Red Diaper Baby

This piece had its origins in a conversation with my long-time friend and interlocutor, the historian Barbara Taylor, a Canadian by birth whose parents, like mine, were communists. What and how does History with a capital H mean, we asked ourselves, for children whose left-wing parents self-consciously saw themselves as part of larger historical movements and forces? How did we understand politics and history as they were mediated by the complex dynamic of the families in which we grew up? In her case her father fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In mine, my father, whose Second World War service took him to England but not the front, retrained afterwards as an historian. Both Barbara and I use psychoanalysis in our work, and our discussion resulted in an invitation from her to speak at the long established London seminar on Psychoanalysis and History. In what follows the original questions remain, but others have crowded in – about the intricate distinctions and overlap between what we call memory and history, and, since I am a literary critic as well as a cultural historian, how new forms available for memoir writing today – notably graphic narrative – enhance or alter its possibilities.

There is a photograph of my father and myself that I have always loved (Fig. 1). It was taken just after the end of the Second World War. I have no memory of it being taken – and it is clearly unposed. Indeed its pleasure for me is that we have had no time to arrange ourselves. My fantasy is that it was snapped by a happily placed street photographer. My father is still in uniform and has a pile of books under one arm but the other firmly holds my hand. I am wearing what looks like an army style trench coat, and I am struggling to keep up with my father, who is, or so it seems to me, absent-mindedly pulling me along. I'm not sure of the cityscape either. He was discharged from the army in Atlanta, Georgia. We are either there or in New York City. The snapshot quality is poor, but that has been always part of its charm – it presents me with a fleeting image of us that, as far as my recollection is concerned, never was. Nevertheless, it pinpoints his return from the war, our reunion as father and daughter. From the time I discovered it, later in childhood, and still today, it has been suffused with affect and meaning without in any way losing its mystery. As opposed, perhaps, to other more formal – even idealized – photographs of my parents and myself in wartime.

Fig 1.

My father, Sid, and myself.

It was a family story that my father sold all or part of his books at this time to pay for a set of studio portraits of us all (Fig. 2), a reminder of how central and psychically powerful a role photographs of all kinds, amateur and professional, played in the construction of the familial imaginary of the twentieth century. Family photos are, of course, never reliable referents to the past, but rather serve to prompt or create both memory and fantasy, the two often hard to distinguish. They stand in for, but also shield us from, what we have forgotten, or never knew, or tried to find out or don't want to remember. It is this long shadow that memory and its tantalizing but mendacious traces in material culture cast, that I want to explore in what follows.

When he was demobbed, at the end of the Second World War, my father, Sidney Kaplan, took advantage of the generous provision of the US government, the GI Bill, which paid for returning veterans to go to college, or, in my father's case graduate school. In doing so he resumed an ambition interrupted by the depression. He had had a deadly dull white-collar job for some years during the nineteen-thirties in the offices of a firm with the Dickensian name of 'Gas Purifying', in Queens, the New...