I’m not exactly sure which section this belongs in but, since it has to do with a photograph, I’m putting it in this one.

The first time I encountered my “double” he was hanging on the wall of a Bronx nursing home. It was about forty or so years ago, and I had done a favor for a friend who had asked me to take his wife and daughter to visit his wife’s mother there. I had been to this home before for other reasons, and was well aware that it was one of the best in the city. It had a caring staff, was beautiful and very well kept, was sited in a picturesque location, and boasted a world class art collection, complete with Picassos and Ertes. My then pre-teen daughter also came along.

As soon as we entered the old lady’s room … she was probably younger than I am now … she took a look at me and said something to the effect of “You’re the man from the picture.” An aid who was attending her agreed and explained that the home had a temporary photo exhibit in its gallery that was based on New York City at the turn of the century, and I apparently resembled someone in one of those photos. So I went with my daughter and the other girl to have a look see.

Sure enough, he did look like me, and my daughter and my friend’s daughter also saw the strong resemblance, as did some passers by. So now, of course, I was curious. Could this have been some remote ancestor of whom I had never known? The picture shows a hatted shabbily dressed man with a bit of gray in his beard standing behind one of those iconic lower east side pushcarts. Behind him is a store with the words “Kosher Butcher” painted in Hebrew characters on the window, and a couple of better dressed men standing nearby having a conversation of some kind. “T. Aronson,” the store owner’s name, is also on the window, as is the building number, 237, with no street name.

All this gave plenty of information, and I could pretty well bet that the picture would have been taken somewhere between around 1890 to about 1910. My grandfather was born in 1870 and died in 1959, when I was almost seventeen. I saw him a lot and knew him very well, and this was definitely not a younger version of him. Moreover, he was not an immigrant. He was born in the same neighborhood in Brooklyn as I was, and as he was a seaman for most of his life, he would never have been standing behind a pushcart.

I tried contacting the home’s art curator, but she was not very cooperative. All she would tell me was that they got the posters from some stock company whose name she could not recall, and otherwise seemed to have no particular interest in satisfying my curiosity.

About fifteen years later, my wife’s cousin died. My wife was, by far, the youngest in her family and had first cousins who were older than my mother. When I first met them I actually thought they were her uncles and aunts. Anyway, this particular cousin was an eminent artist who had been the head scenic designer for Orson Welles' Mercury Theater. One of the speakers at his well attended funeral was the curator of The Museum of the City of New York, with whom he had some strong connections. When I met her at a gathering after the services, she looked at me and very quickly said that I strongly resembled a man in one of the photos in an exhibit the museum was showing. I described the photo I had seen so many years earlier and she said that that seemed to be it. So my daughter and I walked the few blocks to the museum and sure enough, it was the same one. The museum was having an exhibit about New York’s Lower East Side - circa 1890-1910, the very span of years I had estimated when I first encountered that poster.

She gave me the name of a company in Cleveland from which she rented the photo and I contacted them, describing it in as much detail as I could. After paying them a nominal shipping fee, they sent me a batch of possible copies based on my loose description, one of which was correct. Long story short, after all was said and done, they told me the original was held by The New York Public Library, and gave me the number of the person to contact. It turned out that the picture was held in a special repository building the library owned, rather than in the main branch. So I called and made arrangements to go there and, perhaps, come face to face with my possible antecedent. I have to say, by the way, that by this time the picture had acquired a little fame of its own, as it was now featured on a special version of the NYC Metrocard, which the city had just begun to use to as entrance on our public transportation.

The day I went to the repository I purposely wore a peaked “newsboy” cap that was the closest thing I had to what the gentleman in the photo wore. Then it happened again. As soon as I entered the office they took one look at me and declared that they knew why I was there and immediately brought the photo out. No hesitation. They just brought out the one. The moment had arrived.

It was protected by a sealed plastic sleeve transparent at the front, and was larger than I expected it to be: maybe sixteen by twenty inches. They gave me a pair of gloves and admonished me to handle the photo gently, as it was old, and therefore quite fragile. I gently removed it from the sleeve and as I gazed at it, I kept seeing myself in this guy’s place. As it happens, my mother’s sister is buried immediately across a small cemetery path from a man who died the very day I was born and, when I first accidentally came across his marker, I sort of felt as if I must have replaced him in this world. Now it was déjà vu all over again.

I turned the photo over and there was a penciled inscription on the back. It was written by a woman and dated in 1936 who said that she believed that this was her grandfather who was a hot potato peddler on Ludlow Street on New York’s lower east side. She also thought that the photo might have been taken around 1895. She wrote his name at the end of her little essay and, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, I saw that he had my surname. This, as they used to say, really blew my socks off.

Now I’m not going to give my last name on any kind of open forum, including this one. Sorry. But I’m paranoid about that. But I will say that it’s a fairly long multi syllabic Russian Jewish name that sounds very exotic to the ears of most people I’ve encountered over the years as I traveled around the United States. In New York, however, it’s reasonably common … not like Smith or Brown … but common enough that when I was in school several other non related kids also had it.

I was pretty sure that this guy was not an ancestor. I had seen pictures of just about all of them from all the way back to the mid 1800's. The woman who inscribed the back of the photo was probably long gone … remember, it was dated 1936 … although I did make a weak attempt at trying to locate her. Remember, this was in the days before Facebook or Google. The only reasonable conclusion I could come up with was that this person and I shared some common ancestor who went even further back than he did, and we both inherited some particular genetic traits from him or her.

It cost me twenty five bucks to have the library contact whomever they got that photo from, at which time I learned the the original negative still existed. So I had them make a print for me for another thirty five dollars, and it now hangs proudly in my apartment. Eventually the picture wound up in two different books about my city, aa well as in a PBS documentary. It’s too bad this “maybe” relative of mine never knew that a century after he sold those hot potatoes, or whatever was in that cart over there on Ludlow Street, his image, swiped from the one second of his life it would have taken an 1895 camera to get said image, would live on, at least in the mind of a person born nearly fifty years after that moment he stood there. And now he's in your minds as well ... at least for a now.