![]() ![]() Great-uncle Oscar is the little boy on the floor. After he was demobbed from the British Army in 1946, my father went from London to New York to learn the business from Uncle Oscar and, presciently, Nina and Lillian saw the potential for a match. Nina and Lillian were good friends and had probably become acquainted owing to the business connections between their husbands, Oscar Evnin and Joseph Kruskal, both furriers in New York. My parents were, in fact, introduced through the joint efforts of Nina and my mother’s mother, Lillian Kruskal Oppenheimer. It was painted by Nina Evnin, the first wife of my father’s uncle, and dated 1947, the year my parents were married. On a wall in my home in Miami, there hangs this wonderful picture: This post, therefore, is something of a companion piece to this earlier one, which it intersects at one point I will indicate when we get there. As I have resumed and intensified my work on the post in the last week or so, this suspicion has been confirmed. ![]() When I began writing this post, over two years ago(!), I had a dim sense that many of these isolated fragments, these messengers, some material and others lodged only in my memory, were connected with the world of Russian Jewish émigrés in New York (often via London, Paris, and Berlin). I wish I had paid more attention as a child. Now, as I try to comprehend some of those worlds, I am frequently baffled, their inhabitants hovering just beyond my grasp. They were messengers from the worlds that made me, messengers that I heeded far too little. As I proceed with my work on A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!, I find myself thinking not infrequently “I wish I had paid more attention as a child.” I am time and again led right up to the edge of my recollection of people, events, and objects that populated my childhood, each carrying so much, not just of their own histories, but of my history. ![]()
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