The Thing on the Wall:

In my parents’ apartment (my apartment too for the time being) there is a room rather unjustifiably called”the gallery”. A couple steps down from the living room, it contains a horizontal file, some shelves, and two closets. When we don’t mind blocking off one of the closets, it has at various time contained a stationary bike, a small trampoline, and the occasional Christmas tree.

There is a thing hanging on the wall above the horizontal file. Evidently it’s a piece of art, and I suppose it must be a painting, although it looks very different from any other painting I’ve ever seen. First, it’s divided up like a comic book into two dozen square sections, each displaying a different scene, presumably in sequential order. Secondly, the thing is enormous, especially for a painting. It’s nearly four feet wide; if we took it down and laid it out flat it would be noticeably bigger than the dining room table. Each ‘‘panel’’ is captioned by a line of text in an unfamiliar language using unknown symbols. Neither my parents nor I know exactly what they say.

I make the painting sound interesting and mysterious, but for me it was always just part of life. To the extent I thought about it at all, I assumed it was written in Hebrew. My family is largely agnostic now, but a couple generations back were were Jewish. That it was a holdover from those days, like the dusty and unused menorah in the back of the linen closet, did not seem unlikely. More often I didn’t think about it at all. I looked past it, in the way we look past things we see every day. Still, it was the first thing I thought of when I was asked if I had an object that “reflected my family’s immigrant history.”

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As it turns out, the writing on the painting is not in Hebrew but Ethiopian. This is not surprising, since it apparently comes from Ethiopia. My great-grandfather Harold “Geep” Courlander was stationed there during World War II, working as a journalist  for the United States Intelligence Agency. Geep loved the folk tales and legends of other cultures; so much so, in fact, that he later published a book of Ethiopian folktales. It’s not hard to see why he would have been attracted to the painting, which I have learned depicts the legend of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

Precisely where Geep bought the painting is unknown, although my grandmother hinted that he might not have been its first owner. Regardless of where he bought it, he brought it with him when he returned to the United States at the end of the war. When he divorced his wife (my great-grandmother) years later, she kept the painting, and, in the fullness of time, passed it down to my grandmother, Erika “Ricky” Courlander. When Geep died, he bequeathed the rest his art collection to Ricky, who, now owning entirely too many paintings, decided to gift this particular one to my father. It still belongs to him today, hanging in our ‘gallery’ above the horizontal file. It’s entirely possible that it will be passed  on to me someday. If it is, I suppose I’ll do my best to treat it with the respect deserved by a piece of my family legacy, assuming I can find a large enough wall to hang it on.