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understand this.
    I’ve seen a few photos of him when he was a child. One I remember hanging in a frame with other photos—he was a child and someone was holding him; a man, possibly his stepfather, was standing with his mother and siblings in front of a house and landscape. He had a serious face but a tree trunk had aligned just perfectly behind him so it looked like it was growing straight out of his head. My sister and I used to look at this and laugh about it. I’d lookclosely at this small black-and-white photo, sad and stiff, but laugh at it.
    One photo I own—it is a new and glossy reprint of a photo and I’m not sure how I came to have it. Probably I stole it from a photo album at some point. Dad’s family is all clustered around his father’s fresh grave. They must be in Germany, at the camp where Dad was born. His oldest sister is standing, looking down at the grave, next to a wooden cross at the head of the grave, a small photo of his father’s face nailed to the center. His two brothers kneel at the foot of the grave, looking with sad, small faces at whoever was taking the photo. Worn faces, especially for children. His other sister, next to them, is looking into the camera, brows knitted, hands pressed in prayer. She looks serious and intelligent. And then, in the middle, his mother, kneeling in black, holding Dad. His mother looks directly into the camera, chin down, mouth open a little as if she was just saying something. She is pretty and tough, with high, wide cheekbones like mine. Dad is just a baby, wrapped all in black. He is looking somewhere else entirely. His face is neutral. Pudgy cheeks bulging downward. He is the only one there who doesn’t understand.
    The background is just gray, vague hills. Ghostly gray blankness. I keep the photo facedown in a folder with the letters he has written to me. It confronts me. Who would have taken this photo of a family in their most private and serious moment of grief, not posing but mourning next to their father’s grave? And is this what I am doing now in writing about my family?
    My dad’s father’s name was Kazimierz and he was a farmer, famous for breaking horses in the river Strypa. His parents were killed in Poland in 1941. Before he died he received news that his four brothers had been executed for treason. He died from a heart attack on his thirty-sixth birthday in March, 1948, when my dad was two years old.
    Aren’t we together on this, Dad, together on missing our dads, and what it has done to you and me? You left an unknowable self behind, with us, your cover story, your dupes, and I kept following. And I’m still following, somehow more than ever, in love with this trouble, this difficult family, in love with my troubled mom and sister and you too, maybe most of all you, the unknowable one.

9
    F rom the window of the cab our beachfront hotel approached like a dream, as wrong as a dream, and I felt sickly overwhelmed with the luxury of the fantastic palm trees and clean arched doorways. This could not be right. I hung my mouth open a while in joy and suspicion as we left the cab, for him to see. He made a goofy roundabout pointing sweep to the door and said “Lezz go,” goofily, like he did. Thinking about it now, the hotel was probably nothing special, maybe even cheap, but I couldn’t have known.
    This was the longest period of time we spent alone together as father and daughter. I was nine or ten and he’d brought me to Cancun, an unlikely place to take a child on a summer vacation for no particular reason. He had a habit of taking vacations with just me or just my sister, never both of us together, and never with Mom, even when they were married.I imagine we never went anywhere all together as a family because Mom and Dad usually hated each other, but I didn’t get why my sister and I couldn’t go somewhere together. Now, reasoning it out, I run through a spectrum of guesses: on the practical end, there is cost and scheduling