Among the items Dad brought with him when he arrived in New York was an album covered in beige canvas containing snapshots of family, friends and landscapes. The slender volume was organized by location and date neatly written in white ink on its taupe-colored pages. The photographs themselves were sometimes annotated in black ink. They were pictures of elegantly dressed, confident-looking people, secure about their place in the world. There was no hint of the catastrophic events that would soon envelop them and millions of other European Jews.

As I boy I spent hours leafing through the frayed pages of that album. To a middle-class kid growing up in a stiflingly dull American suburb, the pictures were a window into a thrillingly exotic world. There was my father skiing in Yugoslavia, horseback riding in Italy, swimming off the Dalmatian Coast, hiking in the Bavarian hills. In almost every picture he is meticulously groomed, with his short dark hair brushed back and mustache neatly trimmed. He is often dressed in a suit and tie, sometimes accessorized with a topcoat, homburg, kerchief, and gloves. I sometimes wondered how this dashing young blade turned into the sedate, pot-bellied man I knew as my father.

The picture I liked the best showed two men dressed in fur-collared overcoats feeding the pigeons at St. Mark’s Square in Venice. One of them, wearing a homburg and an impish smile, was my grandfather Otto; the other, bare-headed and handsome, a pigeon perched on his outstretched arm, was my father.

Fascinated by the world captured in these photographs, I would ply Dad with questions. Who are those people? Where was this taken? What are those mountains in the distance? His answers — if he answered at all — were invariably brief and frustratingly vague, which only piqued my curiosity more.

Dad is usually pictured in the company of family and friends, and more often than not, there is an attractive, well-turned-out young woman hanging on his arm. One woman in particular was a frequent subject. Her name was Lotte Roderer, and with her round, open face, engaging smile, sparkling eyes and wavy dark hair, she resembles Ingrid Bergman. It’s clear from the pictures that Dad and Lotte were close friends, most likely lovers. There are pictures of them dressed to the nines standing in front of a palatial hotel in Karlsbad, the posh Czech spa town, strolling in a wooded park, posing arm-in-arm and ski-to-ski in the Alps. Perhaps the most telling picture shows Lotte lying languorously with her eyes closed on a bench next to my grandfather, looking perfectly at ease, as if she were a member of the family.