In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  Then there’s the ear with its fleshy lobe. There’s an apocryphal tale that Rembrandt deliberately darkened the wonderfully painted Cleopatra in order to make the single pearl stand out. Cleopatra, if she ever existed, has not been preserved. In an early self-portrait from 1628, with its captivating combination of rosiness and red hair, transparent shadows and flickering surfaces, Rembrandt’s ear is that single pearl. The lighting is what you might call “dimmed houselights”: that melancholy half light that rescues any photograph or film, imparting to it a sudden perfection. The face is immersed in darkness, and only the very button of the nose is illuminated. Part of the neck, the soft cheek with its downy hair and a corner of the white collar appear almost gilded with the light of the disappearing sun, and a ring of hairs on his nape are lit like wires. The center of the composition has followed the light and shifted to the left, and the crimson earlobe (disproportionately puffy, as if he’d just had it pierced and it was still stinging and swollen) is suddenly everything: the sunset, an expensive earring, an unseeing and flesh-covered third eye.

  Consider the “Portrait of a Young Woman with a Fan,” dated 1633 (its pendant, showing a bearded man, rising from his armchair to greet someone, is now somewhere in Cincinnati). It’s a virtuosic work, a demonstration of mastery: thick scalloped lace, the black and wine-red fabrics, the earrings and necklace all appear to hold symbolic meaning that might be deciphered like a rebus. But none of it bears any relation to the face, which is wide and flat as a tray. No message plays across its surface, merely the smooth evenness of the concentrating listener. Something in it looks familiar though, like a fin emerging from the waves and then disappearing again, and it unsettles and distracts from the task, which the artist has so marvelously fulfilled. The young woman has neither name nor biography, giving rise to the suggestion that she never existed, and that both works were calling cards, painted to show the artist at his best and attract new patrons. Something in her figure and the turn of her shoulder, in the way her sleeve is tucked up and her large hand rests on the arm of the chair is in vague contradiction with the silk and gold of the artist’s task. Her eyes are wide apart (a slight skin fold in one eyelid) and she has a broad forehead, an inelegant nose (the bulbous tip is tinged with red) and the expression on her face combines a high level of attentiveness with a little boy’s excited readiness. I can’t rid myself of the thought that Rembrandt liked the idea of painting a female version of himself, just another of the many possible-impossible forms of being — especially handy if a portrait of an unknown woman was suddenly needed.

  The heavy-browed, the surprised, the smirking, contented, and self-satisfied, the suspicious, despairing, and desperate, the slicked-back and curly-haired likenesses of Rembrandt formed their own scale, they were a school unto themselves. The face seems to be able to teach itself to meet every given standard — and at the same time to refute it. The Dresden “Self-portrait with a Dead Bittern” with its mustache, the feather in his cap, the extended hand holding the bird like Goliath’s head, has its echo in the victorious Samson, standing with his hand on his hip at his father-in-law’s gate.

  The comparatively spare late self-portraits, with their dark hats and white linen caps, are even more economical, a serial testing of the faces of acceptance, despair, mockery. They have something in common, it seems, a particular quality to the gaze, although it’s easier to define in an apophatic sense, to note what is absent. They are missing the integral attribute of the genre: an attempt to penetrate. The portrait with its fist of meanings, an embodied demand for attention, a place in the sun, tries to break open your head like a door, to enter in and make itself at home. It has the intensity of a message in a bottle, a voicemail — a letter that sooner or later will become the very last letter.

  Rembrandt’s self-portraits are beings of a different type. They don’t demand attention, but with all imaginable generosity they offer up to you their own attention. The internal space of the portraits is given over to this, the gaze we meet at the threshold opens up to us, allows us in, creates a soft indent for our momentary stay, a womb-like hollow, deliberately intended for partings. What is parting from what here? What is ending, which is hardly begun? If we remember that we are looking (even in the same portrait with the yellow jerkin), in the most literal way, with Rembrandt’s eyes, and through his mind, as if it were a coin-operated telescope presenting a segment of distant reality to us up close, then at this very moment, we are able to cast off our own selves with a mixture of tenderness and gratitude. What happens then is the simultaneous disappearance of both pans on the scales, both parts of the equation, the y and the x. In the hollow, in the deserted meeting place, only its permanent resident is left: the invisible dead monkey.

  3. Goldchain Adds Up, Woodman Takes Away

  In W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz there is a long list — a page or more — of confiscated goods taken from the flat of Prague Jews after they have been dispatched. Everything is itemized, down to the jars of strawberry jam with their conserved summer light. Sometimes we can trace the objects’ journey (I almost added “posthumous”), and there are even photographs of the warehouses where the confiscated goods were stored — a little like transit camps, barracks for captive objects. Long tables, as if in preparation for a wedding feast, are stacked high with orphaned china and crockery, terrible in their ornate nakedness; wooden shelves like bunks, inhabited by pots and pans, sauce boats and teapots, forced to rub along. It’s as if someone’s cupboards had been sliced open like a belly and the contents had slithered out — and this is in effect what happened. There are whole rooms of polished wooden cupboards and cupboards of neatly piled, cold-to-the-touch bedlinen, ancient pillows and duvet covers. These warehouses were closed distribution points, places where the privileged could come and be presented with a gift from someone else’s halted life. The same warehouses existed in Soviet Russia — the furs and furniture of the spoiled bourgeoisie were handed out to the victorious, the people of a new Social formation.

  In contemporary Europe, with its barely healed wounds, black holes, and traces of displacement, a well-preserved family archive is a rarity. A set of furniture and china that has come together over decades, inherited from aunts and grandmothers and once thought of as an ancient burden, now deserves its own special memorial. Those who were forced to flee (it hardly matters from whom they fled) burned documents, shredded photographs, cut off everything below the chin — officer epaulets, army greatcoats, civil service uniforms — and left their papers with other people. By the end of the journey very little is left for the memory to cling to, and to set sail on.

  Exercises in bringing the past closer to understand it remind me of those school tests where you are asked to tell a story based on a picture, or to draw a picture based on a few existing elements: nose, tail, and paw. Whether you like it or not, you are simply more visible than those who came before you. And we have nothing to lay our foundations on — like most of the people who escaped from the black ink of the twentieth century, taking only what they could.

  What can you do when your imagined subject’s possessions amount to almost nothing: a postcard and five photographs that have survived by accident? The imagination bodies forth, the objects acquire mass and the links between them, both past and invented, and smeared thickly with a priori knowledge of that object, establish their own order. But objects from the long distant past look as if they’ve been caught in the headlights, they’re awkward, embarrassingly naked. It’s as if they had nothing left to do. Their previous owners and functions are gone and they are doomed to aimless existence. It is much like retiring from work and finding yourself unable to build a new life. The list of clothing I took to pioneer camp as a ten-year-old (three white t-shirts, blu
e shorts, a pioneer cap), is hardly different from the lists of property that were so lovingly drawn up in the seventeenth century, the frock coats, garters, and breeches. They slowly grow cold in the absence of human touch, of being spoken of and remembered, and each item is suffused with a touching glow when it is brought briefly back out of oblivion. Together with a white cloth of silver doublet and another black silk doublet we find: five East Indian wicker baskets, a green armosin sash, six hair wigs, a cane, being a walking stick with an ivory knob, and a Turkish tobacco pipe. This comes from a list of items belonging to Lodewijk van der Helst, drawn up in Amsterdam on January 7, 1671, on the occasion of moving to his mother’s. It’s a long list and nothing is left out, down to the “various silks and other textiles of “antique” clothes and what belongs to it, as part of the art of painting.” We know almost nothing about the artist Edo Quitter, except that he died in 1694 and all that remains is a list of his still-living possessions, drawn up December 10:

  Three old black hats

  A red Polish hat

  A red leather belt for the waist

  Two black sleeves

  Two pairs of old shoes

  A silver signet ring

  A pair of purple slippers

  *

  Rafael Goldchain’s book I Am My Family: Photographic Memories and Fictions might be described as an album or a catalog, the paper equivalent of a completed art project. This extraordinary book’s concern is memory and the vanity of memory.

  Goldchain was born in Chile in 1953. He is what is known as a second-generation survivor, a son and grandson of those who managed to escape.

  From the early 1920s until the eve of World War Two, most of my family members emigrated from Poland to Venezuela, Costa Rica, Brazil, Argentina, or Chile. A few others sought a new life in the United States or Canada. Some left Poland intending to come back with funds to help their families but were prevented by the outbreak of the war. All of my extended family members who remained in Europe after the beginning of World War Two perished in the Shoah.

  The project (I don’t know how else to describe it) begins like other such projects: the father tells the son a story, and as the story continues the father becomes more deeply immersed in it. It seems Goldchain wasn’t very interested in his own family history until he became a parent himself. No one spoke of the past in his home, the silence was sealed tight, much like a message in a bottle, not yet ready to be opened. This is usual: “we didn’t speak of those things,” “he kept his silence,” “she never wanted to talk about it” — the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of survivors quote the same phrases. Goldchain lived in various places: Jerusalem, Mexico, Toronto, and it was only when he was close to forty and his first son was born that he realized he was the same age as his grandparents on the eve of the Second World War, and that he knew nothing about them, or even about those he had lived with his whole life.

  There comes a day when the scattered pieces of knowledge need to be fixed in a transmission line. It’s a truism that the “dough” of comprehension only rises to its shape in the moment of telling, and in this telling it then sags and subsides. Here’s the emblematic account, a picture from the golden library of generalized experience: a mother or father is recounting family history to the child, passing it from one mouth to another. This is how Art Spiegelman begins Maus, the classic work about the Holocaust and how it is spoken of; this is how hundreds of other works begin:

  A lad comes to his father’s side

  And asks, this little lad:

  Tell me, Daddy, what is good

  And tell me what is bad?

  When the listener is a child, simplicity isn’t just appropriate — it’s essential. The sharp corners round themselves, the lacunae quietly disappear. The tale of the past constantly risks becoming a tale of the future. We have to make the knowledge bearable, skirt the painful, repair connections — or the world will fall apart.

  Only a few photographs remain of the huge clan of Goldchains living in Poland a century ago, and they are all reproduced at the end of the book in an appendix. The book begins with an introduction, and then a warning by the author, and only then the real meat of the book: eighty-four photographs recreating the body of the family. Each is presented like a studio photograph on a monochrome background, the portrait extending downward to the chest. They include men and women in hats, heavy-boned women with piercing gazes, little jug-eared yeshiva students, peasants from the shtetl, imposing gentlemen to whom the respectable labels “Don Moses” or “Don Samuel” adhere as a matter of course. There’s no sleight of hand about it, and I won’t try to pretend that there is. You can see immediately that despite the different ages and genders, the face is the same — we are following the family resemblance down a mirrored corridor. The Goldchain family album is a collection of self-portraits, made in an attempt to resurrect a lost connection, to find oneself in the features of another.

  My first ancestor self-portrait — based on my maternal grandfather, Don Moises Rubinstein Krongold, who had lived in our house from 1964 until 1978 — was motivated by the desire to create an image purely out of memory that could be thought of as defining my life in a foundational way, an image that I could point to and say, “This is where I came from.”

  The Soviet poet Gennady Aygi has a book in which he translates into words the first months of his daughter’s life with a deep attentiveness, silence by silence. He describes what he calls the “period of likenesses,” a short period of time during which familiar and unfamiliar faces and expressions flit across the baby’s face like passing clouds, as if the fretful ancestors looked down at the mirror-face of the child, both recognizing it and impressing on it their own. Goldchain says something similar when he describes his working process as being a spiritual medium: ghostlike shapes swim up from the depths of the image, but only briefly; the likenesses are not perfect, they can’t be held fast.

  From the first glimpse the imagined photographs of an imagined family (what it might have been, what it never did become) shock with their abundance. There’s a plethora of types of person, as if they were competing for places on the ark. It reminded me of the parade of professions in August Sander’s photographs, although in this case all the subjects are members of the same family — as if the Goldchains had been chosen to settle a new world and had to be prepared for all eventualities. There are peasants and city dwellers, two chefs, and the author appears to lose his mind over the family musicians: violinist, saxophonist, accordionist, drummer, another violinist, a tuba player. It’s like some Kafkaesque trade fair, where one and the same person sits at every stand, and peers out from every barrel. The wider the selection of professions, the more we peer straight to the depths and the differences vanish before our eyes. All that is left is typology: profession, age, costume, and the quality of the costume, the frame of the formulaic, which the author will stick his head into, for example “a middle-aged, stylish woman, suffering from chronic, mild depression — there is one in every family.”

  There are family members about whom nothing is known except for the name, and the lifesaving operation demands the invention of clothes and an exterior appearance. Sometimes the self-portrait doesn’t work, Goldstein simply isn’t able to catch the likeness with a “real-life cut out.” But these also come in useful: names are made up for them, the family grows larger. A “Naftuli Goldszajn” appears in the world, whose nonexistence up to that point was only a matter of chance. As it says in the introduction “. . . we are faced with a black-and-white image of a man who might have lived in Poland sometime after the 1830s. He must be a Goldchain, since he looks like all the others.”

  For Goldchain, the attempt to tell his son about his heritage becomes a journey into the Kingdom of the Dead: to become each of them, to stand in their places, to allow them to look out through him like a window. The author becomes a way out, the bottleneck of the family story, the only way
and the only material for saying all that can be said. You can call the result of this anything you like, but you couldn’t call it a family history. The brevity of the descriptions, their feathery-perfunctory quality (well-dressed, distinguished-looking, in a hat, with a bird) become clearer with each photograph: in this thoughtful, subtle project a whole tribe and an entire world appears on a single face, and the result is strange and unsettling. The problem with memory (its unrecognizable, rainy darkness, lit with the sharp flashes of guesswork) is removed at once: the entire tribe, three or thirty generations back, is me, all me, me with a mustache, me in a bonnet, me in a cradle, me in the grave, indivisible, irrevocable. Once again the past gives way to the present.

  The structure of the book tells us a great deal about the mechanism of authorial view: after the introductions, the portraits, the laconic notes on the characters/types, there are some diary jottings from years before the project was being prepared: everything that could be gathered together, including guesses, fantasies, a few real photographs. Among these, an old woman with a wonderful face, who would have been quite impossible to impersonate. The notes are handwritten and you have to make an effort to decipher them, becoming a textual critic in the process — this moment of resistance makes the material irresistible. Here Goldchain and I are as one: the bare threads of knowledge give us wings. The text includes some “ready-mades,” everyday objects, fragments of authentic letters and documents and although they don’t amount to much, by some authorial magic they are transformed and rendered compelling.

  Such magic is rare, which is why I am picking through different approaches to the past, as one might pick through dried peas, in the search of one that might work. Anna Akhmatova once said that there is nothing more tedious than someone else’s dreams or someone else’s fornication — but other people’s family histories also leave unwanted traces of dust and whitewash on your hands. There are very few ways to flick the switch and turn the uninteresting into the enticing corridor of new experience, and people seldom succeed. Rafael Goldchain’s approach was to create for himself and his son the illusion of continuity; to add to his own family a chorus of imaginary figures who shared his own features and his gaze. This is the world of compensation where the lost is returned in triplicate, where Job’s children and flocks increase in number and the unexpected is canceled out.