Plunder Menachem Kaiser (english novels to improve english txt) 📖

that she had in the basement a shoebox full of 8mm film cartridges, forty- and fifty-year-old family videos that hadn’t been watched in decades, if ever. (In our family, to store is to cherish.) This isn’t because no one would be interested—​on the contrary: the older the videos got the stranger and more compelling they’d be—​but because, absent a concerted effort, a shoebox full of Super 8s in the basement will remain a shoebox full of Super 8s in the basement.

The next chance I had I fetched the shoebox and had the tapes digitized and burned onto a DVD, and on a cold weeknight in March I set my laptop on my coffee table and slid the disc in.

There were about two and a half hours of footage—​grainy, flickery, spotty, shaky, over- or underlit, sped up one notch past real-life-speed. I watched beginning to end, without a break. In one sense it was perfectly predictable; I don’t think there’d be much that would surprise or interest a viewer unrelated to the Kaisers. This was quintessential family video, stolen or staged moments from the lives in the sixties and seventies of a middle-class Jewish American-Canadian family with three children. (That they were relatively recent immigrants and Holocaust survivors doesn’t come through, or at least I couldn’t recognize the giveaways.) Overall it was unrelentingly banal. Backyard birthday parties; teasing siblings; trips abroad; summer vacations; bar mitzvahs; engagement parties; graduations; new outfits; new car; new house; first day of school; strolls in the park; close-ups of the newborn. Proud happy auspicious moments.

So yes in a wide sense the videos were predictable but—​of course—​in a more personal sense they were anything but. I sat and watched and I was heart-walloped. It was engrossing, eerie, sad, sentimental. It was a time capsule. It was time travel. I suppose seeing unfamiliar versions of familiar people will have this effect. When I say “unfamiliar” I don’t just mean “younger.” Here was Bubby but a lovely, vibrant, carefree version of Bubby, a version of Bubby that seemed impossible, a version that seemed so much further away from the war than the Bubby I’d known, even though in a literal, chronological sense the opposite was true. Here were my father, aunt, uncle, trusting and goofy and silly and teasing. My father was a pudgy kid and a striking young man. My uncle Hershel was beautiful and slim till well into adulthood. My mother, gorgeous and shy.

And, of course, my grandfather. Here he was. There he is. He cuts a striking figure. Slim, dapper, almost always in suit, tie, fedora, freshly shaved. He looks like he smells good. How he moves, how he walks, hugs, smiles, stands, holds his children. He has an easy grace (something none of his children or grandchildren have inherited) and a charisma my father and others have referenced but which I never really understood until I saw it. What did I see? I saw his liveliness, his joy, his spirit, his seriousness. This wasn’t a new version of my grandfather—​I had never known another. The image on these tapes wasn’t working against a stored image; this man was entirely unfamiliar to me, and as I watched I realized how unimagined, how empty his person—​his person as imagined by me—​had been. Family sans familiarity is still family but is at the same time something very different. I’d seen photographs of my grandfather, I recognized him, of course. Nonetheless. A photograph captures essence, maybe, sometimes, if you’re lucky. But in movement, even or especially in silent movement, there is something so signature, personal, palpable. “Charisma” and “grace” and “spirit” and the rest of the words I’m using to describe my grandfather are, I submit, inherently dynamic attributes: they can be expressed only when there’s resistance, when there’s movement through (against?) the world.

One clip was particularly arresting, revealing, strange. My grandfather comes home, sits on the sofa, opens the Yiddish newspaper. My grandmother bounces a smiling baby Leah on her lap. My father is practicing the piano. But the three of them (not the oblivious baby) are, it’s clear, acting, and they’re terrible at it; you can see the strain of performance in their movements, on their faces. They’re stiff, unnatural, uncomfortable, even though they’re playing themselves. They do multiple takes, assume their positions, open the newspaper, bounce the baby, play the piano. (Who is holding the camera, directing, pushing for another take, demanding the actors be more “natural,” be more “themselves”?) What was it about this clip that got me? I don’t quite know. The artifice, maybe. That family is in fact a kind of theater. That responsibilities can be understood as roles, however natural or imposed. That maybe the essence of family is pretending to be family.

A few weeks later my family gathered for Passover and I showed them the videos. I rented a projector, draped a couple of white sheets over the living room cabinet for a makeshift screen. My parents, siblings, and nephews and nieces piled into the room, squeezed onto the sofa and armchairs.

We watched, it was a party atmosphere, we shouted and laughed, we squealed every time a familiar face appeared, every time we saw someone we knew in a bathing suit. Look how young, how beautiful, how skinny, how handsome, how not-dead these people were! We debated who looked like whom, who got whose nose, eyes, build. We made fun of and admired the outfits. My father’s pudginess was obviously cute and hysterical. Hershel’s svelteness was obviously cute and hysterical. We had so many questions, which we directed to my father: Who’s that? Who’s that? Who’s that? What is that place? What is going on? When was that?

It was a lot more fun watching with my family than it had been watching alone but that cut both ways—​we were an impatient audience, we were eager to be entertained, we were having too good a time to reflect. What had been strange and compelling was now slow, dull, repetitive. Plot, so