A Portrait on the Wall | Rachel Eisendrath

It took almost a day to get there by practice. However then there we had been: Chicago!—the Europe of the Midwest, the “Rome of the railroads.” (Presumably parodying this affiliation, Mark Twain explored how, to an American traveler, Berlin was “the European Chicago.”) Right here all the pieces was grand and girthy. Quickly we had been at my grandmother’s condo, lifting the heavy brass door knocker that was within the form of a human hand—after which we had been in.

My grandmother’s condo was very totally different from the one-bedroom condo the place I lived in Washington, D.C. with my brother, mom, and stepfather. Her place was slim however excessively lengthy, like a subway station, extending the entire size of the constructing—a constructing she owned. We known as it a railroad condo, which was a big identify as a result of, as even I knew, railroads had been necessary to the historical past of Chicago. They had been significantly necessary to the historical past of my grandmother’s household in Chicago, particularly her father, who had bought iron and metal scrap steel again within the railroad days when that enterprise was worthwhile. A sepia-toned {photograph} on her desk confirmed a affluent service provider fortunately leaning again in an workplace chair together with his fingers interlaced behind his head.

Anyway, the condo was so lengthy that to get from one finish to the opposite was an actual stroll. Should you entered by way of the entrance door, previous my grandmother (who had include outstretched arms to the lobby to welcome you), you’ll discover the lounge, which was semiformal and which you noticed solely if you arrived as a result of nobody ever truly sat there—besides, often, me, once I secretly bought up early within the morning earlier than the others to look at in privateness the photographs in a big hardback quantity, all the time on the shelf, known as Masterpieces of Japanese Erotic Artwork. From there, you handed a number of bedrooms (together with my grandmother’s, whose mattress, she favored to say, was as massive as Colette’s), a semiformal eating room, and, amazingly, multiple toilet. The kitchen behind the condo had a second consuming desk, the place my grandmother truly had her meals.

One other notable reality concerning the condo was that it was very clear. This additionally made it vastly totally different from the place I got here from. The darkish wooden furnishings had been dusted, the slot machine on the credenza polished, and the flooring mopped, though I by no means noticed anybody doing these items. The one muddle, stacked on the bedside desk in my grandmother’s bed room, was minimal: a couple of books and papers and barely gross bottles of fragrance or lotion or bubble bathtub beads—barely gross as a result of these vials had been inevitably related to an previous particular person’s physique, one which was heat and padded and liked however nonetheless, for all that, nearer to the grave than mine. Within the eating room, the closely waxed floor of the large desk glowed with mirrored gentle, displaying the hour of the day in a softened type and endowing it with a type of haze, as in early photographic portraits of girls the place the slight blur suggests (whether or not deceptively or not) gentleness and nuanced, clever receptivity of spirit.

The hush of that room with its previous methods was like that of a pure historical past museum, the place extinct animals might be discovered feeding of their pure habitats. Simply as the traditional bison or American mastodon as soon as roamed over the grasses of the Nice Plains, so did my grandmother as soon as sit within the fringed armchair to observe Jeopardy or soccer or to learn. And so did my brother and I as soon as sit together with her on the eating room desk, constructing card homes and consuming stacks of ketchup sandwiches and hysterically laughing every time our precarious constructions tumbled. The slight formality of this old style room gave our laughter a satisfying high quality, as if we had been well-cared-for, barely naughty youngsters whose laughter had no energy to attract the bigger framework of issues into chaos.

The condo itself appeared to have habits and methods; I liked, for instance, that my grandmother all the time served dinner at a sure time, and I didn’t discover that the meals was with out exception horrible. We regularly ate the leftovers that her lifelong basement tenant introduced her from the neighborhood Chinese language restaurant the place he washed dishes three days per week. (A virtually silent man, with massive ears and large palms, he usually stopped by to do miscellaneous favors and family duties or simply sit for a spell, in lieu of paying lease, as if by way of some unstated association that predated recorded historical past or no less than a money-based economic system; what I keep in mind greatest was how impressively critical he was when taking a look at a defective lightbulb or a jar with a caught lid.) The restaurant the place he labored should not have been very “authentic” as a result of I grew up considering not solely that chop suey was an actual Chinese language dish but additionally that New England clam chowder was. He delivered each dishes in huge portions, in plastic five-gallon buckets, in order that we alternated the week of my go to between that bilgewater-grey clam chowder, the place the clams slowly turned indistinguishable from the potatoes, and the mysterious chop suey. A type of diced mash of macaroni and celery and meat, chop suey had as soon as been an American fad among the many late-night set and (no less than in keeping with a newspaper in 1903) “never tastes good until after midnight.” As if nonetheless chafing towards the allegedly snobbish methods of her long-dead mom, my grandmother was no much less willfully detached to the standard of her clothes, proudly explaining that she had discovered a lot of her wardrobe, such because the polyester blouses she wore to 2 of my father’s three weddings, within the alley trash. Clothes, she thought, must be “appropriate,” which meant clear and endowed with the correct stage of ritual for the event, however she eschewed any additional fuss.

If I discovered nothing in anyway from her concerning the pleasures or pretentions of superb meals and clothes, I hope to have absorbed a few of her values, specifically unaffected private heat, good humor, and what was for her an Anglophilic sense of a shipman’s order. (“Come, captain,” says King Leontes to his little son in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Story, “we must be neat.”) However crucial worth was one which, subtending these, ran like an underground present beneath her lengthy life: a veneration of studying. In all of the years I visited her, I by no means knew her to not be, sooner or later within the day, studying a e-book. For her, who was conscious of her materials benefits, training was the nice inheritance. “Why spend more than five dollars on a meal,” she would ask, “when a book that costs 10 cents can change your life?”

The previous, worn covers of the books she learn, in addition to their beveled pages and the robust black ink with which that they had been printed, made their authors (Faulkner, Tolstoy, Cather, Twain, Ellison, Murasaki, Le Carré) appear to me like venerable residents in a world Republic of Letters, delegates to a United Nations of the Thoughts. (She was not delicate to, and had most likely by no means heard of, issues of Eurocentrism.) The books on her cabinets promised what we now not imagine in: that there could possibly be such a factor as a nonnationalistic, even common heritage by way of which we may connect with the grandeur, scope, humor, and absurdity of what it would imply to be a human being. (After I first learn the opening sentences of Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers—“Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?”—I felt that this e-book, with its seemingly everlasting themes regarding the rigidity between delusion and historical past, was a type of bucket that was descending down into that bottomless nicely of time to provide me a style of its darkish waters.) Should you requested my grandmother whether or not she favored the e-book in her palms, she would set it down for a second in her lap and, like a Virgin Mary in a polyester shirt with a previously athletic construct, look humble and critical and reflective as she looked for the correct phrases to precise her expertise of the e-book; often the phrases she discovered had been brief and simple. Hers was not a genius’s relationship to books, however that of a sane and curious one that needed to reside a broad life, if solely inside her thoughts.

This seemingly easy angle of hers had a serious impression on me. Like seeds, which want soil and solar and water to develop, books want one thing from outdoors themselves to tackle life in us. I feel it’s the unpretentious human heat of one other one that loves them too.

However probably the most attention-grabbing factor to me about my grandmother’s condo was a portrait of a well-known determine from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, a world-historical determine in navy gown, a determine of which, in fact, I knew subsequent to nothing.

Earlier than I say who this particular person was, it must be famous that the mere reality of there being a portrait of any centuries-old particular person hanging on the wall in my grandmother’s condo already appeared to me completely weird. On this nation, we have a tendency to think about ourselves as sui generis, and we come into maturity like amnesiacs waking up within the hospital room of time, blinking within the sudden daylight and staring on the Jello. These uncommon, surviving objects that bear historical past inside themselves, if we’re fortunate sufficient to come across them, strike us as irrelevant, as totally ignorable components within the background of ourselves. It is just below an attentive gaze (and why do such objects deserve that?) that these artifacts can begin to vibrate unusually, to rustle and whisper, to look again at us inquiringly, nearly as if soliciting our consideration. This semi-magical expertise could sound Proustian, however the previous these specific objects evoke is just not that of particular person reminiscence (as within the well-known case of Marcel’s madeleine soaked in lime-blossom tea) however of world historical past. Is it shocking that such historical past may also be personally revelatory? That is what historical past feels prefer to those that are blind to it—certainly, who could by no means have heard of it.

The image of which I communicate was a spherical portrait completed in porcelain of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was possibly a foot throughout, and confirmed the emperor in full navy gown, wanting into the gap of his heroic future with that emotionless face that I’ve all the time related to cruelty. (I say this as if there are someplace, in distinction, informal portraits of Napoleon, maybe at dwelling with the youngsters.) This huge portrait was made even bigger by being encased in an enormous round picket body, inside which had been inset fourteen detachable oval miniatures: an eclectic mixture of principally French aristocrats, all additionally completed in porcelain and organized in a hoop across the emperor. I grew up considering that every one of them had been Napoleon’s mistresses and wives—the varied ladies the nice conqueror had conquered, “his women,” as my grandmother defined with laughing eyes. Nonetheless, taking a look at current images (despatched by my aunt, who inherited this factor), I can see clearly that, whereas everybody has lengthy hair, three of this group are literally male. Light gilded letters even reveal their names: Roland, Louis XVI, and Roi de Rome (Napoleon’s son).

Had there been some confusion in my household regarding the identities of those folks? Or, extra doubtless, had my grandmother merely been pulling my leg? Regardless of the case, included amongst this group are the chief mistresses of Louis XV and Louis XVI, in addition to Napoleon’s two wives. Even I can acknowledge the beautiful, if barely rat-faced, first spouse Josephine. Adorned with the imperial tiara, she is smiling in her peculiar, lip-tucked-in method, so as, I’ve since learn, to not present her tooth, a few of which had rotted to blackened stubs from years of her sucking sugarcane on her household’s plantation in Martinique, the place, dwelling candy dwelling, the enslaved inhabitants numbered 85,000.

First let or not it’s recognized that this portrait was not a high-quality murals. Certainly made in mass, possibly in a manufacturing unit or workshop in Limoges, it was a little bit above vacationer artwork and so much beneath superb artwork. It had most likely been modeled after tabletops with inset portraits that had been widespread on the time. Like a Jubilee tea set with portraits on the kettle and cups of Elizabeth II and the varied members of the royal household, the “fanciness” of this merchandise could have been, in reality, its most humble high quality. It was like an object of Chinoiserie or Japonerie—an evocation of a distant place (on this case Europe) that from the angle of my American, principally German Jewish household was a long-lost land—so long-lost that it was now not in our minds at the same time as a fantasy homeland.

However maybe such imperial portraits all the time convey a way of distance. It’s a part of their enchantment to evoke these huge sweeps of geography and historical past that the emperor claims to have mastered and to have put at our imaginative disposal. In To the Lighthouse, for instance, which was revealed in 1927, the yr my grandmother graduated from highschool, Virginia Woolf mentions that the Ramsays have a portrait of Queen Victoria on the wall of their summer time home within the Hebrides. This portrait is talked about solely briefly, as a part of the background when the socially awkward, decrease class Tansley sees Mrs. Ramsay pausing “for a moment against a picture of Queen Victoria wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter.” And but as temporary as this description is, the portrait has a peculiar significance as a part of the background. It’s at this second that Tansley realizes what he feels about this middle-aged, married girl of a better class: that “she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.” In an odd method, it’s intrinsic to the significance of this portrait of the queen that it’s by no means described past this passing reference as a result of the British Empire, with all its wealth and cruelties, its huge holdings someplace on the market in India, is the unconscious, unseen, goal basis of Tansley’s combined emotions for the Ramsays’ Englishness, a roiling and irresolvable mixture of admiration and hatred that’s highly effective sufficient to gas, as if in a collection of inside mini-explosions, his subsequent rise. 

Within the case of the Napoleon portrait, no matter my grandmother’s dislike of her family’s pretentiousness, no matter her ironic angle towards this outlandish object of “fancy” dwelling décor, nonetheless, there it remained on her wall, decade after decade. It may be discovered within the background of her marriage photograph, which in its ostentatious assertion of prosperity and its studio-produced haze of nostalgia conveys nearly nothing of my grandmother’s hardy spirit and suggests to me as an alternative that, simply earlier than leaving dwelling, she submitted one final time to her mom’s methods. Right here my grandmother has allowed herself to be organized: in a satin marriage ceremony gown with an exceedingly lengthy tulle practice, she poses in entrance of the Napoleon portrait, on both aspect of which have been positioned two ornamental Sèvres-style vases that, like twin cows posed in entrance of a farm household’s barn, are clearly meant to point wealth.

From its place on the wall, the Napoleon portrait presided over all the pieces: over the various years of her marriage to my grandfather, over her three youngsters’s births, over her hours and hours spent studying and watching Jeopardy and cheering for her favourite quarterbacks and opera tenors on tv, over her afternoons spent writing letters and her evenings spent consuming that clam chowder or chop suey, over the lengthy years of my grandfather’s decline and loss of life, and over her final decade spent, lastly, in a happier relationship with a psychoanalyst neighbor, a tenderhearted man whom she had recognized for a few years as a result of they each used to love to stroll their little canines alongside the lake. (He had as soon as been a health care provider who, throughout World Warfare II, had served in particular medical items that helped liberate the camps; I vaguely related that have of his, which he by no means mentioned in my listening to, with a second when the three of us had been watching Ken Burns’s Civil Warfare documentary on public tv and, on the half when the marginally soporific voice of David McCullough is recounting the useless of Antietam, I appeared over and to my nice shock noticed tears streaming down his previous face and his hand lifted, palm up, as he whispered to my grandmother in a toddler’s tone of absolute helplessness: “So many young people?”) By way of all these occasions, this unusual portrait of Napoleon stayed and stayed on the wall.

After I used to go to my grandmother, as I did nicely into my maturity (she lived to ninety-five), I appeared ahead to seeing this image in that delicate, obscure method that I appeared ahead to being reunited together with her condo. A go to together with her was a go to with that. On this similar obscure method, I additionally appeared ahead to being served a sure ice cream we known as Pineapple Shock that my grandmother all the time purchased in great portions on the native grocery store and that had been dyed a peculiar radioactive yellow that was the colour of a security vest or, possibly, of automotive antifreeze. Such materials issues, nonetheless good or nasty in themselves, can typically protect for us, simply as Proust promised they will, what’s in any other case laborious for us to carry onto: the sensation of these days.

However within the case of this Napoleon portrait, the item contained for me one thing else, too.

It wasn’t till a few years after my grandmother’s loss of life that I occurred to come across—I can’t recall the place, whether or not in a dialog with a scholar or in a e-book—a incontrovertible fact that stunned me: {that a} portrait of Napoleon was not idiosyncratic to my grandmother however was a comparatively widespread object of family décor amongst generations of diasporic, assimilated European Jews. It had probably not occurred to me till then that my grandmother could possibly be thought-about consultant of an entire tradition.

I hardly considered her or myself as Jewish. I had by no means, not as soon as, set foot inside a synagogue together with her or with some other member of my household. Who had been we? My household was I knew not what. Loving and playful, actually, however hardly united by any single id. Divorces had separated some branches of my household; chosen bonds had linked others. My kin have been educated and uneducated, with cash and with out cash, white and never white. However amid all of the personal complexities of my household, often I might bump up towards one thing laborious and sharp and un-idiosyncratic. If the encounter with the big constructions of historical past usually comes as a shock to an American, maybe it does so in a particular method within the case of assimilated Jews, no less than ones as ignorant as myself, as a result of their tradition is by definition not what they consider as their very own. That’s, cultural self-forgetting lies within the very essence of assimilation as its precondition or purpose. It’s a self-undoing id, and a completely assimilated folks will ultimately not acknowledge themselves as such.

This story is in a single sense a Jewish story, however additionally it is in one other sense a extra basic American story—insofar because it entails a dedication to historic unknowing. The query is: how, in such a state of affairs, do you start to piece collectively the place you come from or who you’re? Stéphane Mosès: “In an age that can no longer believe in the truth of tradition, the only way to salvage memory is to tell the story of its disappearance.”

Maybe each portrait displayed in a household dwelling makes an implicit or express declare of household relatedness. Simply have a look at these photos of FDR that impoverished farm households within the mid-Nineteen Thirties by way of the mid-Nineteen Forties tore from magazines and displayed lopsidedly in low-cost frames. “He’s like a father,” so many individuals reportedly stated at the moment. Or simply look, extra just lately, at these photos of Michelle and Barack Obama that had been organized for view on so many mantelpieces as if to retrospectively graft that couple into the tragic story of America, as if, by the pressure of a want, to make them our nation’s true ancestors.

Was it on this spirit that Jews displayed their portraits of Napoleon and even (as different households I do know did) reproductions of Rembrandts—as if they had been household portraits? One irony is that Napoleon was hardly a philosemite. Of all of the “non-Jewish ‘hero-liberators,’” writes Aubrey Newman, “Napoleon Bonaparte is perhaps the least worthy.” The groundwork for Jewish liberation started earlier than his rise to energy. In 1789 the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen had proclaimed French common citizenship: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” Listening from their ghettos, the Jews perked up their ears: Us too? Whereas some Jewish folks most popular to stay separate, others rose up and lobbied: Us too, please, us too.

The Nationwide Meeting debated exactly who must be included below that umbrella time period of “man”: actors? executioners?—however certainly not Jews? Nicely, why not? So, anyway, Jean-Paul Marat challenged the meeting: “Will we always be children? Will stupid prejudices always be the rule?” With a view to declare the rights of common citizenship, although, Jews ought to forfeit their exceptionalist claims of being a nation unto themselves:“To the Jews as a nation, nothing; to the Jews as individuals, everything,” proclaimed Depend Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre.

In nonetheless imperfect a type, Napoleon then prolonged insurance policies of common emancipation throughout Europe—insurance policies which swept like a fireplace over the land, incinerating the previous order to the bottom. As a part of this venture, he additionally helped construct huge artwork collections on the Louvre (briefly renamed Musée Napoléon) that, stripping the altars of Italy and the tombs of Egypt, laid the foundations in Paris for the hope of a common tradition. This Moses-figure, nonetheless, arguably disliked Jews; for instance, in a letter to his brother Joseph on March 6, 1808, he described them as “the most contemptible of men” (plus méprisables des hommes). He most likely didn’t know that, as Tolstoy would later present, he was merely a feather within the winds that had been blowing at the moment and never, as he clearly considered himself, the wind itself.

Rembrandt no less than appears to have been a buddy of the Jews. Along with his tender consciousness of human struggling, to not point out his use of fashions from the Jewish Quarter in Amsterdam the place he lived, didn’t Rembrandt come to appear to many people nearly, type of, Jewish himself? Hearken to how the German émigré artwork historian Franz Landsberger, who discovered refuge in Cincinnati in 1939, begins his e-book on Rembrandt and the Jews, revealed one yr after the tip of World Warfare II:

It has usually proved a consolation to me, on this period of European Jewish tragedy, to dwell upon the life and work of Rembrandt. Right here was a person of Germanic ancestry who didn’t regard the Jews within the Holland of his day as a “misfortune,” however approached them with pleasant sentiments, dwelt of their midst, and portrayed their personalities and methods of life.

Certainly a lot of crucial collectors of Rembrandt have been Jewish. Within the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, discover what number of precise and misattributed Rembrandts—13!—had been a part of an enormous 1913 bequest from Benjamin Altman, a first-generation Bavarian Jew who based Altman’s division retailer, a reputation that was nonetheless a family phrase once I first moved to New York Metropolis within the Nineties.

It was as if we had positioned our religion in these portraits of people that represented, nonetheless really or falsely, a promise of a common cultural humanism. The tune they appeared to sing was maybe all the time a type of dream tune: it expressed the hope that every one folks (however maybe particularly us) may share in a standard secular story—as if we could possibly be as a lot Egyptian as Austrian—held collectively by the golden thread of artwork, of literature, of the rising and falling melodies of Bach and Beethoven and, my grandmother’s favourite, Mozart. Here’s a little story my grandmother favored to inform: “A man who loves music dies and goes to Heaven. He realizes, happily, that at long last he can now meet his musical heroes. But where are they? Well, surely they are with God. So, he goes to find God, and much to his joy, there they are. The man finds that Bach is sitting on God’s left and Beethoven is sitting on God’s right. And where is Mozart? Well, where do you think? Mozart, of course, is sitting in God’s lap!”

My grandmother liked that little story. Upon telling it, she would go searching in any respect of us, as if fortunately anticipating some widespread acknowledgment in our clean faces of its delightfulness and fact.

It’s laborious any longer to make a case for such universalism. Whether or not we all know it or not, Jews are haunted by the ghosts of those that, after they had been being dragged off to the loss of life camps, protested that they thought they had been French or German or Italian. These victims merely couldn’t imagine that anybody would deal with the apparently recidivist traits in our faces and kill us for our noses: I, who was adorned for bravery in World Warfare I, having risked my life for the German trigger?

Whereas most of my family had already immigrated to Chicago lengthy earlier than then, different Eisendraths who had gone to the Netherlands had been far much less lucky. A duplicate of a letter survives from two sisters, Iris and Leonie Eisendrath, who had been twenty-seven and twenty-two years previous after they died at Auschwitz three days after arriving on August 31, 1943. From a transit camp (Westerbork) previous to their closing deportation, the sisters wrote of how laborious their life had develop into, how dehumanizing it was to now not be capable of hold themselves first rate, and the way troublesome it now was even to keep in mind that, as Iris wrote, “it was me who lived in Botenmakersstraat and enjoyed all the comfort and coziness there.”

These younger ladies knew they had been going to be murdered and imagined that many good folks’s loving needs would go together with them to their deaths, and people needs could be, Leonie added as if reassuring her correspondent, a consolation to them. Amid all of the horrors of the transit camp and their growing certainty about what awaited them, the sisters tried to maintain up their spirits and discover small joys: “You can make friends anywhere and have a little bit of a good time, I’m sure of that.” They’d even developed, Iris says, plans to put in writing a novel! The drive of their natures was clearly towards life and fellowship and speak and play, and this drive continued to precise itself as their state of affairs turned worse and worse. Saying goodbye to their buddy, the sisters made this closing request: “Will all of you enjoy your lives with all your might as long as you are able to do so?” It’s nearly as if these two younger ladies had been in search of some notion of a future in the potential for different folks’s survival and happiness. As I learn this letter, a peculiar type of hope arises in me that, even below circumstances of absolute brutality, we’d nonetheless select to not be brutal ourselves.

There’s a image I’ve seen of Leonie as a toddler: she seems nicely cared for, with a little bit white cap perched jauntily on her head, and he or she laughingly holds her hand to her brow in a salute, conveying a mischievous sense of enjoyable not in contrast to my grandmother’s. There may be additionally an image of her brother Rudolph, who died six months after her in Dora-Mittelbau, and who, together with his barely shy smile, appears to be like a lot like my very own father in his childhood photos that I might not be capable of inform them aside.

After the Napoleonic emancipation, Jews adopted broadly diversified methods of survival. Some turned Zionists; others pursued a revival of non secular religion; others joined Jewish socialist organizations or different politically leftist causes; nonetheless others dedicated to assimilation. These paths (and others) diverged and overlapped as they wound their method by way of the centuries. However to make one massive generalization: those that took these first three paths managed to protect some notion of Jewish id, crafting or reviving or reinterpreting their myths of origin, their historical tales a couple of life lived way back below the infinite stars of the desert. These tales of origin and exile and homecoming supplied them steering, proper and flawed, about the place to go and what to do in a world that was largely hostile to them.

Nonetheless, these Jews who took the trail of assimilation largely deserted all that. Except they transformed to another faith, these folks lived a secular life and positioned their religion in secular issues. They didn’t speak concerning the infinite stars of the desert however, maybe in a Bronx or New Jersey or Chicago accent, removed from Eden, about Napoleon and Rembrandt and chop suey and American soccer and opera on tv.