life during the Holocaust to the deepest existential questions of human suffering. Likewise, the Zapruder film is an iconic representation of the Kennedy assassination. As such, its poignant history and inherent contradictions can be lost in the endless replaying of it, which reduces it to a symbolic, even clichéd set of images. As in the case of Anne Frank’s Diary, what is required is to slow down, to look again at what we think we know, to reconsider the touchstones of our history. I think when we look skeptically at our symbols, we find that there is nearly always a story, or a richer, more provocative set of ideas, beneath the surface. That is the story I wanted to tell in Twenty-Six Seconds.
You say, “As much as I feel the pathos of that time, Kennedy’s death was not my personal loss and the Zapruder film was not my wound.” Can you discuss this quote further?
When I see the Zapruder film or any of the images and footage from that time, or read the accounts of the period, I feel acutely how heartbreaking the moment must have been. I feel deeply for Jack Kennedy’s widow and children, for those who loved him, and for the many millions around the nation—including my own family—who mourned him so personally. But I was not alive at the time. I did not live in that moment, and John Kennedy was never my president. So, I suppose I just mean that it is somewhat removed from my own personal experience. Likewise, the film—which was such a painful reminder of that loss and those disappointed hopes for my grandfather, my father, and my family—never had that direct resonance for me. It was more abstract.
A much more direct analogy for me would be images of watching the Twin Towers fall on 9/11. I was at home in my apartment in Washington, DC, when that event occurred, and I experienced it unfolding in real time together with the rest of the nation. Like everyone else who was alive at the time, when I see that footage again now, I remember where I was, what it felt like, and the fears and implications of the moment. This is not the case for me with the Zapruder film—despite its personal connection to my family—though it is for those who experienced the assassination, the film, and the aftermath firsthand: my mother and my aunt, and my father, my uncle, and my grandparents.
How did you balance the telling of an intimate family story with recounting a public historical account? Was it a difficult line to walk?
For me, writing about historical events is much easier than telling a private or intimate family story. There is something uniquely risky about writing about one’s family—as a writer, you are speaking for yourself but also imposing your own narrative and interpretation on those you love who may or may not agree. You have to be honest and authentic, but doing so might potentially harm the memory or feelings of those who mean the most to you.
In this case, I felt that the personal element of the story was justified because it was integral to a full understanding of the public story of the life of the Zapruder film. Our family’s life and that of the film were intertwined in such complex ways that it was essentially impossible to understand the film without having that window into who my grandfather was, the decisions he made and the deal he struck with LIFE magazine, the reverberating consequences of the agreement, the questions my father faced when the film was returned to our family in 1975, and the legal issues around ownership of the film in the 1990s. I suppose it was less about balance than it was about putting two stories that had been kept apart for many decades together in order to create a complete and coherent narrative for the first time.
In one way, it was difficult because it involved deconstructing established ideas and then reconstructing them. As a Zapruder, it was not difficult for me to see things from the perspective of our family or to understand why my grandfather or father did the things they did. Certainly, it was not as hard for me as it probably would have been for someone else. What was difficult was overcoming the instinct to defend my family or to leave out anything that might be even slightly unflattering or to skew the story to protect their images. But since, in the end, I believed that the worst that could be said of them was that they were human, I didn’t need to whitewash the story to protect them. So that made things much easier for me from both an ethical and a storytelling perspective.
Is history by definition objective, or can it also be personal as well?
I don’t think history is strictly objective. I mean, events occurred in the past the way they occurred, but our only access to the past—to history—is through the telling of it in various forms. And we don’t do it once; we continue to tell and retell, and new documents and materials surface, and times change, and we revisit the eras in question and reconstruct our understanding of them. In this sense, history is very personal because the person who is writing or teaching it is, by definition, shaping a narrative, or imposing a set of views or interpretations upon the information. Having said that, I think that different subjective or personal historical accounts can be true or have overlapping truths. Or, to put it another way, there is not one single absolute historical truth that we should imagine that we are in search of, and if we find it, we will be finished. I don’t see historical inquiry that way.
In fact, you could use
the Zapruder film as an analogy. In one sense, the film itself is what it is. It is literally an unchanging record—it shows exactly the same thing every single time it is run. It never changes. And yet, different people over different eras have seen vastly different things in it. It’s not that the film changes—although perhaps time and technology have permitted it to become somewhat clearer and to therefore reveal more of its details. But really, what changes over time are the people looking at it, their interests, beliefs, and social constructs, and the time and context from which they are looking. They interpret it differently over time, and in very personal ways. This is an evolving process. And while the truth might be out there, it’s hard to imagine that there will ever be a simple consensus on what it is because everything continues to change.
The generations for whom the Kennedy assassination was a personal, visceral experience are aging. What will happen to our understanding of the events—and seminal records like the Zapruder film—when that generation is no longer the keeper of its memory?
It’s interesting because this is really the same question as what will happen when there are no more Holocaust survivors. I think that artifacts—or “secular relics” as scholar Art Simon has called them—like the Zapruder film and the Holocaust diaries of young writers become increasingly important, in a way, as time passes. They are historical remnants that were actually there, that witnessed the events in question, and that will remain to testify after the people who lived through that history are gone.
At the same time, future generations are not likely to have an intuitive understanding of these documents, nor may they necessarily have an emotional connection to them. It’s possible that people won’t care much about the Zapruder film in one hundred years when no one is alive who remembers John F. Kennedy. Or that few will be particularly interested in the diaries of teenagers in the Holocaust when that event is a distant memory from a previous century. I think that’s why I write the books that I do. Because I believe that these sources not only tell us important things about the historical moments they reflect but that their stories tell us a great deal about what it means to be human in any time and place. I like the idea of preserving that meaning—or at least my understanding of it—in books for generations long after the ones who lived this history themselves.
Twenty-Six Seconds Page 42