A daughter's memorial tribute to her mother z"l, written as the saga of going through one's parents' home after their passing.
When I was 17, 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 their children years later.
My mother passed away over a year ago, 15 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 cleaning 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 accompanies 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 use. Indeed, my mother scoffed at those to whom 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 chair and Herman Miller couches in our living room, the Knoll Tulip kitchen set, the minimalist rosewood dining table with bright purple cushioned chairs, and the colorful Edwards Fields rug were anything out of the ordinary. Years later, when a childhood friend was studying design in New York and saw Mid-Century Modern pieces in the Museum of Modern Art, she kept exclaiming, “I saw that in the Steins’ house!”
By the time my siblings and I 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 most of what remained.
Now my once intentionally sparse living room is cluttered with mid-century designer pieces that I couldn’t part with but have little use for. However, after having them professionally cleaned, it somehow works. I look at the Knoll 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, and many other items in the house were carted away by a removal company. We quickly learned 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 sentimental mementos for ourselves, 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.
All 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 mezuzos 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 a 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 in silver wrapping and adorned with bows. Some of them ended up in a thrift shop, and we hoped they would at least find their way into Jewish homes.
I remember standing amidst the clutter thinking that nothing can better epitomize “hevel havalim.” In a fit of mindfulness and under the spell of mortality, I went home and cleared out what I deemed 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 my mother’s 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 to see such waste. She came from a generation where nothing was thrown out and privation taught true gratitude for what one had.
She was raised during the tumultuous years of the Holocaust in a wealthy rabbinic Chassidic family in Transylvania. Her father was a successful businessman who owned a leather-goods shop. Her family had to flee several times to escape the Nazis, and their business was forfeited in the process. When the communist regime took over the area and her parents realized the threat to their religion, they fled again, this time to Israel, leaving everything behind.
I remember my mother’s stories of abject poverty in the years immediately after the State of Israel was established. She would recall how rations for a family allotted a single chicken. Though she disliked olives, my mother 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, supporting herself through teaching. No one had the means to help others financially 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 discount. 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 traveled to Israel. She even saved the fat from the chickens she cleaned to feed the birds in our backyard.
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 of the house. 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 “Yerushalayim shel Zahav.” I can’t help but cry myself when I hear that song and remember her love for the Jewish homeland.
Going through smaller things in the house took more time. Days of discovery turned into weeks, weeks into months. Just when we thought all the clutter was gone, we would discover another closet, another drawer.
I sifted through the possessions my mother cherished most — old letters, photographs, newspaper clippings and books — and 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 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.
I found stacks of old letters and cards in cabinet drawers. Some were bound with 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 more recent letters switched to English.
In our digital age, such correspondence is more than a quaint tribute 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.
But we did throw out political solicitations, calendars and posters with pictures of President Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and the two Presidents Bush. To know my mother was to know that she was an outspoken, passionate conservative consumed with the news, especially as it related to Israel.
Nor did I feel compelled to keep stashed away receipts or thank-you cards for donations to organizations and charities. My mother’s generosity and tzedakah were legendary.
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.
Interspersed in my mother’s writings were some of my own writings, dating back to our trip together to Gush Katif to protest the 2005 disengagement. My mother was my biggest fan and motivator.
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.
Perhaps because my mother’s moral rectitude, her dedication to her family, and her love of Klal Yisrael and Eretz Yisrael survive 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.