24
Another memory, or perhaps less a memory than something vestigial, now pulled from the ruins of my childhood. Just as I can feel Mrs. Kushner’s hand on my shoulder, just as I can see my mother’s profile illuminated by the lights of the George Washington Bridge, so another moment comes to me whole: I am three years old, and my mother has brought me from our New Jersey home into New York City, where the well-known children’s photographer Josef Schneider is going to take my portrait. It isn’t the first time I’ve been in front of Schneider’s lens, though it is the first time I have any recollection of it. My mother knows him from back when she worked in advertising, before she married my father. His background as a child psychologist makes him uniquely suited to photographing young children. He is adept at eliciting certain moods and expressions from them, and—if all else fails—he bribes them with candy.
Snap! Schneider makes faces at me. He thinks I don’t know that he’s holding a button in his fist that is making the shutter snap. Snap! My mother must be close by, watching. I’ve just looked it up, and Schneider’s studio was on West Fifty-seventh Street. There may be faint city sounds from the busy street below. The sigh of buses, the wail of sirens, honking horns. Smile, Dani! Over here, Dani! Something tells me that this is important to my mother. That I had better perform, and perform well. That’s right, Dani! She would have pronounced my name, as she always did, as if it were slightly foreign and exotic, drawing out the a. Daaah-ni.
I have very few memories of my early life, but this—the shutter, the button in the photographer’s fist, the sound of my mother calling my name—is one of them. Schneider wasn’t just a portrait photographer. He had been responsible for discovering the babies who were in the commercials and ads for everything from Ivory Snow to Pampers. He recruited babies and children from everywhere: agents, managers, proud mothers, even hospitals. I recently dug up a profile of him in a 1977 issue of People. “You’re lucky if you get one good baby out of fifteen,” he sighed to the reporter. “A kid is as individual as a thumbprint.”
The portrait from that day’s shoot became the holiday poster—the Christmas poster—for Kodak that winter. In it, I am set against a pitch-black background, and wearing a black pinafore over a puffy-sleeved white blouse. The pinafore is decorated with a deep red poppy. My hair is cut into Dutch boy bangs, and I am playing with a wooden train that carries a half dozen red and green wooden elves. I appear solemn, quizzical, as I focus on a point just above the camera’s lens.
The way my mother always told the story, the Kodak people—clients of Schneider’s—just happened to be visiting his studio shortly after he had taken my portrait, and had asked if it might be possible to use my image on the poster for their national campaign. My parents agreed, and that winter a massive Colorama billboard dominated the main terminal concourse of Grand Central Terminal. A poster hung on a wall at F.A.O. Schwarz for years. Ads were spotted by family and friends all over America.
As I recall, it was a source of great merriment in our home: the fact that an Orthodox child was out there wishing the entire nation a very Merry Christmas. Such a hilarious accident! My mother loved to tell it: she had brought me to the city for a commissioned portrait and, instead, the executives at Kodak had discovered me. A framed version of the poster had a place of pride in the living room of my childhood home, where anyone visiting would be sure to see it. Beneath my quizzical face is a whimsical illustration of a couple being pulled through a snow-covered field on a horse-drawn sleigh.
Confirmation bias—a psychological term I had never heard before but one with which I will become intimately familiar—is the process by which the mind seeks to confirm what it already believes. When in the throes of confirmation bias, we seek and interpret information that will allow us to continue to hold on to our beliefs, even when presented with contradictory evidence.
You aren’t Jewish, Mark Strand had flatly said.
We could have used you in the ghetto. Mrs. Kushner ran her hand through my hair.
Raised kosher, I replied more times than I can count. Went to a yeshiva. Spoke fluent Hebrew. And when faced with the bemusement, the disbelief: I know. It’s crazy. I mean, I was the Kodak Christmas poster child.
Once back home in Connecticut, one afternoon Michael stood for a long time staring at the Christmas poster, which now hangs in Jacob’s bathroom.
“This was shot as a Christmas ad,” he finally said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re playing with red and green elves,” Michael said. “Look at them.”
I stood next to him, examining the photograph of me that had been a part of my life’s narrative for as long as I could remember, and for the first time registered the truth of what I was seeing. It was unmistakable. The elves’ red and green hats were shaped like Christmas trees. The colors of the portrait were Christmas colors, down to the black and red dress I wore. It was not a portrait commissioned by a Jewish mother from New Jersey. It was a portrait deliberately shot as a Christmas ad.
“Are there any other pictures of you wearing that dress?” Michael asked.
No. No, there were not.
Perhaps Josef Schneider called my mother to suggest she bring me in to audition for the Kodak ad. Or it is also quite possible that my mother proffered me herself. She had disdain for stage mothers, so never could have admitted to such a thing. But given the opportunity, she could not have resisted the lure, the temptation of the spotlight. Her daughter, her hard-won daughter, her only child—so surprisingly pretty, so shockingly fair—beheld as the classic, iconic American child. As she returned home from the city, her mind must have worked overtime to fashion a series of lies my father would believe. My mother was quite convincing when she had set her sights on something she wanted badly. “Paul, you’ll never believe what happened! The Kodak people want to put Dani on their holiday poster! Wouldn’t that be so funny?”
Her unsteady gaze, her wide, practiced smile. Her self-consciousness, the way every word seemed rehearsed. His stooped shoulders, the downward turn of his mouth. The way he was never quite present. Her rage. His sorrow. Her brittleness. His fragility. Their screaming fights. The harsh exchange of whispers behind their closed bedroom door. As a child—not much older than I was when I played with the elves and the red and green train—I pressed my ear to that door. I strained to listen. Your parents had to know, Wendy Kramer said. Your mother had to know. My mother is buried in a cemetery near the Jersey shore. My father’s bones lie in the Shapiro family plot in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. And I am straining to listen now.