CONVERSATION PIECES
Parents who had their childhood cut short collected mementoes for their daughter,
When I moved into my first apartment, my housewarming gifts from my parents were a selection of collectible tchotchkes — glass animals, tiny cornhusk mother and child dolls and paperweights — picked up during their travels.
My mother directed me where best to display each object, then she sat back on the couch and announced these would be “conversation pieces.” Each had a story that she and my father shared Antique Roadshow- style.
Both my parents were avid collectors. As a child, I would watch my father, Irving, at the dining room table studying his collection of stamps and coins with guidebooks nearby, and my mother, Dora, dusting and rearranging her growing collection of dolls and figurines. I was baffled at how these seemingly childhood hobbies captivated my parents. Only later did I understand their appeal.
Their childhoods in Poland were cut short by the Second World War when my mother was 10 and my father 13. From September 1939 until my mother’s family settled in Toronto in 1949, she was on the move. Arrested by the Russian army as “spies” when they fled to the Russian occupied section of Poland, they were sent to a Siberian labour camp for two years. When freed, they travelled south to Tajikistan where they remained until the end of the war when they undertook the long journey back to Poland, and next to Germany where they stayed in Pocking, a displaced persons camp, waiting to immigrate to Canada.
My father and his older brother, Jack, were hidden by two Polish farm families after their parents and sister were killed during the Nazis roundup of the town Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp. At the war’s end, my father and his brother were housed in Leipheim, a German DP camp, then my father moved to France for two years until he, too, immigrated to Canada in 1949.
They were already world travellers by the time they were teens, and remained so after they met on Toronto’s Centre Island and married in 1952. Together, they travelled to Central Europe, Scandinavia, the Middle East, South America and the United States. My mother’s dolls were her remembrances of her trips. My father’s were stamps and coins.
I didn’t know to what extent my parents were collectors until I uncovered stashed-away mementoes after my mother’s death.
In large envelopes, I found their immigration papers and visas from 1949, even their boat tickets. In others, were the telegrams from friends and family from their wedding day, the beaded hospital I.D. bracelet from Mount Sinai where my mother was hospitalized before my birth, my paper birth certificate, a lock of my baby hair and decades of greeting cards, including my first hand-drawn, rhyming, misspelled Mother’s and Father’s Day cards.
In a small, red suitcase, I found my ancient Barbie doll, worse for wear — but her outfits handmade by my mom were still immaculate — and a commemorative plate of the movie The Wizard of Oz that my mother had ordered for my birthday when I was a teen. She teased that it took years for me to see the entire movie because whenever the flying monkeys appeared, I put a cushion over my face.
Revisiting these memories was joyful and wrenching. As I did, three phrases kept running through my mind: “When you see this, remember me,” a Victorian proverb capturing the era’s passion for saving keepsakes; Speak, Memory, the title of Nabokov’s collection of autobiographical essays; and my mother’s description of mementoes as conversation pieces.
Now I have my own speak, memory, conversation pieces.
I have my mother’s SAS brand shoes as a reminder of her good-natured fortitude. She struggled with worsening peripheral artery disease for more than a decade. Yet, she didn’t allow that to put a dent in her shared activities with my father — golfing, bowling, walking and their favourite — travelling. I kept the necklace of her good-luck charms — a heart with a key, a Hebrew Chai symbol, a four-leaf clover and her first initial — that she wore through numerous surgeries, and the quilted housecoat she wore during the last months of her life.
When my father died, I kept his Gap baseball caps which he had grown attached to as his Alzheimer’s developed, and placed his last pair of shoes — a pair of extra-wide Skechers for his swollen feet — beside my mother’s SAS shoes.
My father owned a small spring factory, and when I hold one of his Skecher’s in my hand, I remember his sales pitch to suppliers and buyers: The two essentials of life are a good pair of shoes, because you stand on your feet the whole day; and a good mattress to get a good sleep so you could stand on your feet all day. He knew the truth of both. When he and his brother were in hiding, they fled to the forests whenever the Nazis were undertaking their periodical searches of farmhouses for hidden Jews. One night, while fleeing, he lost one of his shoes — the only pair he had. Despite his brother’s pleas that he not run back to look for the shoe, he did. He could not risk losing his foot to infection or frostbite and retraced his route until he found it.
His Gap caps comforted him, as did his many decks of cards, several of which I kept. He and my mother were fervent card players, and with their friends, they played cards several times a week. Gradually, my father’s ability to play cards declined, but then, he got pleasurably absorbed arranging the cards numerically and by suit. Whenever he was hospitalized, the first things I brought him were a deck of cards and a cap — the nurses often recognized their “return customer,” as he called himself — by both.
When my father died, I asked to have a corner of his yellowed tallis, his Jewish prayer shawl, that he was buried with, cut away. It is a reminder of his and my mother’s faith. So, too, is the first conversation piece given to me by my parents — a mezuzah — that has come with me from home to home. Each time I see this decorative case containing a parchment scroll with Torah verses on the doorpost, I remember them.
In large envelopes, I found their immigration papers and visas from 1949. In others, were the telegrams from friends and family from their wedding day.