Facts & Arguments is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.
Day One. I started with the most difficult task: my father's study. On the bookshelf sat his prized possession: a set of black-and-gold Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias. It was not a luxury set and the spines were badly broken from decades of intensive use. My father was an autodidact. Expelled from the gymnasium when the Nazis annexed Vienna in 1938, he had no formal schooling past the eighth grade. I had been a know-it-all child and our disputes were settled by pulling the appropriate volume off the shelf. He was usually right.
I unlocked the antique steamer trunk in the basement. It contained books in German that belonged to his parents. As a teenager, my father spent long days digging out stumps and rocks in a farmer's field, and, after work, he would read Goethe or Mann to his younger brother. In Genoa, Italy, they overstayed their transit visas. My grandmother, who had converted to Judaism the day after the Anschluss, decided it would be better to be an undocumented immigrant in Fascist Italy than to board a steamer to Shanghai. When the foreign Jews in Genoa were rounded up, my father's family was interned in the village of Anzi in the south.
Day Two: The sale was supposed to begin at 9 a.m., but the first knock came at 7:30. In five minutes, all of the mid-century-modern furniture was being professionally wrapped and carried out the door. The dealer, a man whose look was somewhere between aging hippie and Hells Angel, said it was beautiful stuff that would be worth a lot more if it had the designer's mark. He was surprised when I told him my father made it. I didn't mention that this was during a period of intense creativity after his breakdown, hospitalization and electroshock therapy.
My grandfather arrived in the new world too damaged by the loss of his language, his business and his brothers and sisters, so his older son had no choice but to carry the load, which he struggled to bear. These are not the stories people want to hear. We celebrate immigrants who suffer unimaginable horrors and emerge unscathed, grateful for life and full of delight – not people who are prone to unseemly grief for what they lost.
Day Three: I began to understand why San Francisco called the garbage company Sunset Scavenger. In the seigneury of Google and Facebook, there were few actual scavengers. Our once working-class neighbourhood was filled with Audis and BMWs. No one replied to the ad on Craigslist for free firewood. In Toronto, anything we placed in front of our house would be gone within a few hours: the rusty panels of an old metal shed, Marxist theory books, a broken chair. In this neighbourhood of modest stucco houses, there was no interest in intact-but-slightly-threadbare armchairs or a dated-but-serviceable kitchen table. I felt the eyes of neighbours peering out at the unsightly assortment of objects on the sidewalk. We saw no one except dog walkers who stayed on the other side of the street.
My husband drove the cargo van to the Salvation Army, where the tattooed clerk made it clear they wouldn't accept just any items. When deciding who to bring on this trip, I had weighed the value of each family member with the ruthlessness of a sub-contractor for Wal-Mart. The kids were left behind – only a crazy person would bring teenagers to a house without WiFi – but I took a chance on my husband. At home, he could not figure out how to dispose of empty paint cans, make a kid's doctor appointment or call an electrician. But, like the hapless movie character who, when under fire, is transformed into an action hero, my husband managed to navigate the van through the hilly, circuitous streets of San Francisco to find the out-of-the-way places that would accept our National Geographics, fabric bolts and button collections.
Day Four: Torn between two powerful dispositions inherited from my father – parsimony and paranoia – I was uncertain whether to call the pricey but insured 1-800-GOT-JUNK or answer an ad on Craigslist. My father came by both of these dispositions honestly. In his teenage years, he never had new shoes or clothing and, as for the paranoia, his own father had been sent to Buchenwald after being denounced by a family friend who, according to family lore, took over his small grocery store.
I went with Craigslist and two Russian men arrived in a truck that looked like something out of The Grapes of Wrath. The guy in charge was straight out of central casting: muscular with a square, ruddy face and a slightly menacing demeanour. The second man was extremely thin, with long blond hair in a ponytail. We all worked together loading the truck.
"Do these paintings go to the dump?" asked the blond.
"I don't know," I said. They were painted by my father's best friend, Merv, who had died of cancer 10 years earlier.
"They are beautiful. This one reminds me of a painting in my mother's house."
"Does she live here, too?" I asked.
"No," he replied. "I came here by myself a few months ago. I was at the university in Moscow and organized a demonstration against Putin. It was like Tiananmen Square except no one cared. I couldn't even go back home to get some things."
"Would you take the painting?" I asked.
He nodded. I gave them the last of the cash from the estate sale. Everything was gone. They drove away.
Margaret Kohn lives in Toronto.