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WORK TITLE: Twenty-Six Seconds
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1969
WEBSITE: https://alexandrazapruder.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://alexandrazapruder.com/bio-1/ * http://www.star-telegram.com/entertainment/books/article113665099.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2002044705
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2002044705
HEADING: Zapruder, Alexandra
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670 __ |a Salvaged pages, c2002: |b t.p. (Alexandra Zapruder)
PERSONAL
Born 1969.
EDUCATION:Received degree from Smith College. Harvard University, M.Ed., 1995.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author and researcher. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, co-founder.
AWARDS:Jewish Image Award, National Foundation for Jewish Culture, for I’m Still Here; National Jewish Book Award, for Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust.
WRITINGS
The book, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, was adapted into film (I’m Still Here) by Alexandra Zapruder and released by MTV, 2005.
SIDELIGHTS
Alexander Zapruder has made a name for herself through her contributions to Jewish history and culture. She is affiliated with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for which she is both a researcher and co-founder. Most of her exhibits for the museum cater to helping children better understand the events of the Holocaust. Alongside her work with the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Zapruder also devotes her time to education and teaching, and helps to develop curriculum to help teachers better convey Jewish history to their students. In addition to her museum-based work, Zapruder has also penned books and film-based works. She was at the helm of the film, I’m Still Here, a documentary adapted from one of her books, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust. Her work has garnered several awards, such as the Jewish Image Award and National Jewish Book Award.
Salvaged Pages
Salvaged Pages is Zapruder’s first published work, and serves as an grouping of diary entries that both document the events of the Holocaust and were all written by children living during its events. Each letter was brought forth to Zapruder’s collection through careful investigation, and is given an introduction by Zapruder for the sake of imparting more about each child’s backstory and circumstances as related to the period. Every writer featured in the book offers a different perspective on the horrors unfolding around them, in turn providing a wider picture of society’s varying attitudes toward the Holocaust as it happened.
“These writings will certainly impress themselves on the memories of all readers,” commented one Publishers Weekly reviewer. Booklist contributor Hazel Rochman wrote: “The young voices make this a must for the high-school Holocaust curriculum.”
Twenty-Six Seconds
Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film is written by Zapruder from a more personal perspective. The book centers on Zapruder’s own family history and close ties to the Kennedy assassination. Zapruder’s grandfather, Abraham, was able to capture clear footage of the Kennedy assassination on that fateful day in Dallas, sending Abraham Zapruder’s name hurtling ever forward through history for his contribution to one of history’s most tragic archives. Zapruder tracks the history of her family and their societal perceptions from that moment forward, as well as how it personally impacted her grandfather. Abraham Zapruder initially settled in Dallas to build a better life for his family. His capturing of JFK’s assassination came about entirely by a strange and unfortunate twist of fate. Abraham was concerned with the footage from the moment he realized what he had filmed, especially in terms of what those in possession of it would do with it. He ultimately decided to donate his recording in exchange for a cash payment of several hundred thousand dollars. This decision came after an extensive period of journalistic heckling, as outlets all over the country wanted to take Abraham’s footage. LIFE took ownership of the clip for several decades, only to decide to return it. The family kept it for a number of years before surrendering it to the government’s historical records. Zapruder devotes most of the book’s contents to how this small clip so heavily impacted her family as it grew into what it is today. Zapruder also chronicles public perceptions of her family, who have been portrayed in the past as using the horrendous death of the president for their own gain, as well as the general historical legacy left behind in the wake of Abraham’s accidental work.
In an issue of Library Journal, Karl Helicher remarked that Twenty-Six Seconds “provides new perspectives of the film’s role in assassination debates.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the book “an intriguing history of one of the most significant home movies ever recorded.” A reviewer in Publishers Weekly felt that the book is a “well-written exploration of conspiracy, propriety, copyright, and public good versus private gain.” John Henry, a writer in the Star Telegram Online stated: “Author Alexandra Zapruder brings to the market unconventional produce in the genre of biography, the art in literature reserved for the life and times of the living, past and present.” Washington Post Online contributor Joyce Carol Oates wrote: “Alexandra Zapruder writes with passion and clarity about the vicissitudes of bearing a famous name without having been involved with its celebrity or notoriety.” She also called the book ” a meticulous record … of the history of the actual, perishable film.” On the SF Gate website, Kevin Canfield remarked: “Zapruder’s book is at its most moving when she considers her grandfather’s unintended, often painful status as “the quintessential eyewitness” of the postwar era.” New York Times writer Alessandra Stanley expressed that “Zapruder is a gifted writer and storyteller who delicately unravels a minor mystery … that she makes human, complex and quite interesting.” In his review on the USA Today Online, Matt Damsker called Twenty-Six Seconds an “absorbing, deeply researched book.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 1, 2002, Hazel Rochman, review of Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, p. 1295; September 15, 2013, Edie Ching, review of Anne Frank, p. 61.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2016, review of Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film.
Library Journal, October 15, 2016, Karl Helicher, review of Twenty-Six Seconds, p. 95.
Publishers Weekly, April 1, 2002, review of Salvaged Pages, p. 71; September 12, 2016, review of Twenty-Six Seconds, p. 48.
ONLINE
Alexandra Zapruder Website, https://alexandrazapruder.com (July 7, 2017), author profile.
Dallas Morning News, https://www.dallasnews.com/ (November 17, 2016), Michael Granberry, “Zapruder granddaughter reveals how 26 seconds of film changed a family’s history after JFK assassination.”
Hachette Speakers Bureau, http://www.hachettespeakersbureau.com/ (July 7, 2017), author profile.
New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/ (December 2, 2016), Alessandra Stanley, “Two New Books Shed Light on the Kennedy Mystique,” review of Twenty-Six Seconds.
NPR, http://www.npr.org/ (November 21, 2016), David Greene, “Zapruder’s Book Examines Her Grandfather’s Filming Of JFK Assassination,” author interview.
SF Gate, http://www.sfgate.com/ (November 10, 2016), Kevin Canfield, review of Twenty-Six Seconds.
Star Telegram, http://www.star-telegram.com/ (November 9, 2016 ), John Henry, “Alexandra Zapruder puts ‘Twenty-Six Seconds’ in perspective,” review of Twenty-Six Seconds.
United States Holocaust Museum, https://www.ushmm.org/ (March 27, 2008), Daniel Greene, author interview.
USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com (November 19, 2016), Matt Damsker, “New book ‘Twenty-Six Seconds’ details how famed Zapruder film haunts family,” review of Twenty-Six Seconds.
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (November 17, 2016), Joyce Carol Oates, “Twenty-six seconds of the JFK assassination — and a lifetime of family anguish,” review of Twenty-Six Seconds.*
Alexandra Zapruder began her career as a member of the founding staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. A graduate of Smith College, she served as the researcher for the museum’s exhibition for young visitors, Remember The Children, Daniel’s Story. She earned her Master’s Degree in Education at Harvard University in 1995 and returned to the Holocaust Museum in 1996.
Her first book, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, (Yale University Press, 2002) won the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category. She wrote and co-produced I’m Still Here, a documentary film for young audiences based on her book, which aired on MTV in May 2005. The film was awarded the Jewish Image Award for Best Television Special by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture and was nominated for two Emmy awards.
In the fall of 2015, she completed a second paperback edition and a multimedia edition of Salvaged Pages, and worked with the educational nonprofit Facing History and Ourselves to develop interdisciplinary educational materials for the book designed for middle and high school teachers. Over the past fifteen years, she has crisscrossed the country and traveled abroad to speak about Salvaged Pages to teachers, students and the general public.
She is the author of Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film, which tells the story of her grandfather’s home movie of President Kennedy’s assassination (Twelve Books, November 2016.)
Zapruder granddaughter reveals how 26 seconds of film changed a family's history after JFK assassination
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On Nov. 22, 1963, Abraham Zapruder stood on a concrete abutment on what is now known as the grassy knoll and, with his Bell & Howell camera, filmed what may be the 26 most momentous seconds in cinematic history.
His 8mm home movie offers a chilling, live-action record of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Elm Street in Dallas.
Initially, it offered an investigative road map for the Warren Commission, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted as a lone assassin; in later years, it triggered a tsunami of conspiracy theories that suggest the opposite.
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But what no one really knew — until now — is the impact Zapruder's film had on his own family.
In this 2000 file photograph, Jeff West (left), executive director of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, and archivist Gary Mack look at 4 x 5 transparencies of the Zapruder family film. The materials received by the museum include a first-generation copy of the film (the only one in private hands), two sets of color transparencies and color glossy prints of each frame of the film. (Mona Reeder/The Dallas Morning News)
Next
With her riveting new memoir, Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film, granddaughter Alexandra Zapruder offers, as the subtitle says, "A personal history of the Zapruder film."
"It's a fascinating story, and I'm a writer and storyteller. That's the main reason," she says, for writing Twenty-Six Seconds, which yielded a deeper motive: Despite being a Zapruder, she did not grow up "with a clear understanding or knowledge of the history of the film or the relationship of the film to our family."
So, like a detective exploring an emotional terrain, she set out to find the answers.
A National Archives photo from the 1960s of the movie camera used by Abraham Zapruder when he filmed the Kennedy assassination.(National Archives)
A National Archives photo from the 1960s of the movie camera used by Abraham Zapruder when he filmed the Kennedy assassination. (National Archives)
Abraham Zapruder was a dressmaker who owned Jennifer Juniors, a shop on the edge of Dealey Plaza. He was 58 on the day the president came to Dallas. As filmmakers go, he was, in every sense of the word, an amateur. So, what allowed him to keep filming after shots rang out? How could he hold the camera so still, even with abject horror exploding in front of him?
The 47-year-old author offers more than one glimpse into the mind of her grandfather, who was, she writes, "a born musician who never had a lesson and could play by ear; he came home from work every day and sat down to play the piano before even taking off his hat." She wonders if, blessed with a better opportunity, he might have ended up "as an engineer instead of a dressmaker. He was able in so many ways."
Born in Kovel in Czarist Russia in 1905, he fled to New York when he was 15 and settled in a Brooklyn tenement, populated largely by fellow Jewish immigrants. He soon found work as a pattern maker in the city's garment industry.
Abraham Zapruder, next to his wife, Lillian Zapruder, poses for a photograph holding his brand-new Bell & Howell 8mm camera soon after he had purchased it in 1962. In 1963, he created a landmark film by using it to film President Kennedy's motorcade parade in downtown Dallas.(Used with permission of the Zapruder family)
Abraham Zapruder, next to his wife, Lillian Zapruder, poses for a photograph holding his brand-new Bell & Howell 8mm camera soon after he had purchased it in 1962. In 1963, he created a landmark film by using it to film President Kennedy's motorcade parade in downtown Dallas. (Used with permission of the Zapruder family)
He married his wife, Lillian, in 1933, and during World War II, seizing a business opportunity, the couple moved to Texas. Their son, Henry — Alexandra's father — graduated from Harvard Law School a year before the assassination. Daughter Myrna worked as a Kennedy campaign volunteer in 1960.
A JFK devotee, Zapruder loved the idea of a presidential parade passing by his office, having no clue of the surreal, spectacular fallout fate would inflict.
Filming the movie was one thing; dealing with its aftermath quite another. It tested Zapruder's ethics and Old World morality more aggressively than anything ever had, and in the words of Gerald Posner, who wrote Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, the definitive book on the subject, he could not have behaved more admirably.
"Zapruder handled himself with remarkable decency and common sense," Posner says. "Today, if you had an assassination in a public square, we'd have several dozen different films all competing. You could turn on TMZ and see the most outrageous one."
And yet, Zapruder took a nobly different path.
Dallas historian Darwin Payne (The Dallas Morning News Archives)
Dallas historian Darwin Payne (The Dallas Morning News Archives)
Dallas historian Darwin Payne, 79, then a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald, found Zapruder moments after the shooting. For about an hour, he interviewed Zapruder in his office, on an upper floor of the building on the northeast corner of Elm and Houston streets.
"He was in tears much of the time," says Payne, who remembers seeing the famous camera positioned on top of a filing cabinet. He urged Zapruder to go with him to the newspaper "or some other place" to get the film developed, but he only wanted to turn it over to federal authorities.
As they spoke, the two men watched Walter Cronkite deliver the news of the shooting on television. It was then that Zapruder gave Payne an incredible quote.
"They were saying the president had been seriously injured, they didn't know his condition at the time," Payne says. "But Zapruder said, 'No, he's dead, I know he's dead! I was watching through the viewfinder, and I could see his head explode like a firecracker.' " As his adrenaline rushed, the 26-year-old Payne knew that "history was in the making, right there in front of our eyes."
Having met with Payne, a reporter for The Dallas Morning News and Bert Shipp at WFAA-TV (Channel 8), Zapruder followed Shipp's suggestion and ended up at an Eastman Kodak lab near Love Field, the only place where the color film could be properly developed. The Secret Service received two of three color prints made at the lab.
The original was sold to LIFE, which in the golden age of magazines was in its glory days. Alexandra Zapruder says her grandfather felt calmly reassured by the sheer stature of LIFE. He also liked and respected the young LIFE reporter sent to Dallas to cover the assassination aftermath. Richard Stolley scored big by not being as nakedly aggressive as his competitors, although, as Alexandra notes with a laugh, he longed to secure the rights as fervently as they did.
Posner notes that, at the time, LIFE was "the stable, aboveboard, decent magazine," one Zapruder felt would not exploit the film, which his granddaughter says was his greatest fear.
LIFE paid Zapruder $150,000, giving him six installments of $25,000 each ($150,000 in today's dollars would be more than $1 million). Posner calls it a tribute to Zapruder's character that he donated the initial payment to the widow of Dallas police Officer J.D. Tippit, whom Oswald gunned down in Oak Cliff before being captured in the Texas Theatre.
Roger Staubach, during his days as the star quarterback at Navy, was supposed to be on the cover of LIFE magazine in November 1963 but got bumped by coverage of the assassination. (The Dallas Morning News Archives)
Roger Staubach, during his days as the star quarterback at Navy, was supposed to be on the cover of LIFE magazine in November 1963 but got bumped by coverage of the assassination. (The Dallas Morning News Archives)
LIFE published 31 black-and-white frames in its Nov. 29, 1963, edition, bumping from its cover a college quarterback named Roger Staubach. The American public was kept from seeing the 26-second movie until 1975, when a pirated copy aired on Geraldo Rivera's ABC talk show, Good Night America.
Shock waves ensued, convincing an army of critics that what the film reveals in its starkest image is a disquieting truth. The final shot that blows a hole in the president's head had to have come from the front, they said. And if it did, they reasoned, there's no way Oswald could have fired it from a sixth-floor window well behind the motorcade.
"The fact that the general public didn't see it until 1975 is one of the reasons the conspiracies were fed," Posner says. "The film was kept away from the public, so in '75, when you see it for the first time, it does look like the president was shot from the front." Its Geraldo moment came a year after President Richard Nixon resigned in the uproar of the Watergate scandal, exacerbating fears that the government was hiding something.
Author Gerald Posner, on the sixth floor of the former Texas School Book Depository, wrote the book Case Closed about the Kennedy assassination. (The Dallas Morning News Archives)
Author Gerald Posner, on the sixth floor of the former Texas School Book Depository, wrote the book Case Closed about the Kennedy assassination. (The Dallas Morning News Archives)
But by 1993, when Posner's book was published, digital technology made it possible to dissect the film in minute detail. Using such technology, Posner says the film also serves as a frame-by-frame time clock, allowing the viewer to see that, when the final shot hits, the president's head, in the wound's initial moments, is actually thrust forward — not backward — with the bullet blowing out "the right front section of his forehead."
The technology is so persuasive, he says, that some conspiracy theorists are now left with the hollow insinuation that Zapruder's film "had to have been faked."
Without drawing a final conclusion, Zapruder's granddaughter says: "I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I guess what I would say is the people I know and respect the most believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, and I'm very much influenced by that."
And yet, the film casts a shadow on the concept of "visual truth," which in her words poses the question: "How can we look at something that is supposed to have created a record of what happened and question whether or not that what we are seeing is, in fact, what occurred?"
Actor Paul Giamatti plays Abraham Zapruder in a scene from the movie Parkland.(Claire Folder/Exclusive Media Entertainment)
Actor Paul Giamatti plays Abraham Zapruder in a scene from the movie Parkland. (Claire Folder/Exclusive Media Entertainment)
Abraham Zapruder died of cancer in 1970 at 65, leaving the family to determine the film's destiny. Oliver Stone obtained permission to use the film in his 1991 pro-conspiracy movie, JFK. As the book reveals, the family agreed to a routine licensing fee paid by Camelot Productions, which never mentioned being an agent of Stone's.
In 1998, ownership was officially transferred to the JFK collection of the National Archives and Records Administration. The family retained all copyrights.
In 1999, a special arbitration panel of the Justice Department awarded $16 million plus interest to the Zapruder family as compensation for the government's forced acquisition of the film. In 2000, the Zapruder family donated its collection of Zapruder films and photographs, along with all copyrights of the film, to the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, where Alexandra Zapruder will speak on Nov. 22.
She will share with those who come to see her how the family struggled, long after the death of its patriarch, to honor his wish that the film not be exploited while at the same time protecting the people he loved the most.
Henry Zapruder, left, was the son of Abraham Zapruder. On the right is Henry's daughter and Abraham's granddaughter, Alexandra Zapruder, who has written a new book her family's experience surrounding her grandfather's famous home movie depicting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This photo was taken in 1987 at Alexandra's alma mater, Smith College.(Used with permission of the Zapruder family)
Henry Zapruder, left, was the son of Abraham Zapruder. On the right is Henry's daughter and Abraham's granddaughter, Alexandra Zapruder, who has written a new book her family's experience surrounding her grandfather's famous home movie depicting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This photo was taken in 1987 at Alexandra's alma mater, Smith College. (Used with permission of the Zapruder family)
To those who criticize the Zapruders for accepting a monetary settlement, her late father offers the best response in the pages of his daughter's book: "I don't feel that our family is in a position to make an $18 million donation to the federal government."
Her father was, she writes, "in a tough spot. He wanted the government to have the film. ... He had done everything he could to behave ethically and responsibly in this regard and to avoid exploiting the film for its full value. ... I don't believe he ever wavered in his absolute conviction to deliver what he felt we owed to the American people and also to protect his own family. But accomplishing this was no easy task." She and her family figured out long ago that "the film has a life that exists way beyond our life." More than half a century later, "I just look at it and marvel."
Alexandra Zapruder
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Alexandra Zapruder (born 1969) is the author and editor of Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust. which won the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category in 2002. The book is a collection of 15 diaries of young writers who lived during the Holocaust. In 2005, Zapruder wrote and co-produced a documentary film based on her book with MTV Director Lauren Lazin. "I'm Still Here: Real Diaries of Teenagers Who Lived During The Holocaust," debuted on MTV in 2005 and was nominated for two Emmy awards. In 2015, Salvaged Pages was reissued in a second paperback edition with updates, corrections, and new information. A multimedia e-book version was also published that same year and includes visual images of the diaries and their writers, interviews, glossary terms, maps, and other valuable information for educators, students, and the general public. Zapruder is the author of Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film. Zapruder is a 1991 graduate of Smith College.
Her grandfather was Abraham Zapruder, who took a twenty-six second home movie of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination[1] — now known as the Zapruder film.
AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
Zapruder's Book Examines Her Grandfather's Filming Of JFK Assassination
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November 21, 20165:03 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
On a home movie, Abraham Zapruder captured the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. David Greene talks to Alexandra Zapruder about her book: Twenty-Six Seconds.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
November 22, 1963 - Dallas businessman Abraham Zapruder left work to get his eight millimeter movie camera. Abe, Papa Abe, Mr. Z - that's how family and friends knew him - loved making home movies. The film in his camera that day already had footage of grandkids, also scenes from inside his dress manufacturing company. But what Abraham Zapruder captured next forever changed him and his family and also changed America.
ALEXANDRA ZAPRUDER: He perched himself on this four-foot high concrete parapet so that he had this really quite amazing view of the limousine that was going to come down Elm Street from left to right.
GREENE: Alexandra Zapruder has no memory of her grandfather. She was just a baby when he died. But she has spent time studying his memories of that day 53 years ago. President Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, were in the back of that limo, and Abraham Zapruder wound up making a home movie of a Presidential assassination. And we should say this story does include a graphic description that listeners might find disturbing.
ZAPRUDER: The first few seconds are - are amazing. You see the president. You see the first lady in her pink suit and her hat. And they're smiling, and they're waving. And there's this little, tiny gesture that always stays with me of the president brushing his hair out of his face - you know, this - this - just such a human moment. And then they disappear for a few seconds behind this highway sign.
And then when the car comes out the other side, you can see that there's - something is wrong because the president's arms are up. His hand's up around his throat. And then there's this long moment that first lady turns toward the president and - trying to understand what's happened.
And the car sort of sinks down in the frame a little bit and then comes this terrible final shot, when the President's head basically explodes. There's no other way to say it. And if you're looking very closely, you can see Jackie Kennedy's mouth open in this scream of anguish and horror. I mean, it's really just heartrending.
GREENE: This has been remarked on before, but the fact that your grandfather was able to just keep filming, didn't drop the camera out of shock - I mean, you wrote that you didn't really appreciate that until you - you held one of these cameras.
ZAPRUDER: Yeah, the camera is heavy. It's, you know, kind of awkward, by at least today's standards. And not only that, he had vertigo.
GREENE: That's incredible. Already worried about his balance, and then - then to have that happen.
ZAPRUDER: Yeah, yeah.
GREENE: Do you think your grandfather was - realized the gravity of what he was doing, or was he just frozen?
ZAPRUDER: I think he was frozen. It feels like that to me. I can't - I can't imagine that he knew what he was doing. You know, that he just - he was watching, and he saw it unfold. And it was - I mean, I really - you know, I'm stumbling for words because it's impossible to describe. It's impossible to imagine how he did it, why he didn't fall or drop to the ground like all of the people around him or pull the camera away from his eye, but he didn't.
GREENE: He didn't. And now, his granddaughter, Alexandra, has meticulously traced the path of the Zapruder film from that fateful day on. She's written a book. It's called "Twenty-Six Seconds." And she tries to bring a journalist's detachment to a story that is so deeply tied to her own family.
How many tunes do you think you have now watched this film?
ZAPRUDER: You know, I never saw the film until I was a teenager. I tried not to see it. I spent most of my life trying to avoid seeing it. But then, for this book, I had to watch it many, many, many times. And I don't - I don't know how many, but I have to say that every time I watch it, it never loses its horror and the pathos of it, you know?
And I've said before and other people have said that every time that first shot comes, there's some part of me that just thinks maybe this time it will turn out differently. You know, if only he had been able to duck down, or if only this or if only that. It never loses that extraordinary impact.
GREENE: For so many years, I mean, when you were younger, your family - it's not just that they didn't talk about. They didn't want to talk about it. Why the hesitance? Why the reluctance?
ZAPRUDER: The film was extraordinarily traumatic for my grandfather. You know, he never fully recovered from what he had witnessed, and he had nightmares, and he was deeply, deeply pained by it. And for my father, this was an unbelievably crushing disappointment. My father had just, three weeks before the assassination, accepted a job in the Kennedy administration, working in the Justice Department. And he had written in 1962 this incredibly beautiful letter to President Kennedy saying, you know, I want to come and work for the new frontier.
GREENE: It's a beautiful - it was a beautiful letter.
ZAPRUDER: Yeah. And so, for them, this was so personal. It was just personally painful. And to be associated forever with something so gruesome and so devastating for everyone, but most especially for the Kennedy family, you know, we never forgot in our family - we were not allowed to forget - that, for all the things that the Zapruder film is, it is, at bottom, our family's record of another family's tragedy, and that is a very sober responsibility to have.
GREENE: And the weight of that responsibility became even greater in the 1990s. For much of its history, the Zapruders owned the original film and copyright. And that led to criticism that the family was profiting from a national tragedy. The U.S. government eventually seized the film under eminent domain. And after a lengthy arbitration process, the Zapruders were paid $16 million. The family then donated the copyright to the Dallas museum devoted to President Kennedy.
ZAPRUDER: People said tough things. We were called bloodsuckers, all we cared about was the money. I mean, there was a lot of that kind of talk. But I really do understand why people felt the way that they did. And part of the goal of the book was to dig deeper.
GREENE: You said in a - in the later part of the book, when all this arbitration is happening, that one of the questions people were struggling to answer is why this film matters and the meaning of it. How do you answer that question?
ZAPRUDER: There are so many answers to that question. First of all, I think the film is and remains and always will be the world's collective memory of, you know, a traumatic historical moment - the assassination of a beloved president. And at the end of the day, it's also this 26-second narrative that is an existential one. It is a beautiful day. The president's riding down the street with his beautiful wife. All is well.
And within 30 seconds, everything is over, and the world is completely changed and that sense that we see something unfolding that we know is true - that life can change in an instant - and yet that we don't want to confront and must confront if we're to, you know, be deeply human people. That, for me, is ultimately where its - its meaning lies.
GREENE: The new book is called "Twenty-Six Seconds." The author is Alexandra Zapruder.
MARCH 27, 2008
In 1992, Alexandra Zapruder began to collect diaries written by children during the Holocaust. These diaries speak eloquently of both hope and despair.
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ALEXANDRA ZAPRUDER:
You know Anne Frank's diary was the first diary that was published. And her voice was so powerful that it captured the voices of all the children and all the people who had been killed. That's the way it's framed. And that by reading her diary and sort of taking her into our hearts, we could redeem her life. And it never rung true to me.
And I had these diaries. I had this cache in a way of primary sources, each of which kept saying to me: "That's not we're about. You know, we're not about the triumph of the human spirit. We're about something else, which is as simple as a mark in the world."
If a life is gone and what's left are 20 or 30 or 50 or 100 pages, that is not a life. That is a fragment of a life. And let's call it what it is.
DANIEL GREENE:
In 1992, Alexandra Zapruder began to collect diaries written by children during the Holocaust. The diaries presented in her book, Salvaged Pages, show the wide range of young writers' responses to the horrors they faced. These diaries speak eloquently of both hope and despair.
Welcome to Voices on Antisemitism, a free podcast series of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum made possible by generous support from the Oliver and Elizabeth Stanton Foundation. I'm Daniel Greene. Every other week, we invite a guest to reflect about the many ways that antisemitism and hatred influence our world today. Here's editor of Salvaged Pages, Alexandra Zapruder.
ALEXANDRA ZAPRUDER:
This is a great entry—June the 11th, 1944. Anonymous boy writing in Lodz ghetto.
"I go on dreaming, dreaming, about survival and about getting fame, in order to be able to tell 'the world'. . . to tell and 'rebuke,' 'to tell and to protest,' both seem at [the] present moment remote and unbelievable—but who knows maybe, perhaps. I dream about telling to humanity but should I be able? Should Shakespeare be able? And what yet I who am only a little proud of understanding Shakespeare?!"
I just- I love that entry. It's so- his recognition of his limits, or human limits, you know, in light of his circumstances are so potent. And he's writing about the horror around him.
This passage is addressed to the Germans, July 15th, 1944.
"Indeed! to kill so pointlessly, to continue to fight this hopeless battle, can only be done by these disgusting, sordid, perverted, devoid of all human feelings, slow-witted, melancholy Prussians! Vampires, sharks, pirates, buccaneers, thugs—to what kind of incomprehensible predatory species do you belong?"
You know, Anne Frank sort of became a saint. And in many ways this diary is a perfect counterpart to Anne Frank's diary, because it doesn’t have this saintly quality to it at all.
Anne Frank is portrayed as a hopeful person, and her hope for her survival and her hope for humanity is a moral good. You know, we as human beings are hopeful and when we fail to hope we are somehow betraying our best selves. And what I found in these diaries was that everyone wants to have hope in a desperate situation. But the failure of hope, or the inability to have hope—despair, which is it's counterpart—is a part of suffering.
This is an anonymous girl in Lodz ghetto. This is Thursday, March 5th, 1942.
"Winter is back. A freezing wind is blowing. The deportations have stopped for a while, but only for a couple of days, because there are no wagons for the deported people. The hunger keeps getting worse. . . . In the morning I stopped at the vegetable cooperative. They give three kilograms of beets for one ration card. But can you call them beets? They're just manure. They stink and evaporate, and what's more, they have been frozen a few times. . . . I have nothing for dinner. All day I was looking for something. In the evening, at last, I bought half a kilogram of rye flour for twenty reichmarks. You need thousands, millions, to buy anything. Life is impossible."
You know, what I always wanted to say about Anne Frank's diary was: yes, she had hope sometimes, and sometimes she didn't have hope. And the moments when she didn't have hope, you know, when she wrote something about this dark cloud looming, towards the end of the diary, I think that is the moment that demands our greatest compassion.
Not a sort of complacent celebration of humanity's ability to be positive, but rather the understanding that here is a person who is experiencing a tremendously dark moment in life, when it's a loss of the belief that things might turn out for the best.
There are two kinds of hope in these diaries. One is the most common, and that is hope for individual survival—the hope that the circumstances in the writer's life are going to turn out for the best, that he or she and his or her family are going to survive.
But then there's another kind of hope that I only learned about this because of this diary entry that I'm going to read.
This is by a young woman named Elsa Binder, who wrote in Stanislawow ghetto. This is Friday, January 30th, 1942.
"When fear crawls out in the evenings from all four corners, when the winter storm raging outside tells you it is winter, and that it is difficult to live in the winter, when my soul trembles at the sight of distant fantasies, I shiver and say one word with every heartbeat, every pulse, every piece of my soul—liberation. In such moments it hardly matters where it is going to come from and who will bring it, so long as it's faster and comes sooner. Doubts are growing in my soul. Quiet! Blessed be he who brings good news, no matter from where, no matter to . . . where. Time, go ahead. Time, which carries liberation and its unknown tomorrow; . . . maybe not for me, but for people like me. The result is certain. Down with any doubts. Everything comes to an end. Spring will come."
And that to me is about this other kind of hope. That is not hope for herself and her own family, but hope for the world, this dream, this faith ultimately, that the world will right itself.
These young writers, they vacillate between hope and despair, and they struggle for hope, and they look for reasons to have hope. You know, is that an act of courage? Yes, I think it is.
DANIEL GREENE:
Voices on Antisemitism is a free podcast series of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Join us every other week to hear a new perspective on the continuing threat of antisemitism in our world today. We would appreciate your feedback on this series. Please visit our website, www.ushmm.org.
Author and editor of Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust
Alexandra Zapruder began her career as a member of the founding staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. A graduate of Smith College, she served as the researcher for the museum’s exhibition for young visitors, Remember The Children, Daniel’s Story. She earned her Master’s Degree in Education at Harvard University in 1995 and returned to the Holocaust Museum in 1996.
Her first book, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, (Yale University Press, 2002) won the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category. She wrote and co-produced I’m Still Here, a documentary film for young audiences based on her book, which aired on MTV in May 2005. The film was awarded the Jewish Image Award for Best Television Special by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture and was nominated for two Emmy awards.
In the fall of 2015, she completed a second paperback edition and a multimedia edition of Salvaged Pages, and worked with the educational nonprofit Facing History and Ourselves to develop interdisciplinary educational materials for the book designed for middle and high school teachers. Over the past fifteen years, she has crisscrossed the country and traveled abroad to speak about Salvaged Pages to teachers, students and the general public.
She is the author of Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film, which tells the story of her grandfather’s home movie of President Kennedy’s assassination (Twelve Books, November 2016.)
Zapruder, Alexandra. Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal
History of the Zapruder Film
Karl Helicher
Library Journal.
141.17 (Oct. 15, 2016): p95.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Zapruder, Alexandra. Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film. Twelve: Grand Central. Nov. 2016.496p. notes, index. ISBN
9781455574810. $27; ebk. ISBN 9781455574803. MEMOIR
Abraham Zapruder's short home movie of President John F. Kennedy's 1963 assassination became the centerpiece for conspiracy theorists and an
iconic component of American culture. Here, Abraham's granddaughter Alexandra (Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust)
tells the complex story of the film's history, originally sold to Life magazine for $150,000 and now housed in the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey
Plaza, property of the U.S. National Archives. The author shines as a memoirist, offering compelling accounts about her grandfather and how the
film affected generations of Zapruders. The narrative gets bogged down with descriptions of legal battles over copyright ownership vs. public fair
use. However, included are enlightening passages on the film's role in books that express growing public mistrust of the government and its part
in such media events as Oliver Stone's controversial 1991 motion picture JFK. VERDICT This work offers fresh insight into Abraham Zapruder,
family man, and provides new perspectives of the film's role in assassination debates. See David Wrone's T/k Zapruder Film and David Lubin's
Shooting Kennedy for accounts that place the Zapruder film in historical and cultural context.--Karl Helicher, formerly Upper Merion Twp. Lib.,
King of Prussia, PA
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Helicher, Karl. "Zapruder, Alexandra. Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 95.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466413012&it=r&asid=a169c5c7ddd0a429dfdb252077f5ef37. Accessed 23 June
2017.
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Alexandra Zapruder: TWENTY-SIX SECONDS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Alexandra Zapruder TWENTY-SIX SECONDS Twelve (Adult Nonfiction) 11, 15
A meticulous history of an iconic home movie and its contentious afterlife.Positioned to film John F. Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas on
Nov. 22, 1963, Abraham Zapruder, to his profound horror, instead recorded the president’s assassination. In this carefully researched
investigation, his granddaughter Alexandra Zapruder (editor: Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, 2004, etc.)
examines the fate of that movie, from the first chaotic moments after the tragedy to the present. Her aim, she writes, is to tell not only her
grandfather’s story, but to probe “the centrality of the film’s place in the Kennedy assassination debates, how it had
challenged norms around the public representation of violence, how it triggered new debates about the media’s role in protecting
personal privacy or providing access to information.” In the immediate aftermath, the FBI and Secret Service scrambled to find a lab
that would make copies. At the same time, Zapruder was besieged by journalists wanting to buy the movie, demands that he strongly resisted
until a sympathetic reporter from LIFE “offered him a safe harbor in a sea of sharks” that included the aggressive young Dan
Rather. Zapruder relinquished the original to LIFE and kept a duplicate, retaining rights to the film. Eventually, beset by legal problems, the
magazine sold the film back to the family, who deposited it in the National Archives. The author reveals how the film was perceived, frame by
frame, in various investigations, including the Warren Commission, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone; and by a rash of
headstrong conspiracy theorists. After Zapruder’s death, the author’s father, a lawyer, vetted requests to use the film from
writers, scholars, the media, and a certain “Los Angeles-based filmmaker” who turned out to be Oliver Stone. Drawing on
family and media archives, interviews, and published sources, the author makes a strong case for the film’s “fame, cultural
status, and emotional and symbolic value” both for the nation and her family. An intriguing history of one of the most significant home
movies ever recorded.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Alexandra Zapruder: TWENTY-SIX SECONDS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463216091&it=r&asid=a92dcac48f60936d6c1bd22cabbed961. Accessed 23 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463216091
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Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder
Film
Publishers Weekly.
263.37 (Sept. 12, 2016): p48.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film
Alexandra Zapruder. Twelve, $27 (480p) ISBN 978-1-4555-7481-0
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
This well-written exploration of conspiracy, propriety, copyright, and public good versus private gain is seen through the prism of the world's
most famous home movie. Sometimes "personal history" is code for lazy research, but Zapruder (Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the
Holocaust) has doggedly followed the tortured life of her grandfather's short 8 mm film, which captured the moment of President Kennedy's
assassination, through the shock of witness, media frenzy, FBI fumbling, conspiracy theorists, lawsuits, artists, and Oliver Stone. At the center of
the story is Abe Zapruder, who died when the author was an infant. An immigrant from Ukraine, Abe eventually found modest success as a
dressmaker in Dallas. For him, J.F.K. was the symbol of American promise, so when he sold his film to Life, it was with the understanding that
the magazine would safeguard J.F.K.'s dignity--and give Zapruder $150,000 for it. The movie was sold back to the family for $1,12 years later,
when it became too much of a burden for the magazine. And there it stayed until 1993 when the government seized the film, even though it was
on loan to the National Archives. What follows is a dispassionate discussion of how much the film is worth. Zapruder doesn't shy away from the
fact that her family made money from the film, but it was the government that decided the "small, depressing, inconclusive, limited spool of
celluloid" was worth $ 16 million, reaffirming its position as a true relic, one of the few in a secular world. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
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"Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film." Publishers Weekly, 12 Sept. 2016, p. 48. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464046293&it=r&asid=6d40b9ffe57a16c29c00ccaf0d651bbb. Accessed 23 June
2017.
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Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust.
(Nonfiction)
Publishers Weekly.
249.13 (Apr. 1, 2002): p71.
COPYRIGHT 2002 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
EDITED BY ALEXANDRA ZAPRUDER. Yale Univ., $35 (512p) ISBN 0-300-09243-1
Zapruder, who works in the education department at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, has done a great service to history and the future.
Her book deserves to become a standard in Holocaust studies classes, particularly those aimed at youth or focusing on individuals. The 14 diaries
in this anthology--most appearing in English for the first time-- detail the lives of teens and their families, some on the run, some in camps, some
in hiding and some during the chilling last days in the ghettoes in Nazi-occupied Europe. Each is prefaced with a biography of its author,
information on family background and, when known, his or her fate. Zapruder also provides other facts that would have been known to the
diarists and their peers, providing readers with a more complete context. Their experiences and reactions vary widely. Peter Feigl's parents
baptize him as a Catholic and send him to church, but eventually are forced to send him from Austria to France. He blames the Jewish-identified
teens around him for the circu mstances that have ripped him from his parents. In contrast, Belgian Moshe Flinker becomes more attached to
traditional Judaism, but increasingly depressed. His last entry, in the fall of 1943, reads, "I am sitting facing the sun. Soon it will set; it is nearing
the horizon. It is as red as blood, as if it were a bleeding wound. From where does it get so much blood? For days there has been a red sun, but
this is not hard to understand. Is it not sufficient to weep, in these days of anguish?" These writings will certainly impress themselves on the
memories of all readers. (Apr. 9)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust. (Nonfiction)." Publishers Weekly, 1 Apr. 2002, p. 71. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA84651095&it=r&asid=453b37ee2d77938b9a559a8a8ec222a7. Accessed 23 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A84651095
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Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust
Hazel Rochman
Booklist.
98.15 (Apr. 1, 2002): p1295.
COPYRIGHT 2002 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust. Ed. by Alexandra Zapruder. Apr. 2002. 472p. index. Yale, $35 (0-300-09243-1).
940.531.
For the millions who read The Diary of Anne Frank (1952), this collection of 14 Holocaust diaries by young people from all over Europe will
extend the history beyond Anne's attic walls. Scholars will want this volume--editor Zapruder's research is meticulous, drawing on archives and
museums across the world--but the intensely personal voices of these young people who record the unimaginable will also draw a general
audience. In her clear overview and introductions to each diary, Zapruder gives historical context and biography and decries any message of
consolation or redemption, pointing out that these stark narratives banish forever the stereotypes of sweet victim, beneficent rescuer, and
unfeeling bystander; instead, they suggest the immense complexity of ordinary people, Some writers are dull; some write with heartbreaking
power. One diarist focuses on hunger: he's absolutely obsessed with food. Another's anguish is the loneliness, the separation; she cannot forget
having to leave her grandmother in the street. The places range from the Czech forests and the Lodz ghetto to Auschwitz and the horrific scenes at
liberation. A landmark collection.
YA/C: The young voices make this a must for the high-school Holocaust curriculum. HR.
Rochman, Hazel
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Rochman, Hazel. "Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2002, p. 1295. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA85593564&it=r&asid=1ded14590d3a0d7dde820473c47531bb. Accessed 23 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A85593564
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Anne Frank
Edie Ching
Booklist.
110.2 (Sept. 15, 2013): p61.
COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Anne Frank. By Alexandra Zapruder. 2013.48p. illus. National Geographic, paper, $3.99 (9781426313523). 940.53. Gr. 2-4.
While The Diary of Anne Frank is an important part of any school curriculum, it is a demanding read for many students. For younger readers, this
book provides a solid introduction to Anne's life and the forces that slowly constrained and then destroyed it. The emphasis is on Anne as a
normal girl who was forced to live an abnormal life in hiding because of Nazi rule. Simple writing with comments directed to the reader and
photographs generously interspersed throughout the text hold attention; a pronunciation guide and glossary aid comprehension. Sometimes the
history gets a bit lost--students might be left wondering about the identity of the Axis countries, for instance--but this is a book about the life and
times of one special person and the impact of the diary she kept. To further emphasize this point, reference is made to the diaries kept by other
young people during the Holocaust, a possible point for further research.--Edie Ching
Ching, Edie
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Ching, Edie. "Anne Frank." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2013, p. 61. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA347520825&it=r&asid=4e7ead798aedede937082cf0fbca9967. Accessed 23 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A347520825
Alexandra Zapruder puts ‘Twenty-Six Seconds’ in perspective
BY JOHN HENRY
Special to the Star-Telegram
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Author Alexandra Zapruder brings to the market unconventional produce in the genre of biography, the art in literature reserved for the life and times of the living, past and present.
Hers is the story of the journey and issues of not-just-any home movie, but the one made famous in the tragedy of perhaps the most famous crime in world history.
Twenty-six seconds doesn’t even register as a blip in the life of planet Earth. But the 26 seconds of film captured by Russian-born Abraham Zapruder will be talked about and its impact considered for centuries, which is why the film merits a unique place in nonfiction literature.
In Twenty-Six Seconds, Alexandra Zapruder, the amateur filmmaker’s granddaughter, traces the 486-frame film in a personal history, from its accidental beginning to the ownership and ethics of its use over the past six decades since Abraham Zapruder caught the gruesome assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald on Elm Street in Dallas.
ALEXANDRA ZAPRUDER ALSO IS THE AUTHOR OF THE AWARD-WINNING ‘SALVAGED PAGES: YOUNG WRITERS’ DIARIES OF THE HOLOCAUST.’
Though Abraham Zapruder lived less than 10 years after the assassination, his film will live forever as the permanent eyewitness to the events that day as shots were fired around 12:30 p.m.
With his 8mm Bell & Howell zoom lens, Zapruder, a clothing manufacturer and owner of Jennifer Juniors, was so close to the assassination that he knew instantly that he had recorded the murder of the 35th president.
Permanent places in history are often accidental. Abe, as he went by, only went home to retrieve his camera in the first place after some of his employees encouraged him to do so. He didn’t want to wrestle with the crowds or possible rain.
Though in shock, he knew immediately that what he had captured on film would be useful to the authorities, so he sought to develop it and turn it over to the Secret Service and law enforcement. His chief concern was how the images would be used.
Zapruder declined overtures from the Dallas Morning News and others to purchase the film. At issue was the film’s responsible use, particularly frame 313 — the head shot that was not seen until 1975.
An unflattering picture of former CBS newsman Dan Rather emerges during negotiations with news outlets at the offices of Zapruder’s attorney. Each in attendance was required to sign nondisclosure agreements, prohibiting each from reporting what he saw on the film. Rather, however, immediately left the offices for the studios of KRLD TV to be the first to broadcast exactly what he had seen.
When he returned, according to Alexandra Zapruder, Rather then threw a fit when he discovered that Zapruder had sold complete rights to Life magazine for $150,000 in payments of $25,000. That’s more than $1 million in today’s dollars.
ACCORDING TO ALEXANDRA, SHE NEVER KNEW HER GRANDFATHER, ABRAHAM ZAPRUDER. SHE WAS 10 MONTHS OLD WHEN HE DIED.
Troubled that he would appear to be trying to profit off the assassination — a concern exacerbated by stereotypes of Jews — and out of genuine concern, Zapruder donated the first $25,000 installment (almost $200,000 in today’s money) to the family of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit, who was killed by Oswald 45 minutes after the assassination.
Initially, Zapruder was praised for his generosity when reports of his philanthropy were broadcast. Many changed their minds, though, when it became known that his donation was only part of what he had been paid.
It was an unfair criticism. Zapruder never tried to claim that he was donating all the money.
Criticism from accusations of profiteering would dog the family for decades to come in the years after Life sold the original film back to the family in 1975 for a token price of $1.
The family licensed the film to several sources, among them director Oliver Stone, who used it for the movie JFK. In the aftermath of the cloudy, controversial film, a board of the federal government deemed that all footage related to the assassination should be in its hands.
The original film again left the family’s possession for $16 million, paid out by the taxpayers, in 1999.
In the same year, the Zapruder heirs donated all copyright licenses to the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, thus ending the family’s relationship with the film.
It did nothing to diminish their father’s and grandfather’s legacy — a key moment in one of the world’s most pivotal events of the 20th century.
Twenty-six seconds of the JFK assassination — and a lifetime of family anguish
Abraham Zapruder’s home movie captured the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. (Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza)
By Joyce Carol Oates November 17, 2016
Joyce Carol Oates’s most recent book is “Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life.”
For millions of us, whenever we think of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — 53 years ago this coming week — we immediately recall the horrific images: the open presidential car, the stricken young president and his wife (in pink, with a pink pillbox hat on her head) beside him. The film has been shown so many times, seen by so many millions of people, it has entered the realm of myth: 486 frames of silent (but color) home-movie footage shot in bright sunshine at Dealey Plaza in Dallas on that day, by a Dallas resident named Abraham Zapruder. It is surely the most famous home movie ever filmed.
Now, Alexandra Zapruder, granddaughter of the videographer and a founder of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, has written a moving and enlightening account that is part memoir; part detailed history of the film and its (inestimable) role in the nation’s understanding of the assassination; and part overview of the film as an inspiration for countless, often bizarre conspiracy theories, as well as for works of art as disparate as Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up,” Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” Don DeLillo’s “Libra” and “Underworld,” and a particularly inventive episode of “Seinfeld.” So much history, embodied in a mere 26 seconds of footage! Not least, this film would one day be sold by the Zapruder heirs to the U.S. government for $16 million, the highest price ever paid for “an American historical artifact,” to be stored in the National Film Registry for scholars and historians to study.
Alexandra Zapruder writes with passion and clarity about the vicissitudes of bearing a famous name without having been involved with its celebrity or notoriety. (“I could not get over my astonishment at seeing [Zapruder] in print so often.”) She is very good at communicating a child’s confused sense of being special and yet being admonished not to think of herself as special. Growing up in Dallas in the 1960s, after her grandfather’s death, Alexandra knew virtually nothing about “the film” — it was never discussed within the family, though as a child she was often told that her beloved grandfather “should have been famous for who he was . . . and not for the film.” In time, Alexandra came to wonder “about this thing called the Zapruder film: Why did people keep bringing it up . . . and what did other people know about it that I didn’t?”
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Gradually she came to assimilate unspoken Zapruder family assumptions: “We don’t brag about the film. It is a gruesome, horrible record of President Kennedy’s assassination, which was a tragic event for the country and the Kennedy family. It is nothing to be proud of. . . . We are tied to the film by chance and coincidence. It is an accident of fate. It happened to be taken by our grandfather and it happened to be called by our name. Apart from that, it has nothing to do with us.”
And yet, ironically, the film does have much to do with the Zapruders, who would inherit the perishable artifact after Abraham’s death and be forced to deal with its ambiguous presence in our cultural history. If there is one predominant theme of “Twenty-Six Seconds,” it is that an individual cannot easily escape “the inheritance of names, and how it shapes identity and life experiences.”
It is instructive to recall that the political climate of November 1963 was as bitterly polarized as our present-day United States. Reactionary hostility to the “liberal” Kennedy was at an all-time high at the time of the assassination; indeed, Dallas had become “ground zero” for a small knot of ultraconservatives (including the editor of the Dallas Morning News and H.L. Hunt, oil tycoon and “the wealthiest man in the world”) who vehemently opposed him. Fervently convinced that the United States was in danger of an imminent communist takeover, the ultraconservatives believed that Kennedy’s international policies and support for the United Nations were treasonous. In the days before his arrival, thousands of leaflets showing mug shots of Kennedy with the caption “WANTED FOR TREASON” flooded the city.
From the perspective of hyper-security-conscious 2016, it seems astonishing that in such a vitriolic atmosphere, the president of the United States was allowed to ride in an open, unprotected limousine, the route of the presidential procession mapped out and widely publicized beforehand. For many citizens of Dallas, including Abraham Zapruder, the assassination would seem initially to be a result of a right-wing plot.
By November 1963, Zapruder had been working in the garment industry for 40 years. He’d begun as an immigrant (from Eastern Europe) in New York and had moved to Dallas in 1941, where he became a successful dress manufacturer; he was an avid Democrat, an enthusiastic supporter of Kennedy who would describe the experience of witnessing the assassination from such close quarters as a “wound” from which he never recovered. That Zapruder happened to film the assassination at all was something of a fluke, for he’d left his camera at home and had to be cajoled by his wife into returning to get it. He arrived early at Dealey Plaza to scout out a location; he would leave little to chance, positioning himself where the presidential motorcade was to pass closely.
In his granddaughter Alexandra’s words: “Those first few seconds of the film are perfect: the sun is shining and you can clearly see the unmistakable, handsome face of the president . . . smiling, and raising his hand to wave. . . . For an instant, the back of a freeway sign obscures the limousine, and then the Kennedys reappear. ‘As it came in line with my camera, I heard a shot,’ Abe later recalled. The president’s elbows fly up, his face distorted in pain, and he suddenly hunches forward. . . . The car dips into the lower part of the frame, and as the president’s body sinks down in the car toward his wife, the fatal shot strikes him. ‘And then I realized,’ Abe said. ‘I saw his head open up and I started yelling, “They killed him! They killed him!” ’ ”
Following the assassination, there is panic and pandemonium at the scene, but Abraham Zapruder manages to return home and to examine the film he has taken, in something of a state of shock. From the first, the amateur filmmaker seemed to have realized: “I’ve got it all on there.”
So lax was security at Dallas police headquarters after the assassination that alleged killer Lee Harvey Oswald — arrested and held at the county jail — was gunned down in a corridor two days later by a distraught Dallas nightclub operator named Jack Ruby. Since Oswald died before he could be interrogated in depth, the floodgates were open for conspiracy theories that ranged from the near-plausible to the absurd, based upon personal and idiosyncratic interpretations of the (mostly bootlegged) Zapruder film. These, Alexandra Zapruder does a diligent job of elucidating, though her patience may strike the reader as quixotic when she interviews, for instance, conspiracy theorist Robert Groden, who dismissed the Warren Report as “nonsense” and a “massive cover-up,” traveled to Kennedy’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery in 1965 to introduce himself to the deceased president and “swore to find out who killed him no matter how long it took and where it took him.”
The most notorious of the conspiracy theorists was the publicity-seeking New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, who misused his office to prosecute a fellow New Orleans citizen as a conspirator on virtually no evidence (the man was acquitted). Another conspiracy activist was the comedian Dick Gregory, who oversaw screenings of the bootlegged film “to the flabbergasted attention of the media.” If Kennedy’s assassination was a tragedy, the aftermath of competing and vociferous conspiracy theorists was a farce, with serious consequences: the undermining of trust in the U.S. government and in authority in general that continues to this day.
“Twenty-Six Seconds” is at its most eloquent in confronting these issues, but it is also a meticulous record — to some readers, perhaps over-meticulous — of the history of the actual, perishable film. The author does not really attempt to integrate this expository material into the larger story; her transitions are blunt and pragmatic: “Here I have to take a break for a brief technical explanation of the Bell and Howell movie camera and the development and duplication of double 8mm film.” But it is not difficult for the reader with little technical interest in film to simply skim by such sections in following the “unbelievably torturous saga” of the Zapruders, whose very “dignity and restraint” in talking publicly about the film “had left a vacuum in the public story,” not to their disadvantage.
“What I did not fully grasp until writing this book,” the author writes, “was that the ongoing life and intrusions of the film made it a living wound inside our family that could never fully heal. Over time, most of the American public moved on, deciding when and where — or even if — they wanted to revisit the JFK assassination. This was not so for my grandfather first of all, and then for my father.”
Committed by the lone, deranged Oswald, the assassination inaugurated an era of exceptional violence in the United States: assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.; rioting in racially distressed major cities. It has settled uneasily into our collective consciousness as an inadequately healed wound that defies our fullest understanding, even as we continue to be obsessed by it. In this eloquent passage, Alexandra Zapruder speaks for all who have found themselves unwittingly and innocently too close to the raging flames of history:
“From our point of view, the film represented a trauma for our grandfather. It was a source of pain for the Kennedys. It was a reminder of crushing disappointment and abandoned plans for my parents’ generation. It was a burden. It was an intrusion. It was a serious and complicated responsibility. It was a moral dilemma. It brought public censure and personal attacks on our family. It appropriated our name and changed the course of our lives. In the end, it was a legacy we never asked for. . . . That anyone could refer to the Zapruder film as our family ‘good fortune’ shows a profound misunderstanding not only of what the film represented to us, but of who we are.”
‘Twenty-Six Seconds,’ by Alexandra Zapruder
By Kevin Canfield Published 10:16 am, Thursday, November 10, 2016
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"Twenty-Six Seconds" Photo: Twelve
Photo: Twelve
IMAGE 1 OF 6 "Twenty-Six Seconds"
Abraham Zapruder was a home-movie hobbyist and a staunch John F. Kennedy supporter. On Nov. 22, 1963, the Dallas resident nabbed a prime spot from which to view the visiting president’s motorcade. His plan was to capture the experience on film. In the process, he authored the most shocking footage of the 20th century.
His granddaughter Alexandra Zapruder’s new book, “Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film,” is about a length of celluloid that will forever link her family to Kennedy’s death. It’s an unusual, enlightening effort, an intelligent blend of memoir and cultural criticism that breaks fresh ground in the crowded field of JFK assassination studies.
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The film that would come to bear his name “represented a trauma for our grandfather,” Alexandra Zapruder writes. “It was a source of pain for the Kennedys. It was a reminder of crushing disappointment and abandoned plans for my parents’ generation. It was a burden. It was an intrusion. It was a serious and complicated responsibility.”
The author of an earlier book about the documentation of unthinkable events (“Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust”), Zapruder explores the film’s function as evidence in a criminal investigation and fodder for many controversies. On a parallel track, she recounts how the footage of Kennedy’s final moments influenced the lives of generations of Zapruders.
Occasionally defensive when discussing her family’s stewardship of the film, Zapruder’s book is at its most moving when she considers her grandfather’s unintended, often painful status as “the quintessential eyewitness” of the postwar era.
To the extent that anything about the Kennedy assassination makes sense, there was a certain logic to Abraham Zapruder’s role in the proceedings. By 1963, he was an amateur filmmaking whiz.
“He had been taking home movies for nearly thirty years,” Alexandra writes, first in Brooklyn and later in Dallas, where Abraham opened a dressmaking company in the 1950s.
Zapruder turned the film over to federal authorities immediately after the crime. Copies were made, and the original was returned to its owner. Media outlets were soon jockeying for access to the footage. Zapruder decided to sell it. Reporters were allowed to view the film, Alexandra Zapruder writes, provided that they promised not to report on its contents unless their news agency submitted the winning bid.
Dan Rather watched the film and then broke the handshake agreement, Alexandra Zapruder writes, by subsequently describing the shooting to a live audience: “Rather’s rush to get the exclusive on the film ended up having an unintended consequence — as rash and ill-considered actions often do — in the later conspiracy debates.”
The young CBS reporter, she continues, “described the president’s head as jerking slightly forward at the moment of impact and didn’t mention the far more obvious backward motion that followed. This description later fed the interests of a number of a different conspiracy theorists ... who relied on this detail to ‘prove’ that Rather had seen the ‘real’ version of the film compared to the later ones in circulation that must have been altered.”
Abraham Zapruder sold the original film, and the rights to publicize it, to Life magazine for a total of $150,000, $25,000 of which he donated to the family of a police officer killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. He had nightmares about the crime until his death in 1970, Alexandra says. “We had all seen the film,” a Life staffer wrote. “But Abe Zapruder saw the actual murder.”
Clandestine copies of the Zapruder film began to circulate in the 1960s, and before long, it was widely bootlegged. It made its national TV debut on Geraldo Rivera’s “Good Night America” in 1975. Shortly thereafter, Life magazine, apparently tired of being chided for not sharing the footage more liberally, returned the original to the Zapruders for $1.
The family subsequently stored the film at the National Archives, and according to Alexandra Zapruder, was judicious when it came to licensing the footage for commercial purposes. In the 1990s, after Oliver Stone’s “JFK” led to renewed interest in Kennedy, Congress chartered the Assassination Records Review Board and charged the panel with assembling a library of evidence.
It was at this point that officials decided that the 8mm original was the property of the United States. The federal government took the film by eminent domain. In 1999, taxpayers compensated the Zapruders with a $16 million payment that various observers called “unseemly,” “outrageous” and “obscene.”
Alexandra Zapruder chafes at this criticism. On a few occasions, it seems as if she intends to use the book as a platform to counter every unsympathetic word that’s ever been published about her family. But when she stops responding to decades-old slights and simply explains the family’s position, it makes a lot of sense.
Citing her father, Zapruder says the family believed that “when the government took the film, they implicitly committed to compensating our family for that taking.” This is reasonable, and given that the figure of $16 million emerged from an arbitration process agreed to by the family and the government, it hardly seems fair to scold the Zapruders for accepting the money.
In “Twenty-Six Seconds,” Zapruder interviews a range of people whose lives have been touched by the Zapruder film. It’s fitting, though, that the most poignant moment features her late grandfather.
In the summer of 1964, Abraham Zapruder appeared before the Warren Commission, the panel that investigated the assassination. Asked by a commission lawyer what he witnessed the previous November, Zapruder recalled hearing gunshots: “And then I saw his head opened up and the blood and everything came out ... I can hardly talk about it (the witness crying).”
Kevin Canfield has written for Bookforum, Film Comment and other publications. Email: books@sfchronicle.com
Two New Books Shed Light on the Kennedy Mystique
By ALESSANDRA STANLEYDEC. 2, 2016
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From top: Entering Dealey Plaza; Kennedy and Connally, wounded, begin to slump; Jackie Kennedy appears to embrace her husband; Jackie climbs out of the back seat of the limousine. Credit Photographs from Zapruder Film (c) 1967 (Renewed 1995) The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza
TWENTY-SIX SECONDS
A Personal History of the Zapruder Film
By Alexandra Zapruder
Illustrated. 472 pp. Twelve. $27.
JFK AND THE MASCULINE MYSTIQUE
Sex and Power on the New Frontier
By Steven Watts
Illustrated. 415 pp. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press. $29.99.
Everybody has a theory about the plot to kill John F. Kennedy. It’s about time somebody looked into the conspiracy to keep him alive.
More than half a century after that fatal shooting on Nov. 22, 1963, television specials, conferences, movies and books related to Camelot — or its seamier underside — keep feeding the eternal flame of nostalgia and fascination.
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Natalie Portman is the latest Hollywood star to play Jacqueline Kennedy in “Jackie,” a movie that comes out this month and imagines the former first lady in the immediate aftermath of the assassination — from bloodied pink suit to widow’s veil on the steps of the Capitol.
“Jackie” follows two new books, “Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film,” by Alexandra Zapruder, and “JFK and the Masculine Mystique: Sex and Power on the New Frontier,” by Steven Watts.
These works are only tangentially about Kennedy’s presidency or his assassination, and in that way, they are probably more instructive about our own era than Kennedy’s — shared history told through a self-preoccupied lens. One is a first-person family narrative, the other a cultural essay on masculine malaise, but both are footnotes inflated to full-length meditations.
And either one could seem almost comically small bore. The granddaughter of Abraham Zapruder, the Dallas dressmaker who recorded the shooting in all its horror with his 8-millimeter camera, presents a kind of “Zapruder Agonistes,” delineating the personal trials of the filmmaker and his descendants.
The examination of Kennedy’s masculine mystique is essentially “Profiles in Swagger,” a pop culture look at the manly sex appeal of Jack Kennedy as well as contemporaries like Hugh Hefner, Ben Bradlee, Ian Fleming and Frank Sinatra.
Yet both works are surprisingly engaging, for entirely different reasons.
Zapruder is a gifted writer and storyteller who delicately unravels a minor mystery few people know or care about, but that she makes human, complex and quite interesting.
Watts, who has written biographies of Henry Ford, Walt Disney and Hugh Hefner, focuses on the touch football, booze and babes side of the Cold War, positioning Kennedy as the avatar of “the assertively manly ethos of the New Frontier.” In places, Watts’s book reads almost like “The Wise Men,” Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas’s portrait of the Cold War establishment, only the Kennedy men are a hipper early 1960s version — “The Cool Guys.”
Watts isn’t exploring new ground or even a very novel theory as he cherry-picks material that supports his thesis. But it’s a measure of the Kennedy magic that the familiar still seems exotic.
Possibly thanks to plentiful pop cultural allusions, even millennials recognize the name Zapruder. But many Americans who were alive and watching live television in 1963 have no real idea who Zapruder was or what happened to him; they certainly wouldn’t be aware that he, his children and grandchildren felt burdened by their name — and the suspicion and second-guessing that followed it for decades.
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Zapruder was a home-movie buff who almost didn’t record the infamous gunshot that blew the president’s head open; Zapruder didn’t bring his camera to his dressmaking factory that morning. After being goaded by his employees, he went back to fetch it in time to position himself on a concrete abutment with an unobstructed view of Elm Street where the presidential motorcade was due to pass.
Alexandra Zapruder was an infant when her grandfather died in 1970, but she paints an intimate portrait of a humble Jewish immigrant from Russia who loved the United States with a convert’s passion. She feelingly conveys the shock, horror and grief he felt as he filmed what was supposed to be a happy home movie. And she then painstakingly explores what exactly happened to him and his film, step by step, frame by frame.
Basically, Zapruder gave a copy to the Secret Service but sold the in-camera original to Life magazine for $150,000; years later, the rights returned to the family and ownership became a subject of controversy, lawsuits and countless conspiracy theories.
In the author’s more nuanced telling, however, there was nothing mercenary or ordinary about the transaction. Zapruder, and later his son and other heirs, were torn about taking money and responsibility for the film’s distribution, but did so with a sense of obligation to Kennedy’s memory that was sometimes misunderstood and trampled by the United States government and media organizations. (They are a sensitive bunch: Zapruder felt wounded when William Manchester described him as “stubby” in “Death of a President.”)
The Zapruders were an ordinary American family, but they inherited something special that defined them forever. It’s hard to feel too much pity — the Zapruders ended up with a lot of money — but they suffered pangs of guilt and uncertainty that are totally understandable.
Male inadequacy is the élan vital of “JFK and the Masculine Mystique.” Watts posits that Kennedy’s unique stature, then and even now, stems from what he describes as his leadership in a “cultural crusade to regenerate masculinity.” In the 1950s, men felt weakened and demoralized by the women who grew empowered while they were away fighting World War II. He cites many articles from the period, including a 1958 essay in Esquire that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote called “The Crisis of American Masculinity.”
Those expressions of alarm now seem quaintly amusing, given how far the male species has evolved — or devolved — in the era of metrosexuals and transgender rights. But postwar castration anxiety wasn’t unique to the 1950s. Whenever fighting ends, be it the Battle of Actium or the Battle of Amiens, men start to worriedly measure their machismo. That was true both before and after World War I, and some felt anxiety even at the height of the slaughter. (In March 1917, three months after the Battle of Verdun, the American ambassador to Britain argued that the United States should enter the war, to “break up our feminized education” and “revive our real manhood.”) Kennedy became the antidote to the male identity crisis of his time by embodying, according to Watts, “physical vigor, decisive action, personal heroism, individual initiative, tough-mindedness and abundant sex appeal.”
But manly panache alone does not quite do justice to Kennedy or men like Frank Sinatra, Edward Lansdale or Alan Shepard. Ben Bradlee, in this telling, was a rakish Kennedy confidant who tempered his Newsweek coverage of the president to preserve their bond. Bradlee was certainly a courtier in Camelot, but that era didn’t define him. He became more interesting a decade later when he was at The Washington Post leading the coverage of Watergate.
Similarly, Watts gives great importance to the masculine messaging embedded in the movie “Spartacus.” The film is more notable today because Kirk Douglas, who co-produced and starred in it, put the blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo in the credits under his real name.
When Kennedy sneaked out of the White House in February 1961 to see “Spartacus” at a theater, that endorsement signaled the end of the blacklist. Watts prefers to focus on the revival of virility, arguing that Kennedy saw in the movie “a Hollywood vision of manly insurrection and stylish revolt that mirrored his own endeavors.” (On the other hand, Kennedy screened “Roman Holiday” in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis. A runaway fantasy?)
Both books are good reading, but the mere fact of their publication points to a clandestine mythmaking machine so potent that Kennedy could live up to his own legend only by dying young.
If he had survived to seek re-election, challengers would no doubt have said something like Lloyd Bentsen’s words to Dan Quayle in their 1988 debate, “Jack Kennedy, you are no Jack Kennedy.”
Correction: December 18, 2016
A review on Dec. 4 about “JFK and the Masculine Mystique: Sex and Power on the New Frontier,” by Steven Watts, misspelled the surname of an official who worked in the Defense Department during the Kennedy administration and who, like Kennedy and other figures of the era, has been associated with “manly panache.” He was Edward Lansdale, not Lonsdale.
New book 'Twenty-Six Seconds' details how famed Zapruder film haunts family
Matt Damsker , Special for USA TODAY 2 p.m. EST November 19, 2016
Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film
by Alexandra Zapruder
(Twelve)
in History
Buy Now
USA TODAY Rating
As artifacts of the 1960s go, one of them towers, tragically, above all others — above Andy Warhol’s silk-screen masterworks, above The Beatles’ first recordings, above the high and low iconography of the decade.
A 26-second home movie of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, filmed by a Dallas dress manufacturer named Abraham Zapruder, who found the perfect vantage point along the presidential motorcade route of Nov. 22, 1963, is more than historical document.
It’s a singular window on what, arguably, ended America’s overextended, post-war innocence. JFK’s murder was a national trauma that still haunts modernity; the Zapruder film is its real-time ghost.
Relied upon by the government for investigative purposes, its ownership controversially acquired by Life magazine, even parodied in a famous episode of Seinfeld, Zapruder’s chance creation took on mythic status and, inevitably, burdened the family whose name it bears.
The morbid fascination it sparked, and still sparks, make it impossible for the children and relatives of Abraham Zapruder to take public pride in his legacy, and so it’s fitting that his granddaughter, Alexandra Zapruder, has chosen to tell the story of the film through a familial lens. The result, Twenty-Six Seconds (Twelve, 421 pp., **** out of four stars), is a first-rate work of biography and history, addressing the film and the family in all their complexity and character.
Author Alexandra Zapruder.
Author Alexandra Zapruder. (Photo: Linda Fittante)
Alexandra Zapruder was born in 1969 and became aware of what made her last name famous as children often will, through a kind of osmosis: “I have no memory of learning this fact,” she confides. “It seems to me that I always knew it.”
Zapruder (author of Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust) writes elegantly and with keen sensitivity about the toll the film took on her late father, Henry, a lawyer who became the film’s guardian after Abraham’s death. Henry Zapruder bore the brunt as the family and federal government fought over the film’s ownership, copyright, and monetary value, and as the press weighed in, fairly or not, on the family’s morality, at times accusing it of profiteering on the death of a president.
Zapruder knows well the fraught cultural issues at play here, given that her parents descend from Jewish immigrants who built a comfortably middle-class existence in the Dallas suburbs. But the family’s quiet instinct — to compartmentalize the 26 seconds as an aspect of Zapruder identity rather than as an object that defined them —– was dwarfed by the film’s outsized fame.
Natalie Portman becomes 'Jackie' in unorthodox new biopic
Studied frame by frame by the Warren Commission to conclude that the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted alone, the 8mm Kodachrome print became a totem for conspiracy theory, including Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK. (Twenty-Six Seconds also arrives just before Jackie, the new movie starring Natalie Portman as first lady Jacqueline Kennedy in the days after the assassination, hits theaters Dec. 2.)
“It was not just my grandfather’s story, or even that of our family,” Zapruder concludes, “but the centrality of the film’s place in the Kennedy assassination debates, how it had challenged norms about the public representation of violence … influencing some of the century’s greatest and most provocative filmmakers, artists, and writers.”
This absorbing, deeply researched book will only extend that influence.