This is definitely my favourite of all the old photos my father-in-law has from his father’s family. My husband and I call it the ‘Party Picture’. I have looked at it so many times. I have stared into each person’s eyes, hoping they will tell me who they are. I have examined each detail, determined to find out the place and time the photo was taken. And although I have some theories, the reality may elude me forever.
The Photo
So, what is happening here…23 people – 11 women and 12 men, plus one tiny dog; inside a small room with a lamp on the wall and a door or window in the back. A table is filled with plates of food, an oil lamp and a bottle of some kind of beer or wine maybe. Several people are holding up their drinks in the gesture of a toast. Others are pouring drinks. There are five stringed instruments, two with scarves tied around the necks. They look like guitars and mandolins. They are clearly celebrating something. A young Olga Rozentals is holding up her small glass of celebratory beverage in the lower right-hand corner of the photo. I can sense the strength of character in her light-filled eyes and her characteristic sideways smirk.
Most of the men are dressed in wool suits with white shirts and ties. One man is sporting a bowtie and one man in the centre is in a military uniform (that I have yet to specifically identify). The women are also dressed up, some in short sleeves, one in a warm coat and Olga in her typical solid black. There are two very tall, almost intimidating, men in the very back who look like twins! Some of the people look quite young, others heading towards middle-age and the woman in the white-trimmed dress is almost elderly. I would place this photo in the mid-1920s based on costume, hairstyles and Olga’s apparent age.
The group seems to be very comfortable and friendly with each other. Like they know one another quite well. The two women and a man on the right side are all embracing each other with their heads very close together. Some people are grinning widely, some have a slight smile, some are looking right at the camera and some are looking away. The woman in the middle looks blank-faced, as if her mind is a million miles away. And the man next to her is intensely gazing off the side.
Possible Story
Olga Rozentals probably evacuated Riga as a young factory worker in 1915 when everything was being moved to inner Russia to prevent it falling into the hands of the approaching Germany army. Olga was then a refugee in South Russia, specifically the Caucasus, during the end of WWI and during the Russian Civil War. We know that she finally returned to Riga on the 12th of August 1921, where she would have spent two weeks in quarantine before being released into a ruined but hopeful independent new nation.
I believe that she must have been a part of the Volunteer Army of South Russia under General Denikin and then General Wrangel, that was by early 1920 fleeing further and further south, from city to city, trying to escape the Red Army. She, along with thousands of other Latvians, were probably part of the infamous and horrific evacuation of Novorossiysk in March of 1920 and then the even more famous evacuation of Sevastopol in November of 1920. They would have ended up in Constantinople, along with tens of thousands of other refugees, where they would have spent months in camps before being able to get passage on a ship to take them back to Riga.
Were the 23 people in this party picture all refugees from the Russian Civil War? Did they fight for their lives together, against the odds and witness atrocities that I could never imagine? Is this the bond that tied them all together? I feel confident that this is a viable theory. What are they celebrating? One obvious guess might be November 18th, Latvia’s Independence Day. If there was any day for a group of Latvian refugees who barely escaped the clutches of the Red Army to celebrate, it would be Independence Day.
Whatever the occasion, the photo, taken in the mid-1920s when Olga was around 30 years old, must have meant a lot to her. She kept it through those interwar years. She brought it with her when she fled to Germany in 1940 and when she fled again in 1945 from eastern Germany to Bonn. It was then sent, along with her photo of Alexei Romanov that I talk about in a previous post, to us in Australia after her death in 1963 and here it remains today where I have a copy framed on a wall in my house.
I have always hoped to come across someone else in the world who also has a copy of this photo. Someone who might have a clue to the picture’s mystery. Until that day comes, all I can do is continue to look into these intensely interesting faces of the past and wonder…