On Wednesday of last week, I had planned to go to the Bronx Zoo with a friend of mine, but while we were in the car, it started raining pretty hard, so we decided to go to a place I had never been to before: Brooklyn. I don't know if you have ever been to Brooklyn, but it is one of those places where everything is a hidden treasure. The place is covered in graffiti and murals. On the outside, it looks rough and like a place I would never go to, but as we shopped around, I knew this was a place I would be visiting again soon.
Our first stop was a vintage shop. From the outside, it looks pretty small and the area seems somewhat sketchy. Immediately my friend and I catch sight of the cameras. I've been looking for a brownie box camera for a while, so I look thoroughly.
After giving the shop a good walk through, I made my way back to the cameras. The other side of the shelf, an undiscovered area by myself with little room to move, I had found a brownie box camera. The price tag read 20 dollars, which for a brownie isn't bad. Normally being 40 or 50 dollars, I was psyched!
Of course, we wanted to make sure we didn't miss anything good, so we kept looking through the shelves. Amongst the usual things one finds in a vintage shop, we found photo albums and postcards and letters. I was surprised by the letters. There were so many. As I looked through the names of the people they were addressed too, I noticed they were all for the same person. The mass of letters I found in a shop was unusual, let alone them all being for the same person. What does one do when they come across this unique find? They buy letters.
As we were reading them on the way home after a long day in Brooklyn, a thought to write about them maybe in a series, crossed my mind. I thought I would start with an open letter to the man to whom these letters were addressed to. A man named Eliezer.
Dear Eliezer,
Last week, I came across a few of your letters, ones I assume you saved from your family and friends since I found quite a few of them in a pile. I know you won't ever see this, but I am interested in your story. Why? You are just a Brown University student who happened to be in the army that no history text book has ever heard of. I don't know how your story starts or begins, since I only have about half a year of letters written to you, but I want to find out more about you. Your letters give us a passage of what it was like to live as a Jewish manin the second half of 1943.
Little did you know that the war was only half way through when you received these letters and that it would be called the second world war. Little do I know if your brother got married on the 7th of November that year with or without your father's permission as your aunt had written about. Did your father move out of her apartment? Did he attend the wedding? Were you sent over seas to fight for our country, I wonder as we are currently on the verge of the third world war breaking out? When DID you graduate? Do you think the people receiving your replies saved your letters, just as you did theirs?
So many questions circling my mind. I know readers will probably think 'you didn't even finish reading all of them yet?', but I know that as I read them and sort them into chronological order, some of my questions will be answered and more will pop up. As I continue to sort out your life in 1943, and as I ask myself all these questions with only the distant thought of getting answers, two always come back to me. Are your relatives still in Brooklyn and the Bronx? Where did you go after Brown University?
If you could see the world as it is now, coming as far as we did, what would you say? What do you think your relatives think of it? It is useless to ask you these questions, because I know that if you were still alive, which is highly unlikely (and I will get to why I think that way), you would be in your early nineties and probably don't use a computer. The reason I think it is unlikely that you have are alive, is that you must have saved these letters for a long time if they were all together in one spot. On the way home, we theorized how your letters ended up for sale in Brooklyn.
The most logical reason was that a relative must have had these or you had them and passed away. When the person who was in possession of these letters passed, no one knew about these letters and just gave boxes of old things to an auction. Personally, as someone who loves history and reading primary sources written by people who lived in the time period, it is beyond me why anyone would get rid of these letters.
Within the past week, I have been thinking of what to I would do with these letters in the future. Part of me wants to save them for reading purposes in the future, but most of me wants to return them to your relatives someday. Why is it that I feel sort of guilty knowing that I have ownership of letters that have nothing to do with me? All I did was buy them in a shop. Your relatives and friends wrote them, so it is only fair that your family has them.
Eliezer, I hope you don't mind that I am reading these letters and me hanging onto them a little while longer before doing research on how I can get them to your family. Wherever you are, I want you to know that your letters are safe with me. As you can tell, it is important to me to document the present, as you don't know who will being reading them as documents of the past in the future.
All the Best,
Tatiana Mehos
