This post is something of an outlier, in that it concerns a member of my family. But it’s also an interesting story about a kind of cultural citizenship: a long-hidden act of witness. And it fits right in with a theme I’ve pursued (unconsciously it seems, yet it’s a clear red threat) in various essays going back thirty years: the theme of secular resurrection. By that I mean discovering significance in the lives of forgotten people.
Like the May 18th post “Blue Ghost,” about a Civil War soldier whose letters unexpectedly came to speak of pain and suffering across the centuries, this one concerns something special – a collection of photographs – that was hidden for generations. If anything, this cache is more extraordinary than the letters, which are unremarkable in themselves. The story also relates to my April post about Jack Gorelik, an ordinary man whose life added up to a kind of super-citizenship.
Richard J. Scheuer – my uncle Dick – was born in New York in 1917, the eldest of four brothers (including my father) and a sister, and died in 2008. I remember him very fondly. He was a gentle, somewhat shy, thoughtful man who managed to excuse my shortcomings as a nephew. He was someone who seemed to me to have missed his calling, working in a family business rather than following his passion for Biblical archeology, although he devoted a fair amount of time to that as well. I also knew him to be an amateur photographer – but I don’t remember seeing the results.
Photography is where this story gets interesting. Some years after Dick’s death, it came to light that as a sixteen or seventeen-year-old, he had traveled with my grandfather to Europe. They went to France, where our family has distant relatives, and also to Poland. Their exact itinerary, whom they met, and to what extent the father and son traveled together, is unknown.
But after Dick’s death, his family discovered a set of negatives of photographs Dick had taken on the trip. Not just forgotten photographs lying in a drawer: they had never even been developed – or if they were, the prints were lost or destroyed. It’s painful to think that Dick probably never even saw these photographs, because they are fascinating portraits of, among other things, the Warsaw Ghetto.
In 2023, the photos of pre-war Poland were exhibited under the title “Street Visions” at the Hebrew Union College in New York; a book is in the making that will also display them. Seeing them, one senses an acute photographic eye – as well as historical resonance.
Dick went on to attend Harvard, where I’m told he struggled, and then the US Army, where he didn’t, serving in Italy during World War II and rising to the rank of captain. According to my father, that was a role in which he thrived. Later, he became an accomplished sailor.
But it’s hard to look at these photos and not feel sadness that their author never pursued his obvious talent – family pressures may have played a major role; at the same time, their rediscovery and publication, some ninety years after they were taken, is something of a miracle, and a posthumous tribute to a man who lived quietly but did great things. It’s something to shoot for.