Bearing Witness

This is Rose’s lonely time. Papa Joshel out at his pinochle game, the children asleep in bed, Irving working late at the candy store. Sunday nights the business closes early, but after he’s lowered the metal shutters and tidied the place so his brother won’t find a mess when he opens up at seven in the morning, Irving tallies the accounts for both stores. Her husband won’t be back until eleven at the earliest.

When they were courting, Irving presented Rose with a half-pound tin of chocolates from Schrafft’s for her birthday. Must have cost a fortune. Darling man, even if he isn’t very tall, even in shoes with lifts. A small man with a large, generous heart. A natty dresser, too, in his off-hours, especially in those days, in his three-piece suits and plate-gold watch chain and homburg, and always with a clean handkerchief in his breast pocket. Of course she saved the tin: a memento, a treasure. Now she keeps her collection of photos inside it. At loose ends, she sits with it on the sofa and opens the hinged lid.

On top is a small sepia likeness of her mother, Reyne, posed with an infant in a smocked dress: Rose’s oldest brother, Manny. The inscription on the worn cardboard frame reads The Scottish Photo Touring Company, 22 Argyle Street, Glasgow. Around 1899 it must have been, two years after her parents, new immigrants from Russia, got married, and six or seven years before Mama and her children left Scotland for America. In the photo Reyne’s dark hair is uncombed and her blouse wrinkled. Her lovely young face has a startled look, like a gentle animal surprised in its burrow. Rose supposes that a traveling photographer rapped on the door of their Glasgow tenement and persuaded her to have her picture taken for a few pennies. Maybe Bobeshi, Rose’s grandmother, paid for it. Rose doubts that her father did. A man whose burning ambition is to rescue the workers from the sins of capitalism, Sol Mendelson has little sentiment left over for his own family.

Rose’s mother is long dead, taken away in childbirth in 1914, not long after Rose’s ninth birthday. There are few photos in the tin candy box. Rose’s family couldn’t afford to buy a camera. Alevai. Memories are not fixed like...