If, as Pierre Nora asserts, "Being Jewish is to remember being Jewish," how does this sort of memory work in diaspora? Or to put it differently, how is one to establish meaningful self-identification through contacts with a time and place, even a people, one has never known? And why? Using personal family photographs, some taken recently in Paris, some going back to pre-war Hungary, I show how familial connectedness may provide a model for communities conceived as separateness rather than in opposition to it, since that very separateness is what defines diasporas in the first place.

I start off with an analysis of some pictures of my father I took in Paris recently. I show how my father's presence as a Holocaust survivor in contemporary Paris awakens the ghosts of those who did not survive and how the Holocaust functions in these photographs as a trace, or what Peirce would call an indexical sign. As a result, the personal relationship represented (performed even) on the pictures finds itself inscribed in the history of two peoplesthe Jews of Eastern Europe and the Frenchlinked to one another by their diasporic relationship.

I then move on to old family portraits taken in Hungary before World War 2 in order to analyze how the failed attempt by Jews to normalize themselves following the model of bourgeois family portraits made way for a radical redefinition of the family in terms of difference rather than sameness. While the family has long provided the model for community formation by making sameness the unifying factor, I propose to use it to show that communities could instead be rooted in separateness, distance and discrepancy. In that sense, diasporic memorythe memory of a time, a place, a people one has never knownmay provide a nontotalizing model for all communities.