Dear Asher, Caleb, Luke, Lola, Ella, Oliver, Talia:
These are pictures of your great-great-great-grandparents, Leib or Louis Hessel and Tsina Voloshen Hessel. They are the parents of Eta or Yetta Hessel, who married Isaiah Pearlman, your great-great grandfather, in StaryConstantine, Ukraine, sometime around 1895. I knew Eta, who died in 1962 when I was in my early 'twenties, although our conversations were limited because we did not share a common language. According to my father, these pictures are copies of drawings executed by an itinerant Ukrainian artist. Drawn when? Perhaps 1870 or thereabouts.
I don't know much about these people. I have no idea what they did for a living or how long they lived. I see some family resemblance in Leib's small black eyes and abbreviated eyebrows, but otherwise, not much. What sort of hat is he wearing? Is Tsina wearing the wig of the orthodox or is that her real hair?
He looks mild. She looks determined.
I know that my grandmother Eta had a number of siblings. In my father's handwriting, I have a document that hints of two of them: a brother, Morris Hessel, who married Mary Greenberg and had a son, Paul and a grandson Merel; and then a sister Malka, who married one Joseph Cohen and had a son, Saris, who was a high school principal in New York, and had a son Peter Cohen, a physician based in Denver. I wonder why my father kept so aloof from his aunts and uncles and cousins? Was there a story? They were not at all a part of our life. No visits, no family celebrations, nothing.
I once met my father's "Aunt Mary," who sold tickets at the Kent Theater on Coney Island Avenue. it must have been the only time I went to a movie with my father; he said, "This is my Aunt Mary." I was perhaps 8 years old, and uncurious. That's the end of the story. I wish I had more to tell you.
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