This picture began this project a year ago last week and it still remains one of my favorite pictures of all time, though it has been joined on that roster by others in the last year.  A year ago, I touched briefly on what it is that I love so much about this picture: my grandmother’s face as she sits, barely containing her excitement, next to her older brother Arthur.  But it isn’t really just that, the fact that she was a cute kid.  It’s also the bittersweetness of her relationship with Arthur and the emotions I can see taking place behind their faces. 

My grandmother Ethel was 12 years younger than Arthur, born less than two years after the death of their brother William and this age difference governed their relationship until they were both adults.  I suspect that teenage Arthur had very little interest in playing with babies (especially girl ones) and their mother’s growing overprotectiveness in the wake of William’s death probably didn’t make it an easy or relaxed situation either.  By the time Arthur graduated from William Penn Senior High School in 1924, Ethel was only 6; at his undergraduate graduation from Johns Hopkins in 1928, she was 10.  Used to thinking of his sister as a baby, Arthur didn’t know quite how to interact with her once she reached the age of talking and thinking for herself.  Ethel, for her part, idolized Arthur, as one might expect from little girl with a much older, brilliant and handsome brother. 

This dynamic of blind adoration and a paternalism mixed with not-quite-knowing-what-to-do is perfectly manifested in a story that, for me, also helps to tell a part of the story behind this picture.  When Ethel was in elementary school and Arthur still in college in Baltimore, she one day wrote him a letter.  I’m not sure exactly how old she was, but young enough that she was quite excited to be a grown up and write her own letter to her grown up brother.  She must have done this fully under her own power, because neither mother nor father proofread the letter before it was sent.  She waited probably quite anxiously for a reply and when it came, she was shattered and mortified to see that Arthur had sent her letter back to her, corrected for spelling and grammatical errors.  I would like to say she never wrote another letter to him again, but I’m sure she probably did. 

Arthur probably never realized that doing this was not the right thing to do or that it would hurt his sister’s feelings immensely.  Indeed, I’m sure if he had, he wouldn’t have done it, or he would have done it in a more artful way.  But, as her much older and well-read brainy brother, he probably felt that it was his duty to help Ethel along, to teach her how to write a proper letter and tutor her in the ways of spelling.  Though Ethel didn’t keep that letter with its corrections, other letters Arthur sent her while she was still at home and he was in college then medical school show this same sort of formality -- though as she grew older, these letters became less awkwardly formal and more playfully so, treating her as if she was a grown up sophisticated lady.

For me, all those feelings and complexities become palpably real in this photograph: the little girl so pleased to be sitting next to her brother, yet not wanting to seem too excited; the young man humoring his parents by posing for a photograph next to the sister he doesn’t quite know what to do with. 

And then there’s also the fact that there’s a handkerchief tucked under Ethel’s watchband, while she sits next to the brother who will grow up to be an allergist because he suffers from the same allergies that made that handkerchief necessary.  That only makes the photograph that much better.

Ethel Kalisch Hoffer (1918-1991) and Arthur Cohen Kalisch (1906-1949)