Family Frames as Exile Photography

Abstract

This article examines five family photographs. The first of these family frames was taken in Czechoslovakia during the early 1930s and was found after the Holocaust, the one and only surviving photograph of my father’s exterminated family. The other four are family frames taken in Israel, the land of rebirth, where the survivors tried to start over from scratch, forget the past, and create a new family. All five frames are discussed as ‘exile photographs’—images of absence, alienation, and nostalgia; images of emotions like anxiety, sadness, and loneliness, all of which are inherent to the condition of exile. The article argues that the new family frames, which are supposed to represent new (personal and national) beginnings, continue to authenticate the traumatic past. Their testimony bears witness not to revival and reconstruction, but to forced exile from one’s birthplace, a devastated home and family, a condition of terminal loss.