Displaced and Dreaming: The Lure of the Motorcycle and the Briefcase

Inquiring into the past through family photographs and personal narrative connects us to larger histories—even if we don't have answers to those inquiries. In this essay, I analyze photos of my parents taken immediately after the Holocaust while living as Displaced Persons camps and showing each with an object or "attribute" that hints at their dreams and aspirations. These photos remember them the way they saw themselves at a moment of renewal and suggests that Jews in the Displaced Persons camps in postwar Germany lived in a kind of suspended space between their former vanished lives and the uncertain futures that lay ahead, leaving them free to invent a new sense of self.