When I was seventeen, I brought home a small art print from Israel as a gift for my mother. In Hebrew, it read, “Everything that I am or hope to be, I owe to my mother." It was a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln, whose name appeared at the bottom of the print.
My mother hung the picture in our kitchen. It then moved with my parents from Detroit, where I grew up, to Brooklyn, where they followed years later to be close to their children.
My mother passed away over a year ago, fifteen years after my father died. During my mother’s final years of sickness, I moved the print to my own kitchen. It reminded me of what she had been before falling ill. And it became one less thing to address when confronted with the monumental job of emptying out her house after she passed away.
Only someone who has been tasked with clearing out a lifetime of a parent’s belongings can comprehend the enormity of such a charge. It is a time intensive undertaking that often demands physical labor. More than that, it is an emotionally immersive, sometimes rewarding and sometimes draining, trip down memory lane.
What to save and what to give away or even throw away becomes an agonizing process. And the more there is, the more angst in that process.
I was raised by parents whose appreciation for materialism never eclipsed fundamental ideals. They treasured beauty in artifacts but never let that regard surpass the true worth of those objects or supplant their usage. Indeed, my mother scoffed at those whose materialism exceeded intellectual pursuits or contradicted religious values.
My father was an architect from the Midwest. My mother was from a Hungarian Chassidic home. Together they forged an eclectic taste for ultra contemporary furnishings with classic refinement.
I grew up with iconic furniture without realizing it. I had no idea that the Knoll Womb Chair and Herman Miller couches in our living room, the Knoll Tulip kitchen set, the rosewood minimalist dining table with bright purple cushioned chairs, and the colorful Edwards Fields rug were anything out of the ordinary.
When a friend I grew up with was studying design in NYC and saw these Midcentury modern pieces in the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art), she kept exclaiming, “I saw that in the Stein’s house!"
By the time we were faced with emptying out my mother’s home, we well knew the worth of such pieces and were challenged by what to do with them. We had to scrounge around to find takers. We gave away some to grandchildren, others to a Gemach, took some for ourselves and filled my sister’s garage with much of the remainder.
Now my once intentionally sparse living room is cluttered with Midcentury designer pieces that I couldn’t part from but have little use for. However, after having them professionally cleaned, it somehow works. I look at the Knoll womb chair, the Herman Miller couches and the rosewood breakfront and see my parents. Sentimental attachment ultimately won out over utility.
But some of the furniture, as valuable as we deemed it to be, along with many other items in the house, were ultimately carted away by a removal company. We quickly learned that that the disposable society we live in has little interest in out-of-date items, no matter the quality. I literally had to avert my eyes when a worker took a hammer to a Herman Miller rosewood headboard.
The same went for smaller items in the house. After taking mementos for ourselves for sentimental reasons, we had to cajole others to take the Waterford bowls, Orrefors vases, lace tablecloths, and almost new Pesach dishes that filled my mother’s cabinets. My sister diligently posted pictures of items on online Gemach chats and I continued to ask my children, nieces and nephews if they were interested. But much of it we couldn’t even give away.
We were left with a house full of “stuff" that no one wanted. And this was in addition to the heaps of gifts my mother had amassed in closets throughout the house. There were wrapped boxes of baby clothes, afghans knitted by an elderly woman she had befriended, silver mezuzas and trinkets from a silver seller in Netanya, Lenox serving pieces and new kitchen wares.
My mother was not a hoarder, but she was an enthusiast in all she did. And she had penchant for buying gifts for others - wedding gifts, shower presents, baby clothes and toys. In the pursuit of making others happy, zeal overcame practicality. Closets overflowed with ungifted offerings, her ability to actualize the joy of giving curtailed by many years of illness. That was my mother - generous to a fault.
So, there we were - left with piles of forlorn boxes, many gift-wrapped with bows and silver wrapping. Ultimately some of them ended up in a thrift shop and we hoped they would at least find their way into a Jewish home.
I remember standing amidst the clutter thinking that nothing can better epitomize “hevel havalim". In a fit of mindfulness and under the current spell of mortality, I went home and cleared out what I deemed was extra stuff in my own cabinets. After 120, I would spare my children the effort. I even made a trip of my own to the thrift shop.
We donated most of her wardrobe, including Chanel suits, Sonia Rykiel skirts and Giorgio Armani jackets, to a Jewish Gemach. But many things even they didn’t want. Especially housewares. Each time I threw out an outdated sweater, an old-fashioned bedspread or a barely used Tupperware container, I would say out loud, “I’m sorry, Mommy. I’m sorry."
My mother would have been horrified if she had seen the waste. She came from a generation where nothing was thrown out and where privation taught the true worth of gratitude for what one has. Baal Tashchis had no standing in our home growing up.
She was raised during the tumultuous years of the Holocaust in a wealthy and rabbinic Chassidic family in Transylvania. Her father was a successful businessman who owned a leather-goods shop. However, her family had to flee several times to escape the Nazis and their business was forfeited in the process. When communism took over and her parents realized the threat to their religion, they fled again to Israel, leaving everything behind.
I remember my mother’s stories of abject poverty in the immediate years after the State of Israel was established. She would recall how one family was allotted a single chicken through rations. Though she disliked olives, she taught herself to like them since there was hardly anything else to eat.
My mother also taught herself Hebrew and became a teacher. When she moved to New York several years later, she taught herself English and put herself through school. This, all while supporting herself through teaching. No one had the means to help others in those days.
It seems the lean years left their indelible mark on the fat years that followed. It might explain my mother’s approach towards the material side of life, like buying designer clothing but only at a discounted price. The thrill of the metziah, which stays with me today, rivaled and even surpassed the pleasure of buying something valuable.
My mother threw away nothing of worth. What she couldn’t use she gave to others. She would pay for extra luggage and take suitcases of clothing for relatives when she travelled to Israel. She even saved the fat from the chickens she cleaned to feed the birds in our backyard. Our freezer was stacked with frozen bags of fat that she would take out piecemeal, defrost, and throw to the birds.
The power of example is an enduring one. Though I haven’t brought myself to freeze chicken fat, to this day I save all bread and challah to feed the birds. And “like mother, like daughter", my daughter does the same.
The Baldwin piano that sat in the living room was one of the last things to be taken out. It was promised to my youngest son, as a token of appreciation for the countless times he played my mother’s favorite songs. I remember how she applauded my son’s renditions of Chopin waltzes and Beethoven sonatas. And I can still see her cry as she listened intently to Yerushalyim shel Zahav. I can’t help but cry myself when I hear that song and remember her love for the Jewish homeland.
That piano came to symbolize the love of music that my mother handed down. It was the same one my sister and I practiced on as children. I would touch its keys, shockingly in tune after so many years, and recall the weekly trips to an acclaimed musical couple in West Bloomfield during elementary and high school. Piano lessons for my sister and me from Mrs. Stasson, and violin lessons for my brother from Mr. Stasson.
We were accompanied on the way, like all other trips in the car, to the sounds of Mendelsohn, Gershwin, Bach or any other composer whose pieces were being played by the local classical music station. I recall the horror on my mother’s face when one day the station suddenly, and without warning, turned into a rock music station. She fiddled over and over with the dial until she was forced to accept that it had become another casualty of the decaying culture she incessantly decried.
Going through smaller things in the house took more time. Days of discovery turned into weeks and weeks turned into months. Just when we thought all the clutter was gone, we discovered another closet, another drawer.
I sifted through the possessions my mother cherished most - old letters, photographs, newspaper clippings, books. And I realized that of all the variations on the theme of “you can’t take it with you", the one that predominates is the one that actually confounds that idiom. My mother did take with her what was most important to her. Though her sickness robbed her of the ability to realize it at the time, she ultimately took to Shamayim the merit of passing down to her children the ideals that her worldly goods represented.
Sorting through what my mother left behind was a tedious task. The more time I spent delving into my mother’s past, the more the lines blurred between learning about my mother and learning about myself. What to keep and what to discard became a reflection of what I, as a child, internalized from my parents.
When my father passed away, his sefarim were mostly distributed to the children and grandchildren. We found my mother’s favorite siddur faded and with its cover hanging halfway from its binder. Pages were yellowed, some falling out, some water marked, and others turned down to indicate certain tefillos that were especially dear.
Her set of Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch Commentary on the Torah was worn with repeated use. Many pages were covered with notations in the margins, some sentences underlined. Rav Hirsch was my mother’s favorite commentator. She used to love reading portions to me, praising the most insightful of Rav Hirsch’s remarks. She would often go to a nearby photocopy shop to copy pages to save.
Then there were the classics - old copies of Plato, Aristotle, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky that lined the bookshelves. They were silent tributes to the intellectualism that defined my mother and to the determination of a self-taught woman who defied so many odds to achieve an education. To me, they represented my entry into the world of classical literature.
We had no choice but to throw out instructional material from her teaching days, including handwritten Hebrew plays she wrote for her children’s gan. We dumped boxes of thick textbooks from her psychology classes when she earned her Master of Social Work (MSW) degree, after her children finished school.
I found stacks of old letters and cards in cabinet drawers. Some were bound by ancient rubber bands that crumbled as I opened the packets. The oldest letters were in Hungarian, yellowed by time and indecipherable to me. Next were letters and postcards in Hebrew to relatives and friends in Israel. Finally, the later letters switched to English.
In our digital age, such correspondence is more than a quaint tributes to a time gone by. It is a tribute to my mother’s sociable nature and her innate sense of obligation to family and friends. She was a people person who connected and stayed connected with others.
The demands of familial ties didn’t weigh heavy with her because she never viewed them as a burden. Her siblings, nieces and nephews always maintained that she was the glue that held the family together. We found more than one well-worn, ink-stained cardboard card carefully listing the names of numbers of her family and friends.
I looked at the cards and the letters and knew I couldn’t throw them out. Especially the profusion of cards from her children and grandchildren - the people in her life she valued most. Letters from my siblings and myself from sleep away camp, birthday cards, Mother’s Day cards, and childish artwork from her grandchildren lovingly stored away in separate plastic bags.
But we did throw out receipts of donations from organizations, political solicitations, calendars and posters with pictures of President Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, the two Bush presidents and others. To know my mother was to know that she was an outspoken, passionate conservative, consumed with the news, especially as it related to Israel. We needed few reminders of her obsession with politics and policy, especially since it was passed on to her children and grandchildren.
Nor did I feel compelled to keep stashed away receipts or thank you cards from donations to organizations and charities. My mother’s generosity and tzedakah were legendary. Her extreme largesse towards her children, grandchildren, close and distant relatives and various tzedakahs lives on in their gratitude and continues as a merit for her.
Then there were boxes filled with my mother’s own writings - old newspaper clippings of a satirical article in the Detroit Free Press, letters to the editor in the Detroit Jewish News and later letters to local papers in New York. They covered everything from lamenting the decline of stay-at-home mothers to criticizing President Bush’s Middle East Roadmap to Peace.
Interspersed in my mother’s writings were some of my own writings, dating back to our trip together to Gush Katif to protest the Disengagement. My mother was my biggest fan and motivator. When the onset of dementia prevented her from properly critiquing my pieces before I submitted them, I lost my soundest editor.
At last, when the final black garbage bag was carted out of the house to make it “broom clean", I said Baruch Shepatrani. I walked through the empty rooms and felt surprisingly little of the nostalgia I thought I would feel.
Perhaps because my mother’s moral rectitude, her dedication to her family, her love of Klal Yisrael and Eretz Yisrael live long after the furniture is carted out and the clothes and dishes dispersed. The mesorah she handed down was never confined to the walls of her house. It lived in the home she made for others and, with Hashem’s help, will continue to live in the homes of her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.
That is the greatest heirloom of all.