By Malkie Gordon Hirsch Magence
Developing pictures from my phone has always been a struggle for me.
I told you about almost deleting my entire inbox and camera roll, containing somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 pictures. To update you, they’re still on my phone, which although slow to start from time to time, still performs its basic functions.
For me, that’s good enough for now.
I think often about why I don’t value the same familial collector’s item that most do.
The reason that I managed to get around to choosing wedding pictures that were 12 years of age from my first marriage, after having five children with a man who at that point had roughly another year left of life in him.
The reason that currently, I (Baruch Hashem) have four past occasions to make albums for at the photography studio that I will keep procrastinating about for as long as I can.
The question has several answers to it, some that won’t interest you, but some that might.
And now, for your curiosity and entertainment, I’ll break down my thoughts on this subject.
Pictures were a constant requirement when we were growing up. Wherever my family went, we’d have to stop and stand in a formation that made sense and fight the urge to twitch, make funny faces, or swat at the sibling next to you who was making strange noises.
It doesn’t sound too complicated but to a 10-year-old middle child whose fear of heights is making it hard to stand at the very edge of the Intrepid without inching towards the picture taker, it’s somewhat of a distraction and will likely require several pictures of the same family holding the same pose for as long as humanly possible.
Back in the old days, when people were just people and not amateur photographers, videographers, directors of their own internet shows, and food stylists designing dinner plates that no five-year-old would touch, a camera was the vehicle used to take pictures. There were rolls of film that would need developing and there was thought put into each shot snapped.
I’d say it was as opposite as you can get from the current snap-happy teenager who is appointed to take a picture of something or someone with your cell phone—there will be no less than 50 pictures taken in lightning quick succession and you, the official old person who grew up on Kodak disposable cameras, shall sit there deleting 49 of those pictures, wondering why on earth someone would do something so silly.
Pictures made my grandmother happier than most things and I only recently started to understand what it must have felt like to be the owner of a solitary picture, after surviving the Holocaust.
She, like countless others, was the victim of a time period and geographical location that ensured a trauma that we can’t possibly comprehend.
She was nine when the war began and by the time it was over, she was a 15-year-old orphan with none of her many younger siblings surviving.
As a child, I’d ask her questions about her life before and her parents and siblings. Most of the time, she’d answer in a way that told me that she really didn’t want to talk about it, so the conversations were short lived.
I collected information throughout the years and one day, while in her house, she showed me a solitary piece of history that she held onto, since everything else had slipped through her fingers.
It was a black-and-white photograph of her at the tender age of 15, marrying my grandfather in Paris, the location that his yeshiva had stopped by for some time after the war had ended.
On the day this picture had been taken, a number of couples married one another without much advanced planning. There was a wedding dress that the ladies took turns borrowing and when it came to my grandmother’s turn, she discovered that the dress was far too big, so she took a piece of rope and tied it around her waist, in an attempt to make it look more suitable for a picture that she’d show her family one day, when they’d ask about her story.
The image staring back at me was of two bereft people who were trying to start over. It was a picture of a teenager in a dress marrying a man she barely knew because the one thing she did know was that it was up to her to do what was needed to ensure the future generations that rested solely on their shoulders.
The value of this picture with its story is as they say, “worth a thousand words.”
Once my grandmother had her children and she eventually became a grandmother, she’d get letters sent from her children and grandchildren with the latest family pictures.
They would line her walls and decorate her rooms and to her, it felt like she had more involvement in the lives of family that didn’t live locally.
She created an impressive lineage of what started as five children that grew to grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even a few great-great-grandchildren.
She studied these pictures and memorized the faces of children she didn’t really know, because it’s a link to her past, and a whisper of her future. It’s an important piece of history and it’s a goal of mine, a granddaughter who lived close enough to visit her, to develop some pictures of my own so she could derive the nachat she was so deserving of.
A stranger who enters my home might be confused when they see a sprinkling of two lives that melded into one.
Although they’re dated photographs, there are clearly two families with completely separate beginnings coming together when the time was right and so, therein lies our story. There are pictures of the kids at various ages, there’s one of the boys at my friend’s engagement party with my youngest at the time elegantly covered in vodka sauce, while my friend thought it was the perfect time to snap a picture that became a favorite. It’s the image of imperfection, and it illustrates what it really looks like when you’ve got three boys in four years—messy, unpredictable, beautiful. So much has happened since that picture. The kids are growing up and life hasn’t been easy. There are a lot of pictures I’d rather keep private because they’re just too sad to share. I haven’t done justice to the happiness my life has found once again because I’m still processing it all, but hopefully one day soon, I’ll have that picture that my grandchildren will ask about and it’ll be the introduction to the story of my life.
Malkie Gordon Hirsch Magence is a native of the Five Towns community, a mom of 5, a writer, and a social media influencer.
