We are both dark-skinned, with big brown eyes, two Jewish children in 1960 posing as Dutch children in a country still suffering the devastating after effects of World War II.  We are in Rotterdam, a bombed out city, and one trying to rebuild itself from the ashes of the war.   My father seemed to be trying to recover his lost childhood by returning to Europe and seek the sensations, the smells, the food, the images, he left behind.           Was this photo a way for him to play out a fantasy of belonging?  Instead of being the fearful refugee child, he could have us pose as traditional Dutch children who belonged to their culture, their language, their history.  My brother and I became these posed characters in an alien setting, like my father, trying to find our place in the world.

Since Rotterdam had been so heavily bombed, everything seemed new and in a way it was.  They built new malls, new shops, new housing, new gardens, and new parks.  Holland smelled of rain, either impending, or finished.    It was gray and rainy, but in many ways a sanctuary for my family, and for us, from grimy, industrial Newark, New Jersey.  Here, we could feed ducks in ponds, drink cups of hot chocolate, and it always sparkled.  Flowers were everywhere: tulips or geraniums.  We didn't have to worry about crime or race riots or what neighborhood we found ourselves in.  In that photo, my brother and I could pretend we were Dutch, forget about feeling different, and our history of fleeing Jews and relatives killed in concentration camps. 

 It was in Holland I discovered A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh since it was the only English language book in the Dutch library.  I must have read that book a hundred times and almost memorized it.  I was so hungry for print in English, and while I was fascinated by the guttural sounds of  Dutch, I could not understand or read it.  Language seemed to be my home, no matter where I was, even at nine. 

I did not belong to New Jersey, either.  I yearned to be like my Christian friends who celebrated Xmas, got presents; ice skated gracefully in the park.  My name was different, I looked different, and desperately wanted to be blonde and mainstream.

 I look at that photo, now, and I recognize that my brother and I don't belong in that photo as we stare at the camera, though it has become a memory of the two of us.

We don't have many photos of us together.  I don't remember much of our early relationship.  I don't know what we did that day, or what we said to one another, or how we felt dressed up in a strange outfit.  I do know that we inherited from our father, who never seemed to find it, the trait of constantly looking for our place.