A Portrait on the Wall

It took nearly a day to get there by train. But then there we were: Chicago!—the Europe of the Midwest, the “Rome of the railroads.” (Possibly parodying this association, Mark Twain explored how, to an American traveler, Berlin was “the European Chicago.”) Here everything was grand and girthy. Soon we were at my grandmother’s apartment, lifting the heavy brass door knocker that was in the shape of a human hand—and then we were in.

My grandmother’s apartment was very different from the one-bedroom apartment where I lived in Washington, D.C. with my brother, mother, and stepfather. Her place was narrow but excessively long, like a subway station, extending the whole length of the building—a building she owned. We called it a railroad apartment, which was a significant name because, as even I knew, railroads were important to the history of Chicago. They were particularly important to the history of my grandmother’s family in Chicago, specifically her father, who had sold iron and steel scrap metal back in the railroad days when that business was profitable. A sepia-toned photograph on her desk showed a prosperous merchant happily leaning back in an office chair with his fingers interlaced behind his head.

Anyway, the apartment was so long that to get from one end to the other was a real walk. If you entered through the front door, past my grandmother (who had come with outstretched arms to the foyer to welcome you), you would find the living room, which was semiformal and which you saw only when you arrived because no one ever actually sat there—except, occasionally, me, when I secretly got up early in the morning before the others to examine in privacy the pictures in a large hardback volume, always on the shelf, called Masterpieces of Japanese Erotic Art. From there, you passed multiple bedrooms (including my grandmother’s, whose bed, she liked to say, was as big as Colette’s), a semiformal dining room, and, amazingly, more than one bathroom. The kitchen at the back of the apartment had a second eating table, where my grandmother actually had her meals.

Another notable fact about the apartment was that it was very clean. This also made it vastly different from where I came from. The dark wood furniture had been dusted, the slot machine on the credenza polished, and the floors mopped, although I never saw anyone doing these things. The only clutter, stacked on the bedside table in my grandmother’s bedroom, was minimal: a few books and papers and slightly gross bottles of perfume or lotion or bubble bath beads—slightly gross because these vials were inevitably associated with an old person’s body, one that was warm and padded and loved but still, for all that, closer to the grave than mine. In the dining room, the heavily waxed surface of the enormous table glowed with reflected light, showing the hour of the day in a softened form and endowing it with a kind of haze, as in early photographic portraits of women where the slight blur suggests (whether deceptively or not) gentleness and nuanced, intelligent receptivity of spirit.

The hush of that room with its old ways was like that of a natural history museum, where extinct animals can be found feeding in their natural habitats. Just as the ancient bison or American mastodon once roamed over the grasses of the Great Plains, so did my grandmother once sit in the fringed armchair to watch Jeopardy or football or to read. And so did my brother and I once sit with her at the dining room table, building card houses and eating stacks of ketchup sandwiches and hysterically laughing whenever our precarious structures tumbled. The slight formality of this old-fashioned room gave our laughter a pleasing quality, as though we were well-cared-for, slightly naughty children whose laughter had no power to draw the larger framework of things into chaos.

The apartment itself seemed to have habits and ways; I loved, for example, that my grandmother always served dinner at a certain time, and I did not notice that the food was without exception terrible. We often ate the leftovers that her lifelong basement tenant brought her from the neighborhood Chinese restaurant where he washed dishes three days per week. (A nearly silent man, with large ears and enormous hands, he regularly stopped by to do miscellaneous favors and household tasks or just sit for a spell, in lieu of paying rent, as if through some unspoken arrangement that predated recorded history or at least a money-based economy; what I remember best was how impressively serious he was when looking at a faulty lightbulb or a jar with a stuck lid.) The restaurant where he worked must not have been very “authentic” because I grew up thinking not only that chop suey was a real Chinese dish but also that New England clam chowder was. He delivered both dishes in massive quantities, in plastic five-gallon buckets, so that we alternated the week of my visit between that bilgewater-grey clam chowder, where the clams slowly became indistinguishable from the potatoes, and the mysterious chop suey. A kind of diced mash of macaroni and celery and meat, chop suey had once been an American fad among the late-night set and (at least according to a newspaper in 1903) “never tastes good until after midnight.” As though still chafing against the allegedly snobbish ways of her long-dead mother, my grandmother was no less willfully indifferent to the quality of her clothing, proudly explaining that she had found much of her wardrobe, such as the polyester blouses she wore to two of my father’s three weddings, in the alley trash. Clothing, she thought, should be “appropriate,” which meant clean and endowed with the right level of formality for the occasion, but she eschewed any further fuss.

If I learned nothing whatsoever from her about the pleasures or pretensions of fine food and clothing, I hope to have absorbed some of her values, namely unaffected personal warmth, 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 Tale, “we must be neat.”) But the most important value was one that, subtending these, ran like an underground current beneath her long life: a veneration of reading. In all the years I visited her, I never knew her not to be, at some point in the day, reading a book. For her, who was aware of her material advantages, education was the great 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 old, worn covers of the books she read, as well as their beveled pages and the strong black ink with which they had been printed, made their authors (Faulkner, Tolstoy, Cather, Twain, Ellison, Murasaki, Le Carré) seem to me like venerable citizens in an international Republic of Letters, delegates to a United Nations of the Mind. (She was not sensitive to, and had probably never heard of, problems of Eurocentrism.) The books on her shelves promised what we no longer believe in: that there could be such a thing as a nonnationalistic, even universal heritage through which we could connect to the grandeur, scope, humor, and absurdity of what it might mean to be a human being. (When I first read 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 book, with its seemingly eternal themes concerning the tension between myth and history, was a kind of bucket that was descending down into that bottomless well of time to give me a taste of its dark waters.) If you asked my grandmother whether she liked the book in her hands, she would set it down for a moment in her lap and, like a Virgin Mary in a polyester shirt with a formerly athletic build, look humble and serious and reflective as she searched for the right words to express her experience of the book; usually the words she found were short and straightforward. Hers was not a genius’s relationship to books, but that of a sane and curious person who wanted to live a broad life, if only within her mind.

This seemingly simple attitude of hers had a major impact on me. Like seeds, which need soil and sun and water to grow, books need something from outside themselves to take on life in us. I think it is the unpretentious human warmth of another person who loves them too.

But the most interesting thing to me about my grandmother’s apartment was a portrait of a famous figure from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, a world-historical figure in military dress, a figure of which, of course, I knew next to nothing.

Before I say who this person was, it should be noted that the mere fact of there being a portrait of any centuries-old person hanging on the wall in my grandmother’s apartment already seemed to me totally bizarre. In this country, we tend to think of ourselves as sui generis, and we come into adulthood like amnesiacs waking up in the hospital room of time, blinking in the sudden sunlight and staring at the Jello. Those rare, surviving objects that bear history inside themselves, if we are lucky enough to encounter them, strike us as irrelevant, as utterly ignorable elements in the background of ourselves. It is only under an attentive gaze (and why do such objects deserve that?) that these artifacts can start to vibrate strangely, to rustle and whisper, to look back at us inquiringly, almost as though soliciting our attention. This semi-magical experience may sound Proustian, but the past these particular objects evoke is not that of individual memory (as in the famous case of Marcel’s madeleine soaked in lime-blossom tea) but of world history. Is it surprising that such history can also be personally revelatory? This is what history feels like to those who are ignorant of it—indeed, who may never have heard of it.

The picture of which I speak was a round portrait done in porcelain of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was maybe a foot across, and showed the emperor in full military dress, looking into the distance of his heroic future with that impassive face that I have always associated with cruelty. (I say this as though there are somewhere, in contrast, casual portraits of Napoleon, perhaps at home with the kids.) This large portrait was made even larger by being encased in a massive circular wooden frame, within which were inset fourteen removable oval miniatures: an eclectic mix of mostly French aristocrats, all also done in porcelain and arranged in a ring around the emperor. I grew up thinking that all of them were Napoleon’s mistresses and wives—the various women the great conqueror had conquered, “his women,” as my grandmother explained with laughing eyes. However, looking at recent photographs (sent by my aunt, who inherited this thing), I can see clearly that, while everyone has long hair, three of this group are actually male. Faded gilded letters even reveal their names: Roland, Louis XVI, and Roi de Rome (Napoleon’s son).

Had there been some confusion in my family concerning the identities of these people? Or, more likely, had my grandmother simply been pulling my leg? Whatever the case, included among this group are the chief mistresses of Louis XV and Louis XVI, as well as Napoleon’s two wives. Even I can recognize the pretty, if slightly rat-faced, first wife Josephine. Adorned with the imperial tiara, she is smiling in her peculiar, lip-tucked-in way, in order, I have since read, not to show her teeth, some of which had rotted to blackened stubs from years of her sucking sugarcane on her family’s plantation in Martinique, where, home sweet home, the enslaved population numbered 85,000.

First let it be known that this portrait was not a high-quality work of art. Surely made in mass, maybe in a factory or workshop in Limoges, it was a little above tourist art and a lot below fine art. It had probably been modeled after tabletops with inset portraits that were popular at the time. Like a Jubilee tea set with portraits on the kettle and cups of Elizabeth II and the various members of the royal family, the “fanciness” of this item may have been, in truth, its most humble quality. It was like an object of Chinoiserie or Japonerie—an evocation of a distant place (in this case Europe) that from the perspective of my American, mostly German Jewish family was a long-lost land—so long-lost that it was no longer in our minds even as a fantasy homeland.

But perhaps such imperial portraits always convey a sense of distance. It is part of their appeal to evoke those vast sweeps of geography and history that the emperor claims to have mastered and to have put at our imaginative disposal. In To the Lighthouse, for example, which was published in 1927, the year my grandmother graduated from high school, Virginia Woolf mentions that the Ramsays have a portrait of Queen Victoria on the wall of their summer house in the Hebrides. This portrait is mentioned only briefly, as part of the background when the socially awkward, lower class Tansley sees Mrs. Ramsay pausing “for a moment against a picture of Queen Victoria wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter.” And yet as brief as this description is, the portrait has a peculiar importance as part of the background. It is at this moment that Tansley realizes what he feels about this middle-aged, married woman of a higher class: that “she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.” In a strange way, it is intrinsic to the importance of this portrait of the queen that it is never described beyond this passing reference because the British Empire, with all its wealth and cruelties, its vast holdings somewhere out there in India, is the unconscious, unseen, objective foundation of Tansley’s mixed feelings for the Ramsays’ Englishness, a roiling and irresolvable mix of admiration and hatred that is powerful enough to fuel, as though in a series of internal mini-explosions, his subsequent rise. 

In the case of the Napoleon portrait, whatever my grandmother’s dislike of her own family’s pretentiousness, whatever her ironic attitude toward this outlandish object of “fancy” home décor, still, there it remained on her wall, decade after decade. It can be found in the background of her marriage photo, which in its ostentatious assertion of prosperity and its studio-produced haze of nostalgia conveys almost nothing of my grandmother’s hardy spirit and suggests to me instead that, just before leaving home, she submitted one last time to her mother’s ways. Here my grandmother has allowed herself to be arranged: in a satin wedding dress with an exceedingly long tulle train, she poses in front of the Napoleon portrait, on either side of which have been positioned two decorative Sèvres-style vases that, like twin cows posed in front of a farm family’s barn, are clearly meant to indicate wealth.

From its place on the wall, the Napoleon portrait presided over everything: over the many years of her marriage to my grandfather, over her three children’s births, over her hours and hours spent reading and watching Jeopardy and cheering for her favorite quarterbacks and opera tenors on television, over her afternoons spent writing letters and her evenings spent eating that clam chowder or chop suey, over the long years of my grandfather’s decline and death, and over her last decade spent, finally, in a happier relationship with a psychoanalyst neighbor, a tenderhearted man whom she had known for many years because they both used to like to walk their little dogs along the lake. (He had once been a doctor who, during World War II, had served in special medical units that helped liberate the camps; I vaguely associated that experience of his, which he never discussed in my hearing, with a moment when the three of us were watching Ken Burns’s Civil War documentary on public television and, at the part when the slightly soporific voice of David McCullough is recounting the dead of Antietam, I looked over and to my great surprise saw tears streaming down his old face and his hand lifted, palm up, as he whispered to my grandmother in a child’s tone of absolute helplessness: “So many young people?”) Through all those times, this strange portrait of Napoleon stayed and stayed on the wall.

When I used to visit my grandmother, as I did well into my adulthood (she lived to ninety-five), I looked forward to seeing this picture in that mild, vague way that I looked forward to being reunited with her apartment. A visit with her was a visit with that. In this same obscure way, I also looked forward to being served a certain ice cream we called Pineapple Surprise that my grandmother always bought in tremendous quantities at the local supermarket and that had been dyed a peculiar radioactive yellow that was the color of a safety vest or, maybe, of automotive antifreeze. Such material things, however nice or nasty in themselves, can sometimes preserve for us, just as Proust promised they can, what is otherwise hard for us to hold onto: the feeling of those days.

But in the case of this Napoleon portrait, the object contained for me something else, too.

It wasn’t until many years after my grandmother’s death that I happened to encounter—I can’t recall where, whether in a conversation with a scholar or in a book—a fact that surprised me: that a portrait of Napoleon was not idiosyncratic to my grandmother but was a relatively common object of household décor among generations of diasporic, assimilated European Jews. It had not really occurred to me until then that my grandmother could be considered representative of a whole culture.

I hardly thought of her or myself as Jewish. I had never, not once, set foot inside a synagogue with her or with any other member of my family. Who were we? My family was I knew not what. Loving and playful, certainly, but hardly united by any single identity. Divorces had separated some branches of my family; chosen bonds had connected others. My kin have been educated and uneducated, with money and without money, white and not white. But amid all the private complexities of my family, occasionally I would bump up against something hard and sharp and un-idiosyncratic. If the encounter with the large structures of history often comes as a surprise to an American, perhaps it does so in a special way in the case of assimilated Jews, at least ones as ignorant as myself, because their culture is by definition not what they think of as their own. That is, cultural self-forgetting lies in the very essence of assimilation as its precondition or goal. It is a self-undoing identity, and a fully assimilated people will eventually not recognize themselves as such.

This story is in one sense a Jewish story, but it is also in another sense a more general American story—insofar as it entails a commitment to historical unknowing. The question is: how, in such a situation, do you begin to piece together where you come from or who you are? 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.”

Perhaps every portrait displayed in a family home makes an implicit or explicit claim of family relatedness. Just look at those pictures of FDR that impoverished farm families in the mid-1930s through the mid-1940s tore from magazines and displayed lopsidedly in cheap frames. “He’s like a father,” so many people reportedly said at that time. Or just look, more recently, at those pictures of Michelle and Barack Obama that were arranged for view on so many mantelpieces as though to retrospectively graft that couple into the tragic story of America, as though, by the force of a wish, to make them our country’s true ancestors.

Was it in this spirit that Jews displayed their portraits of Napoleon or even (as other families I know did) reproductions of Rembrandts—as though they were family portraits? One irony is that Napoleon was hardly a philosemite. Of all the “non-Jewish ‘hero-liberators,’” writes Aubrey Newman, “Napoleon Bonaparte is perhaps the least worthy.” The groundwork for Jewish liberation began before his rise to power. In 1789 the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen had proclaimed French universal citizenship: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” Listening from their ghettos, the Jews perked up their ears: Us too? While some Jewish people preferred to remain separate, others rose up and lobbied: Us too, please, us too.

The National Assembly debated precisely who should be included under that umbrella term of “man”: actors? executioners?—but surely not Jews? Well, why not? So, anyway, Jean-Paul Marat challenged the assembly: “Will we always be children? Will stupid prejudices always be the rule?” In order to claim the rights of universal citizenship, though, Jews should forfeit their exceptionalist claims of being a nation unto themselves:“To the Jews as a nation, nothing; to the Jews as individuals, everything,” proclaimed Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre.

In however imperfect a form, Napoleon then extended policies of universal emancipation across Europe—policies which swept like a fire over the land, incinerating the old order to the ground. As part of this project, he also helped build enormous art collections at 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 universal culture. This Moses-figure, however, arguably disliked Jews; for example, 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 probably did not know that, as Tolstoy would later show, he was merely a feather in the winds that were blowing at that time and not, as he clearly thought of himself, the wind itself.

Rembrandt at least seems to have been a friend of the Jews. With his tender awareness of human suffering, not to mention his use of models from the Jewish Quarter in Amsterdam where he lived, didn’t Rembrandt come to seem to many of us almost, sort of, Jewish himself? Listen to how the German émigré art historian Franz Landsberger, who found refuge in Cincinnati in 1939, begins his book on Rembrandt and the Jews, published one year after the end of World War II:

It has often proved a comfort to me, in this era of European Jewish tragedy, to dwell upon the life and work of Rembrandt. Here was a man of Germanic ancestry who did not regard the Jews in the Holland of his day as a “misfortune,” but approached them with friendly sentiments, dwelt in their midst, and portrayed their personalities and ways of life.

Indeed many of the most important collectors of Rembrandt have been Jewish. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, notice how many actual and misattributed Rembrandts—thirteen!—were part of a huge 1913 bequest from Benjamin Altman, a first-generation Bavarian Jew who founded Altman’s department store, a name that was still a household word when I first moved to New York City in the 1990s.

It was as though we had placed our faith in those portraits of people who represented, however truly or falsely, a promise of a universal cultural humanism. The song they seemed to sing was perhaps always a kind of dream song: it expressed the hope that all people (but perhaps especially us) could share in a common secular story—as though we could be as much Egyptian as Austrian—held together by the golden thread of art, of literature, of the rising and falling melodies of Bach and Beethoven and, my grandmother’s favorite, Mozart. Here is a little story my grandmother liked to tell: “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 loved that little story. Upon telling it, she would look around at all of us, as though happily expecting some common acknowledgment in our blank faces of its delightfulness and truth.

It is hard any longer to make a case for such universalism. Whether we know it or not, Jews are haunted by the ghosts of those who, when they were being dragged off to the death camps, protested that they thought they were French or German or Italian. These victims simply could not believe that anyone would focus on the apparently recidivist traits in our faces and kill us for our noses: I, who was decorated for bravery in World War I, having risked my life for the German cause?

While most of my own family had already immigrated to Chicago long before then, other Eisendraths who had gone to the Netherlands were far less fortunate. A copy of a letter survives from two sisters, Iris and Leonie Eisendrath, who were twenty-seven and twenty-two years old when they died at Auschwitz three days after arriving on August 31, 1943. From a transit camp (Westerbork) prior to their final deportation, the sisters wrote of how hard their life had become, how dehumanizing it was to no longer be able to keep themselves decent, and how difficult it now was even to remember that, as Iris wrote, “it was me who lived in Botenmakersstraat and enjoyed all the comfort and coziness there.”

These young women knew they were going to be murdered and imagined that many good people’s loving wishes would go with them to their deaths, and those wishes would be, Leonie added as though reassuring her correspondent, a comfort to them. Amid all the horrors of the transit camp and their developing certainty about what awaited them, the sisters tried to keep up their spirits and find small joys: “You can make friends anywhere and have a little bit of a good time, I’m sure of that.” They had even developed, Iris says, plans to write a novel! The drive of their natures was clearly toward life and fellowship and talk and play, and this drive continued to express itself as their situation became worse and worse. Saying goodbye to their friend, the sisters made this final request: “Will all of you enjoy your lives with all your might as long as you are able to do so?” It is almost as if these two young women were seeking some notion of a future in the possibility of other people’s survival and happiness. As I read this letter, a peculiar kind of hope arises in me that, even under conditions of absolute brutality, we might still choose not to be brutal ourselves.

There is a picture I have seen of Leonie as a child: she appears well cared for, with a little white cap perched jauntily on her head, and she laughingly holds her hand to her forehead in a salute, conveying a mischievous sense of fun not unlike my grandmother’s. There is also a picture of her brother Rudolph, who died six months after her in Dora-Mittelbau, and who, with his slightly shy smile, looks so much like my own father in his childhood pictures that I would not be able to tell them apart.

After the Napoleonic emancipation, Jews adopted widely varied strategies of survival. Some became Zionists; others pursued a revival of religious faith; others joined Jewish socialist organizations or other politically leftist causes; still others committed to assimilation. These paths (and others) diverged and overlapped as they wound their way through the centuries. But to make one big generalization: those who took those first three paths managed to preserve some notion of Jewish identity, crafting or reviving or reinterpreting their myths of origin, their ancient stories about a life lived long ago under the infinite stars of the desert. These stories of origin and exile and homecoming offered them guidance, right and wrong, about where to go and what to do in a world that was largely hostile to them.

However, those Jews who took the path of assimilation largely abandoned all that. Unless they converted to some other religion, these people lived a secular life and placed their faith in secular things. They did not talk about the infinite stars of the desert but, perhaps in a Bronx or New Jersey or Chicago accent, far from Eden, about Napoleon and Rembrandt and chop suey and American football and opera on television.