Family Hair Looms

heirloom—2. something having special monetary or sentimental value or significance that is handed on either by or apart from formal inheritance from one generation to another.

—Webster’s Third International Dictionary

In the last years of his life, my father’s rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side became the repository of what had been his lawyer’s office in the glamorous Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan. The office itself was small and chaotic, though my father claimed that he knew where everything was. My father’s attachment to his office and the papers that filled it was intense, but at some point in the 1980s, the combination of his worsening Parkinson’s disease and the economic demands of the law firm from whom he rented his space forced him to give up his name on the door. The Redwelds, the distinctive rust-colored containers of legal files, moved uptown.

When I inherited my father’s possessions after his death, I found, tucked away in his dresser drawers and in the Redwelds that I thought contained the history of his legal career, the unsorted memorabilia of our family: random items from past and forgotten lives—cemetery receipts for the upkeep of graves, report cards, loose photographs of unidentified subjects, magazines, newspaper articles, telegrams, letters in Yiddish, and the mysterious locks of hair that I allude to in my title.

What was the point of my keeping what, on the face of it, was precious neither to me nor to anyone else—unless, through another kind of editorial decision, I could figure out whether there was something I could learn from what, as an academic, I called my archive, my material. Material for what? For a narrative I would some day construct about a family that had vanished without a trace. Or maybe just the opposite. This family, over generations, had left traces—in objects, in documents, and finally in me. What was missing was a story that would make sense of the silence that surrounded the scraps of information I had gathered, a story that would bear witness in the place of the absent voices.

If I haven’t already done so in a gesture of efficiency, at my death someone will toss this entire legacy into a black trash bag and it will all vanish down the garbage chute of history, completing the disappearance already in progress. But perhaps if I convert these objects into words, I can counter the vanishing act. I can share my objects and reinsert them into the wider history to which they belong. This is because my story branches into a network of narratives both characterized by their incompleteness and their interrelatedness. The story I’m trying to tell is both individual and collective. For example, if you click onto the web site jewishgen.org you can see, through criss-crossing tracks of virtual connection, the attempts of many other third-generation descendants of an Eastern European world, shattered at the end of the nineteenth century into the shards and scraps of diaspora, to make sense of a fractured past. The objects—in particular, the locks of hair—photographs, and documents in my personal safekeeping for which I am seeking an interpretive framework take on meaning in relation to a world to which I have no direct access beyond their limited material dimensions. My objects bear witness, as it were, to the existence of a community to which I belong only remotely, but that I can invoke when I insert them into this historical context.

The hair was stored in a once-elegant cardboard box.

Fig. 1.

Locks of hair. Photograph by Lorie Novak.

I believe that after my grandmother’s death in 1954, my father kept the locks previously saved by my grandmother, without necessarily knowing their origin. While I can safely guess that this hair belongs to my father’s side of the family (on my mother’s side everyone had bone-straight black hair), what does it mean to inherit something when you don’t know for sure to...