Writing from Photographs
Images inspire essays in Paul Hendrickson’s creative writing course
Former Washington Post journalist Paul Hendrickson teaches a creative writing course that invites undergraduates to research and report "memorable, full-bodied stories" based on a single photo. Hendrickson's prize-winning book Sons of Mississippi was launched by the 1962 Life photograph that appeared on its cover. Read stories by Molly Johnsen and Allison Stadd, students from the fall 2007 course, and view the photos that launched them.
Storytelling by the Numbers
by Allison StaddTwelve photographs.
Each is black and white, eight and a half by eleven inches, and worn around the edges with years of eager handling. They lie inside a Fredric Perry Photographers wedding album, its seam threadbare and cardboard covers jaundiced with age. One photo in particular, this one in front of us, holds my attention. I slip it out, turn to my grandmother, and click my mechanical pencil. “This is the one,” I tell her. “Tell me about this one.”
Sixty years ago.
It seems impossible, probably even more so to my grandmother, that sixty years have passed since this grinning groom and his sassy wrinkled-nose bride sunk the knife into their three-tiered wedding cake, my grandfather gently grasping his new wife’s gloved hand. But over half a century has indeed passed since May 20th, 1947. I suppose those five cent Coca Cola bottles, uncapped at each table setting like cheap centerpieces, are proof of the passage of time. Actually, much else in the picture is outdated. How about that dress?
One hundred dollars.
Maybe it cost a little more, maybe a little less. It’s no surprise that after so much time has elapsed, fact has faded into conjecture. But my grandmother does remember the actual dress with certainty. Her clarity on this point is likely owing to the stir caused by the slightly-too-sheer tulle and slightly-too-short cap sleeves, unsuitable for a young Jewish bride. So even on this most pious of days, my grandmother lived up to her nickname: “Torchy.” She claims that the alias derived from her maiden name, Tulchinsky. But the girl in this photograph looks like a fireball to me. And it would have been easy to breach formality a little with her dress design, as her mother granted her free reign to collaborate with the seamstress. I’m sure the hired help was worth the money, too; having a gown tailor-made would have been a real treat. Normally my great-grandmother Rachel outfitted her two daughters with practical store-bought clothing. In fact, the woman made shopping so businesslike that she would actually knit while bustling between stores with her daughters in tow. Rachel’s deft fingers could guide the needles with nary a glance downward. Well, like mother, like daughter. The miscellany of woolen patchwork quilts and scarves adorning my family’s couches and coat closets, each product emblazoned with a sewn-on “Hand-Knit by Sarra Chernick” label, were skillfully crafted by my grandmother in the tradition of her mother Rachel. My grandmother, the expert needle-wielder, can knit on public buses and air buses, can knit while waiting in her terry-cloth apron for the chicken broth to heat and can knit while waiting in her black-tie attire for the Kennedy Center Opera House lights to dim.
But right now, by my side on a loveseat in her apartment, she is wistfully peering into her past, hands holding this beautiful, cherished, ancient moment rather than a pair of knitting needles. Right now she has transported herself to another time and place: a springtime evening in Winnipeg, Canada. Right now my pencil scribbles, wringing details from the recesses of her memory. I study the image in front of me, foraging for facts that my grandmother’s recollections can breathe life into. Ah, how could I forget? One of our family folklore gems. It’s difficult to see in this shot, but I know exactly where to look: the right hand of my great-grandfather Samuel, the one with his fedora brim jutting out from in between his wife Rachel and older daughter Byrtha.
Only four fingers.
My grandmother knows the story as thoroughly as she knows the birthdates of her five children, as well as those of her sister Byrtha’s five children. Byrt is the one in the picture with the Frida Kahlo eyebrows, smiling up not at the camera like her parents, but at the younger sister she so adored despite the fact that she, the older one by four years, was yet unwed. My grandmother has to retrieve a magnifying lens from her desk, but with it I can just make out the evidence of when, thirty years or so earlier, the two girls’ father took a sip of whiskey, a deep breath, and finally a handgun from his army supply pack and blew off his right index finger. The agony is beyond comprehension, but my grandmother avows that it was worth anything to her father- even mangling his trigger finger to preclude his capacity as a soldier- to escape fighting for the anti-Semitic Cossacks in Russia during World War One. Sadly, decades later at his daughter’s wedding, Samuel’s disfigurement precluded his capacity as a Jewish father. For even though he was a kohen- a Jewish priest- my great-grandfather Samuel was only allowed that May 20th by Jewish law to stand on the bimah with his family, but not recite prayers or read from the Torah. My mother remembers Sam as warm and affable, always keeping the jars of penny candy on the front counter of his grocery store fully stocked for customers’ children. But he seems subdued in this picture, tucked in the shadows between Byrtha and Rachel. Maybe he is so cloaked in reserve here because he laments being unable to contribute his part to his daughter’s wedding ceremony.
But my great-grandfather certainly wasn’t ill at ease for the entire evening. My grandmother tells me about the live band her family hired, gushing about how everyone “danced the whole night.” I so want to be there with her. I want to see my grandfather frisbee his fedora off to the side and grab his bride around the waist, lifting and twirling
her so her skirts balloon. I want to picture it. I ask her: where was this photo taken?
123 Matheson Avenue.
We have to look it up, of course. Even though every winter she doles out an
envelope of Hanukah gelt to each of her eight grandchildren, remembering every child’s age in dollar bills without fail, even the sharpest 82-year-old wouldn’t be able to recall the exact address of the Jewish Orphanage and Children's Aid Society of Western Canada. I am taken aback at first by the peculiarity of the venue. But according to my grandmother, all Jewish weddings in Winnipeg then took place at the Jewish orphanage.
I so badly want this place to have been elegant, tasteful. But, I reluctantly admit to myself, the flower-freckled curtains do seem a bit tacky, the wrinkled white tablecloth low-cost and machine-washable. And what about the food? Thick slices of challah bread are heaped on ceramic dishware, salt and pepper shakers dotted haphazardly along the table almost as in a mess hall. One plate in the foreground bears a mangled mass of chicken cutlets, the small bowl next to it containing what looks like spinach. But at this, my grandmother looks aghast. “It was NOT spinach.” I get a glimpse of the fiery spirit of “Torchy”: spinach is my grandmother’s least favorite food, and she assures me that she would not have ordered it for her nuptial meal. In any case, all this lack of grandeur is not surprising in light of the fact that the Tulchinskys, the bride’s family, financed the whole wedding. How much did my grandfather’s family pay?
Not one cent.
My grandmother describes her father-in-law, seated left of her here, the fabric of
his suit jacket and tines of his fork just barely visible, as a “big strong man,” a manual laborer who made anchors for fishermen. But his lack of fiscal know-how made it hard to provide for his family. Without my grandmother’s financial support, my grandfather would not have received his University of Manitoba diploma. My grandfather’s siblings, too, struggled penny for penny to pursue an education. His oldest brother Jack, seated here third from the right, used to trudge runny-nosed through the snow to the university with nothing more in his lunch sack than a sandwich of chicken fat glooped onto brown bread. The Chernick family’s near-poverty explains why only one of my grandfather’s siblings is in this photograph. Jack was the only one to come to the wedding. The travel was far too expensive for the other brothers, but Jack and his wife Anne and son Paul came from relatively nearby Minneapolis.
And it’s a good thing they did. My grandmother laughs as she recalls her favorite
anecdote from her wedding day, featuring her four-year-old nephew Paul. I can tell from this picture that Paul was a troublemaker. He is nestled in the nook between his parents, happily about to cram a hunk of bread into his mouth. I can imagine him swinging his legs back and forth beneath the table. Hours earlier during the ceremony, as Paul’s father Jack and his uncle- the groom- stood shoulder to shoulder on the bimah, the little boy hollered amid the hushed murmurings of prayer, “That’s my dad!” Of course his proud proclamation referred to Jack but, much to everyone’s amusement, one could easily interpret the child’s exclamation to mean he was the son of the groom- a preposterous prospect then for a young unwed Jewish couple. Perhaps it’s not too far off the mark, then, to suppose that Paul is so snugly situated between his parents in this photo as a preventative measure. I suggest wryly to my grandmother that perhaps it would have been more effective to seat him next to Mrs. Tulchinsky, her mother. It’s easy to recognize from Rachel Tulchinsky’s smug smile and that glorious, ridiculous hat that she would have been the right one to give little Paul a smart smacking if needed. I know, without asking, how much nonsense she took.
“Bupkis.”
One of the only Yiddish words I know from my grandmother- ironic, considering her veneration of her grandkids would never let her disappoint them with “nothing”. But supposedly that wasn’t the case with her mother Rachel who, according to my grandmother, “really thought she looked terrific” sporting her latest purchase from the millinery. Taller than her husband, Mrs. Tulchinsky’s cocksureness made her the only Jewish woman in their Winnipeg community to keep her family on a strict diet, Jewish mothers normally being known for their hearty cooking.
I love hearing my grandmother’s narrative tidbits about my hell-on-wheels great-grandmother, just as I’ve loved watching the texture of her wedding day, and her life before I knew her, emerge from this photograph like the ripples of a reflection in water melting into each other to form a clear image. Maybe this is what imbues photography with its power: not the stories that materialize out of a rectangle, but the ability of that rectangle, by virtue of those stories, to fuse an emotional bond between its viewers. Perhaps this one treasured instant from May 20th, 1947, cradled in the box of its four boundary lines for all eternity, is so valuable not for the narrative flesh it affords from its depths, but for the new story it has created in my and my grandmother’s joint reading of its contents. I haven’t merely looked at this photograph with my grandmother, I haven’t just pored over it. I have experienced it with her all over again. And that.
Is unquantifiable.
Allison Stadd is a junior English major concentrating in creative writing. Her passions other than writing include playing jazz drums, tap dancing and reading anything in sight.