About six months ago, out of the blue, I received an email from a stranger:
I am a resident of Montclair in Oakland, California, and recently found a box of family pictures in the parking lot of a local Home Depot store. The box (Columbia sportswear) has the names ‘Corbin and Greenblatt’ on its top. Inside are many old photographs of an H. and Ida (?) Greenblatt, as well as a graduation booklet of Carol Corbin from UT, Dallas. Please let me know if this box belongs to you, and if so, we can arrange shipping.
I thought that the phrase “we can arrange shipping” had a suspicious ring, vaguely akin to those pestiferous emails that begin, “I am the widow of the former strongman of Nigeria who left me $27,000,000 in cash and securities.” No doubt I would soon be told that all I had to do to get the family pictures was to provide my bank account and PIN number. But wait: this suspicion was clearly absurd. Though I had no idea who Carol Corbin was, the rest of it made sense: Harry was my father’s name, and Ida my grandmother’s. It was remotely possible, I briefly considered, that some immensely clever con-man could have picked up the mention of my father in the preface to Will in the World, but it would have taken serious archival labor to dredge up Ida, whom I scarcely knew. In any case, it was almost clinical narcissism to imagine a thief poring over one of my books. Besides, before moving to Massachusetts, I lived for many years in the Bay Area, and it was entirely possible that, in the uprooting of my life, I had left behind a box of old pictures. But that uprooting occurred a decade ago; why should this particular piece of domestic flotsam and jetsam only bob up now?
I wrote back expressing my puzzlement and my interest.
Several months passed, a few more emails were exchanged, and then the box arrived. I will not melodramatize my experience: my hands were not shaking, as I opened the package, and my heart was not pounding in my chest. I was hardly Howard Carter in the tomb of King Tut. But my curiosity was intense, and, quite contrary to what I had expected, its intensity did not diminish when I rifled through the contents.
For what I found was indeed the Greenblatt family. There were the sepia-toned group photographs of the greenhorns, fresh off the boat from Lithuania and looking out dazed at the brave new world. In The American Scene, Henry James, after strolling around New York’s Lower East Side on a summer evening, would write about the ferocious energy, diffused intensity, and “whole hard glitter of Israel.” But that was in 1904, considerably later than the date of the photographs I held in my hand. Perhaps it took the better part of a decade for the new arrivals to find their feet. My sad-eyed relatives, uncomfortable in their new clothes, looked anything but ferocious, nor were there visible signs in their faces of what James called, with something of a shudder, “the waiting spring of intelligence.” If they were poised for triumph—the “immensity of the alien presence climbing higher and higher”—they seemed to have no inkling of what lay ahead.
Sifting though another batch of the photographs—small black-and-whites, with scalloped edges—I could still identify some of the first American generation, but they were old now, as if they had gone precipitously and without warning from raw immigrants to doting elders, the men in dark business suits, the women oddly shrunken, as if their vitality had been entirely spent on the florid children and grandchildren by whom they were surrounded. Did no one, in the years after their arrival at Ellis Island, think to take pictures of them by themselves, as they made their way in the world? Did no one want to record the move to Boston, the horse and wagon, the hardware store? Everything, it seems, ceded place to their children—my parents and uncles and aunts—who were all heavily represented. This grainy picture, I realized, must be my Aunt Esther and Uncle Sam on the back porch of the apartment in Roxbury; this other one, my Aunt Dora in front of the half-Tudor house in Newton that she and my Uncle Al bought when the restrictive real-estate covenants against Jews were broken; still another, my Aunt Rose and Uncle Ben at the beach in Maine. The women are all a little plump; the men wear brilliantine. And somewhere, among the children who swarm about in the photographs, must be me.
But it is this that most puzzled me: where exactly am I in this pile of images? I could conceivably be the baby propped up in a crib in a room darkened by Venetian blinds, but the smiling woman next to him doesn’t resemble my mother. There is a sweet picture of a skinny little boy at the beach who might be me, but somehow it isn’t quite right. Nor, despite a certain resemblance, is the slightly older child on a sled likely to be me. And the ten- or eleven-year-old boy who is evidently on a vacation in Florida—exactly the vacation that left an indelible impression upon me, when I witnessed separate water fountains for blacks and whites—is definitely not me either.
At this point, of course, the realization finally came over me: none of these pictures had anything to do with my family. These were some other, entirely unrelated Greenblatts, complete with an “H” Greenblatt —I assumed it was Harry, but it could have been Harold or Herbert or Hugo—and his mother Ida. That’s why the mysterious Carol Corbin’s graduation from UT Dallas was jumbled in with the other memorabilia. These were somebody else’s memories. Why should I have been surprised? Any biographer of Shakespeare knows that in addition to John Shakespeare, the father of the playwright William, the Stratford parish register records another contemporary John Shakespeare, the son of a shoemaker of Warwick who succeeded to the business on the drowning in the Avon of his brother William. Greenblatt—a bit like Shakespeare—was a fairly recent name of uncertain spelling, called into being by evolving bureaucratic regulations.
The eerie resemblance that deceived me, when I first rifled through the packet of pictures, was in part the effect of shared genetic make-up. After all, I would probably not have made the same mistake with photographs of Swedes. It was as if, Henry James wrote about the Jewish immigrants, he were looking “at the bottom of some vast sallow aquarium in which innumerable fish, of over-developed proboscis, were to bump together, for ever, amid heaped spoils of the sea.” But more than noses or lips, my momentary confusion was the effect of a shared social trajectory, the effect, that is, of the cold truth of history: your experience and your memories and your destiny are not yours alone.
Carol Corbin: If you’re out there, I have some pictures for you, and the tassel from the cap you wore at your graduation. We can arrange shipping.
Stephen Greenblatt is the author, most recently, of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.
