A Family Album

Alter Brody

1918

1

Worn and torn by many fingers

It stands on the bedroom dresser,

Resting back against its single cardboard buttress,

(There were two)

The gilt clasp that bound it, loose and broken,

The beautiful Madonna on its cover, faded and pencil-marked,

And the coarse wood of its back showing through its velvet lining.

2

I remember the time that my sister Pauline bought it for the house

(300 Cherry Street, fourth floor, right-hand side, front)

Thirteen years ago,

With the proceeds of her first week at the factory.

It was beautiful then,

The golden-haired, grave-eyed Madonna that adorned it,

Her blue eyes were ever so much bluer and clearer, and so sweetly pensive,

3

Her golden hair fell forward over her bare breast,

Brighter and yellower than gold,

And there were no black pencil marks across the pure white of her brow

Or the delicate pink of her cheeks.

She was beautiful . . .

And my father,

I remember my father didn’t like that album,

And murmured against the open-bosomed female on its cover,

“It is sinful to have such a picture in a Jewish home!”

But I,

I loved that album because of its glorious, golden-haired Madonna.

And when I was left alone in the house

I would stand in the parlor for hours

And gaze into her ecstatic face

Half reverently, half tenderly.

And sometimes,

When I was doubly certain of being alone,

I would drag a chair up to the mantelpiece

And get on top of it,

And, timidly extending my hand,

Touch with my trembling fingers the yellow threads of her hair as they lay across her breast,

Or the soft slope of her breast into her loose robe.

And once, I remember,

Ashamed of my feelings, yet unable to repress them,

I drew the picture closer to my face.

And pressed my lips passionately on that white bosom—

My first kiss . . .

Somehow I never cared to open the gilt clasp of the album

And look through the photographs that were collecting there:

Photographs brought here from Russia,

Photographs taken here at various times,

Grandfathers, grandmothers, aunts, uncles, cousins,

Sisters and sisters-in-law, brothers and brothers-in-law;

Photographs of some of the many boarders that always occupied our bedrooms

(The family usually slept on folding beds in the kitchen and parlor

Together with some other boarders);

Boarders-in-law; sweethearts, wives, husbands of the boarders;

Group pictures: family pictures, shop pictures, school pictures.

Somehow I never cared to open the gilt clasp of the album

And look through that strange kaleidoscope of Life.

But now,

As I find myself turning its heavy cardboard pages,

Turning them meditatively back and forth,

My brain loosens like the gilt clasp of the album,

Unburdening itself of its locked memories,

Page after page, picture after picture,

Until the miscellaneous photographs take to themselves color and meaning,

Standing forth out of their places like a series of paintings;

As if a Master-Artist had gone over them with his brush,

Revealing in them things I did not see in the originals,

Solving in Art that which baffled me in Life.

And all the while as I go through the album, supporting the cover with my hand,

The yellow-haired Madonna gazes at me from under my fingers,

Sadly, reproachfully.

4

Poor, warm-hearted, soft-headed, hard-fisted Uncle Isaac

In his jaunty coat and flannel shirt,

Stiff and handsome and mustached,

Standing as if he were in evening dress—

His head thrown backward, his eyes fixed forward

Conscious of the cleanliness of his face and hands,

Fresh washed from a day’s grime at the coal cellar.

When I look at his bold, blank face

My mind tears through the dense years,

Along the crazy alley of his life,

Back to a Lithuanian village on a twig of the Vistula.

Kartúshkiya-Beróza (what a sweet name—Beróza is the Russian for birch trees)

And from a background of a dusty road meandering between high, green banks of foliage

I feel two black eyes looking at me strangely,

Two black passion-pregnant eyes

Nestling in a little dark face.

5

Every Saturday afternoon in the summertime

When the town was like a green bazaar

With the houses half-hidden under leaves and the lanes drifting blindly between the dense shade trees

After the many-coursed Sabbath dinner and the long synagogue services that preceded it

Mother took the four of us over to Grandpa’s

A few houses up the lane

Where the aunts and the uncles and the cousins and the nephews and the nieces

In silk and in flannel and in satin and in linen,

Every face shining with a Sabbath newness,

Gathered on the porch for the family promenade:

Up to the lane and across the Gentile quarter and around the Bishop’s orchard;

Through the Polish Road past the Tombs of the Rebels to the haunted red chapel at the crossroads—

And back again by cross cuts through the cornfields,

With the level yellow plain mellowing mystically around us in the soft sunshine,

And the sunset fading behind us like the Sabbath,

At twilight—just before the evening service—

Every Saturday afternoon, in summertime.

6

They rise in my brain with mysterious insistence

The blurred images of those Sabbath walks—

Poignantly, painfully, vaguely beautiful,

Half obliterated under the cavalcade of the years,

They lurk in the wayside of my mind and ambush me unawares—

Like little children they steal behind me unawares and blindfold me with intangible fingers

Asking me to guess who it is:

Across a wide city street a patch of pavement like a slab of gold;

A flash of sunlight on a flying wheel—

And I am left wondering, wondering where I have seen sunlight before?

By a holiday-thronged park walk, a trio of huge trees thrust their great, brown arms through uplifted hillocks of green leaves—

And I stand staring at them penetratively;

Trying to assure myself that they were real,

And not something that had swum up in my mind

From a summer that has withered years ago—

In the beaches by the wayside on the Polish Road,

Isled among the birch woods,

As you come out of Kartúshkiya-Beróza.

On my bed, within the padded prison-walls of sleep, lurching through a night of dreams;

I am awakened by a shrill wide-spreading triumphant outburst of incessant twittering—

Under my window in the park,

Catching like fire from tree to tree, from throat to throat

Until the whole green square seems ablaze with joy,

As if each growing leaf had suddenly found tongue—

And I raise myself in my bed, dreamily, on my elbows

Listening with startled attentiveness to a sweet, clear twittering in my brain

As of a hundred populous treetops vying with the pebble-tuned waters of a brook

Gurgling timidly across a wide road.

In a hallway among a party of girls and young men tripping downstairs for an outing on a Sunday morning,

The coarse, keen pungency of satin from some girl’s new shirtwaist,

Though my nose into my brain pierces like a rapier—

And suddenly I am standing on a sunny country porch with whitewashed wooden columns,

All dressed up for a Sabbath walk,

In a red satin blouse with a lacquered, black belt

With my mother in her blue silk Sabbath dress and grandmother with a black lace shawl around her head

With my sisters and my brother and portly Uncle Zalman with his fat, red-bearded face

And my grandfather stooping in his shining black capote with his grizzled beard and earlocks and thoughtful, tiny eyes

And poor Aunt Bunya who died of her first childbirth, with her roguish-eyed young husband

And smooth-shaven, mustached Uncle Isaac half-leaning, half-sitting on the banister with his little girl clamped playfully between his knees

And his wife Rebecca, with black eyes and pursed up scornful lips standing haughtily aloof

And my cousins Basha and Miriam and little Nachman clutching at Uncle Zalman’s trousers

And their mother, smiling, big-hearted, big-bosomed Aunt Golda, offering me a piece of tart

As I am staring absently sideways

Into the little dark face rimmed lovingly between Uncle Isaac’s coarse hands.

Credits

Alter Brody, “A Family Album,” from A Family Album and Other Poems (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1918), pp. 18–24, 36, 39. Used with permission of the author's estate.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 8.

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Creator Bio

Alter Brody

1895–1979

The American poet Alter Brody was born in Ukraine and brought to the United States at age eight. He was educated in New York City public schools and rapidly became conversant in American culture and literature. At a young age he began contributing to well-known literary and public affairs magazines and attracted attention for his poetry. In the 1920s, however, his literary output diminished as he was drawn into political activism, specifically writing articles in praise of the Soviet Union. In 1934, he announced his intention to publish a wide-ranging anthology of Yiddish literature in English translation, but it never appeared. In the end, he disappeared from the literary scene and little is known of his later life.

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