The Couple in Pictures

Dora's apparent age here -- younger and rounder-faced than in her other portraits -- plausibly predates her 1903 emigration from Latvia entirely; a soft inference from clothing and hairstyle, not a dated document, but if right, this may be the earliest photograph in this whole collection.

Likely from around the time Sam gave up on Montreal for good. He'd spent nearly a decade there from 1901, cycling through jobs that didn't last, once earning about a dollar for four days' work — turned away on arrival for being a Jew, he'd told the hiring office he was an Austrian Christian instead, and they'd believed him. The Panic of 1907 wiped out what little he'd built, and it was Dora who sent him the money — three pounds toward his return ticket — that got him back across the Atlantic in 1908, to London, where her family lived and where a marriage contract between them had already been signed that same year. They married in February 1911.

Sam's mother, with Sam and Dora together. Undated, but Dora's apparent age here suggests England rather than Latvia -- which would mean Sam's mother made the journey too, around the same time as the photograph above; a soft inference from clothing and hairstyle, not a dated document.

Dora was born in Korsovka in 1889 and emigrated to England around 1903–04, aged about 14. This undated portrait likely shows her in England, in the years after that move but before her 1911 marriage to Sam — while the two of them, first cousins already committed to each other, courted almost entirely by letter across the Atlantic, as Sam tried to make his way in Montreal.

Gladys and Beatrice as babies, pictured with their mother and a beloved teddy bear. The photograph's own inscription reads "Jan. 10" and names the children, dated 1913 — matching Beatrice's confirmed birth year, and ruling out Cynthia, who wasn't born until 1924. Their arrival bracketed Sam's establishment of his own fur business in 1916, the venture that would make the family genuinely prosperous over the following decade.

One of Sam and Dora's three daughters — Gladys, Beatrice, or Cynthia — as a toddler with her mother; this photograph doesn't identify which. Motherhood filled these years for Dora, in the decade or so before Sam's fur business, launched in 1916, made the family genuinely prosperous.

By the 1930s, Sam's fur business had made the family genuinely prosperous — buying pelts by the thousand on regular trips to Paris, Berlin, and Leipzig — and summers meant weeks at the English coast for Dora and the girls while Sam stayed in London for work. This undated seaside photograph, whose clothing style suggests the 1930s, fits squarely into that pattern, even though this particular outing isn't otherwise recorded in the letters.

Sam walking the promenade at Margate with two of his daughters, Gladys and Beatrice, dressed in the fashion of the day. Gladys married in October 1934, so this — judging by the clothes, likely the late 1920s or early 1930s — probably predates that; it falls in roughly the same years as the seaside photograph above, when the fur trade's prosperity meant regular coastal holidays for the family.

Robin (Gladys's son) and Gary (Beatrice's son) in their grandmother's arms. Undated, but both boys look young enough here — Robin a toddler rather than a baby or older child — to place it a few years after Robin's 1936 birth; Gary's own age isn't otherwise known. It was Robin who would grow up to keep this whole correspondence safe, decades later passing it to Paul's brother Richard.

After struggling for the better part of a decade to build a life in Montreal, Sam found real success back in London — a fur business launched in 1916 that made the family genuinely prosperous, and a home address that climbed steadily through Hackney and Stoke Newington over the following decades. By this photograph, Sam and Dora were well into the settled, comfortable life that hard-won foothold had built.

By 1971 — their sixtieth, "diamond" wedding anniversary — Sam and Dora were decades into the marriage that the 1908 tenaim and the decade of letters before it had been building toward. The correspondence itself would outlive them both: kept by their daughter Gladys's son Robin, passed to Paul's brother Richard in the 1990s, and inherited by Paul after Richard's death in 1999, which is how this project came to exist at all.