My First Camera

The first camera I had was my Grandpa Herman’s 35mm. I’m not even sure how it landed in my hands, that’s how insignificant I thought photography would be in my life. I brought it around Europe with me during my first trip on spring break from a semester abroad studying English Literature at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. I packed it in my way too heavy gigantic backpack along with a stack of books, including Ulysses by James Joyce, that I mistakenly and perhaps delusionally, thought I’d read while staying in bunkbeds in hostels or on train rides across the continent.

As an American, my first trip abroad was like a revelation, so much history, so much beauty—the architecture, the art, buildings that were so many hundreds of years old unlike the ones in the US. Of course, these were the years that Native American history was still not taught in schools. I think I ended up taking a lot of self-portraits of my shoes, steel-toed Doc Martens (was I trying to make my life harder with all the weight I was carrying?)— over the canals of Venice, dangling over the ocean from cliff tops of Ireland, sitting in a tree in the rain in the Lake District. I remember being stunned by the stained-glass windows of Sainte-Chappelle in Paris and the amazing, coloured light that hit the floor. These were the analogue days and when I came back and had the pictures developed, I carefully put them into a photo album along with ticket stubs and other memories from the trip. It is one of the few things I still have after years of being a Buddhist nomad when I dropped most of the ballast from my earlier life. I’m so glad I kept it.

Great Uncle Aaron Sussman

The other photographic influence in my life came from my mother’s side, which I didn’t even realise was an influence until years later. My great uncle Aaron lived in New York City, we didn’t get to see him much, but when we did it was always so special. I remember dressing up and driving into the city from New Jersey. Perhaps in black patent leather Mary Janes and a dress, although that might as equally be a fantasy of my mind. He took us to the Princeton Club, where one of my first childhood food traumas originated when I mistook caviar for jam. But, regardless of the incident which made it impossible for me to eat anything that was on the same plate still to this day, I have such fond memories. I remember his warmth and his generosity. He took us to The Russian Tea Room—I remember the lush red booths and carpets, the golden ceiling and fixtures, white table clothes and the Chicken Kyiv I ordered, a breaded fillet that when you cut it open oozed golden butter from the middle. I remember looking through all the glossy books they had lying around their apartment—he was a book publisher. I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with him, but he left a lasting impression with details I remember decades later.

Adventures in Genealogy

I was always somewhat interested in genealogy, guess it is kind of a national pastime in the US, a nation of immigrants where everyone is from somewhere else. I had a childhood workbook, that I also have kept, with my newly learned cursive handwriting that filled in answers from interviews I had with my grandparents when they were still alive. It was not until about 20 years later when I was recovering from a burnout, that when I first was able to do anything at all, I started exploring my ancestry. Although not conscious of it at the time, maybe in feeling so groundless, I was seeking ground, roots. Somehow through the magic of the inter-webs, Barry Aronoff (my first cousin once removed) and I managed to find each other. He and his brother Howard, wrote an amateur genealogy of my mom’s father’s side of my family.

We Always Knew…

One of the main revelations that emerged was that I am actually Jewish. Me, the daughter of a WASP (white Anglo-Saxon protestant) priest. Although my college Jewish roommates were not surprised, “We always knew you had some Jew in you.” Turns out that on my mother’s side, both her parents have Jewish ancestry, that through the generations was suppressed and denied—either through fear or trauma or both (my great-great grandmother was in a Jewish orphan’s asylum), along with what was probably a good dose of internalised and self-directed anti-Semitism. All of this somehow resulted in my mother, who didn’t really have an idea of her Jewish ancestry, marrying a man who was to become a Christian priest and having me, who grew up thinking that hers was the epitome of a New England Protestant family. I subsequently ended up becoming a Buddhist and following a Tibetan lama around the world for about 20 years. I’m sure Freud would have a lot to say about all of this. My therapist certainly does.

Artistic Men, Strong Women

The second revelation was the artists on this side of my family. There was a family myth that my great-grandfather painted the original Greyhound bus logo. Turns out, as Barry and Howard discovered, that my great grandfather Saul Sussman was actually an artist (he listed painter as his profession on a passenger manifest to the US), and that after he immigrated from Ukraine, he opened a sign painting business in NYC.

It seems that with a family of three children, he didn’t have much time to pursue his art. But, he did leave behind a series of oil paintings that were copies of the Spanish impressionist painter, Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida’s work. It seems that my great grandmother Adele, who was said to have a lot of ‘chutzpah’, went back to Odessa alone in 1910, in the midst of mob violence against Jews, on a boat with her three children to introduce them to their grandparents (Aaron even remembers hearing gunfire while hiding in an attic in Russia as a child)! I like to think that I have some of her strength in me. Barry and Howard concluded that while my great grandmother and their children were away, that my great grandfather had some extra time on his hands… At the time, the Sussmans lived on E 149th Street in NYC. The newly established Hispanic Museum & Library was located a short distance away on Broadway and 155th Street and they had a permanent display of some of Sorolla’s works on display. Barry and Howard deducted that this was how Saul occupied himself during the year that Adele and his three children were away, by practicing his painting!

And of Course… Photography

The other revelation to emerge was that my great uncle Aaron was actually a photographer and that he would take his trusty Leica with him everywhere. He was also a writer and wrote a book called The Amateur Photographer’s Handbook and another one called The Magic of Walking before interest in walking was a “thing”. Funnily enough, most of my own photographic work is taken while out and walking.

With a Dash of Buddhism

The other connection I just discovered while writing this, which my Buddhist friends will appreciate and that completely blew my mind, is that my great uncle Aaron is the one that first published (and also wrote the introduction to) the original US edition of Alexandra David-Neel’s Magic and Mystery in Tibet in 1932.

Seeker, adventurer, pilgrim, dedicated Buddhist practitioner and scholar, she was the first European woman to ever meet the Dalai Lama in Tibet itself in 1924.

My uncle Aaron said, on receiving a letter from her thanking him for the success of the publication in America, “Coming as this does from the only European woman to have been honoured with the rank of a Lama, I doubt that any other author will be able to top this for me.”

Honouring the Unseen Links

It is said that certain things pass down through seven generations, perhaps both trauma and gifts.

My mother who spent her life working as a nurse has recently reconnected with her own talent for painting which was squashed by an unskilful art teacher in her childhood. She is now selling a lot of her own watercolour paintings. My brother is also an artist and activist living in Washington D.C.

And I am an artist/photographer, now living in Amsterdam, trying to connect a bit with my Jewish heritage, lighting Hanukkah candles in my window, just a few blocks away from Anne Frank’s house. 

All photographs thanks to the research done by Barry and Howard Aronoff.