A PHOTO OF BORIS — Summary

There is no Boris in the family tree.

I found the photo in a box in a closet. On the back, in Nana’s scrawl, the one word: “Boris.”

A little boy, perhaps two years old, standing on the seat of a chair against a drapery. His hair was parted and neat. He wore a dark jacket and pants, sturdy shoes.

They’d put a hoop around his neck. In one hand, he held a stick like the ones big boys used to turn a hoop along a road. His expression was puzzled, alarmed: Why do they want me standing here, with a hoop around my neck?

So many photos in the box: People from the Old Country around a table. People haying on the farm in East Germany., A uniformed man—maybe the cousin who went down with his ship in 1945. Onkel Herman, Onkel Hans’s wife, Pa and Frieda.

And Boris.

I tossed the unlabeled ones. A kind of sacrilege, but they pile up, those anonymous people, in their grainy imaginary places.

But I could not cast Boris. away. What was he doing there, with Paulina and August and Wanda, Great-grandfather Joseph, Tante Helen, and Nana herself, stout in her printed dress, standing with the nameless Sunday School teachers in front of the Cleveland Lutheran Church.