take the candlesticks and go

On The Things We Carry

The pack-it-and-run menorah we bought in 2002.

The year that Susan and I had our first commitment ceremony — Middlebury, Vermont, 2002, a few weeks after my father died in a car accident, just us and a Justice of the Peace — we decided to buy a very small Italian filigree menorah that, if you turn it upside down, doubles as tiny Sabbath candlesticks. We actually didn’t buy this for religious reasons — I was raised and remain secular (and more agnostic than not), and Susan was brought up in a devoutly Catholic home and went on years later to walk in meditation with Thích Nhất Hạnh in Washington DC — but because owning holiday candlesticks traditionally goes hand-in-hand with stepping into the next part of one’s life, at least in my family. My mother, for example, was given her mother’s silver wedding candlesticks when she married my father, in 1962; my paternal grandmother passed along her silver wedding candlesticks most likely to my aunt, who then passed them on to one of her daughters, or granddaughters. I’m guessing there were also my great-grandmother’s wedding candlesticks that she packed up when she left Europe in 1901, and those are who knows where. My mother still has my grandmother’s candlesticks, and I assume I will take possession of them when the time comes. But in 2002, with nothing passed along to us, we decided to buy them ourselves to mark the occasion.

I believe that the emotional plight and trauma of refugees are interchangeable; most people don’t flee because they want to, but because they have to, be it from war and oppression, starvation or fire, and something or someone will almost always get left behind.

I have ever since referred to it as the pack it and run menorah because that is what so many of my forebears had to do, with very little warning. If you have to go, what do you take? If you’re in Ukraine or Warsaw or (my grandfather’s little village of) Novvy Yaarchev; Saigon or Somalia or Gaza; Guatamala or Galway or wherever, and you need to leave in a hurry, what do you choose? I remember reading Andrea Nguyen’s story about her family fleeing Vietnam, and her mother taking the notebook that contained all of the family recipes so that she could not only feed her children and husband wherever they went, but so she would have a gastronomical record of their history.

Some years ago, a story hit the news about an apartment in Paris that had been discovered as-is in 2010. When the woman who owned it died at 92, her family learned that she had inherited it from her grandmother, who had lived during the Belle Epoque period. Madame de Florian, as the former was known, apparently locked up the apartment in 1942 and fled for the South of France, never to return. When the story emerged and with it, the photos that made it look like she’d just gone out to run a quick errand — the peeling wallpaper, the seven decades of dust covering everything — the press seemed to mull over the question: what was the story behind the mystery?

The mystery?

No mystery. The Nazis marched into Paris in 1942, and Madame de Florian dropped what she was doing — literally — and ran. Maybe her phonograph was still playing. Maybe she was making dinner. Whatever she was doing, though, was less important than getting out and getting out fast. She closed the door behind her and left.

What did she take, if anything? A photo or two? Jewelry? Money sewn into her clothes? Candlesticks?

Who would ever willingly want to do such a thing?

A few years ago, while sitting in Susan’s cousin’s house in western Massachusetts, I noticed a tiny Irish linen gown and cap hanging on a wall above the table. Who had it belonged to, I asked. Every one of Susan’s Turner relatives had been christened in it, including her father, uncles, aunt, and many cousins. An ancestor leaving Ireland had thought to take it. I have no idea what else they took, but they took that. Of course they did; it was a connection to each other, to history and forebears, to devotion, to furthering the line. (What did that day look like? I can hear a Turner ancestor’s broad Irish accent: take the crucifix from the bedroom, Elizabeth, and the christening gown, the bible, and the china wedding plates.)

When you see images of families wheeling carts or carrying suitcases — I believe that the emotional plight and trauma of refugees are interchangeable; people don’t flee because they want to, but because they have to be it from war and oppression, or fire, and something or someone will almost always get left behind — you have to wonder: what are they taking with them? Stories abound of women sewing jewelry into their clothes to use as bribes to get from place to place unharmed, or at least alive. My well-to-do Russian friend’s family did the same thing during the Revolution, but sadly, it didn’t make a difference. When the flames roared up the canyons of Los Angeles and into the streets of Altadena, people of every hue and background and socioeconomic standing grabbed what they could and fled. Like my Russian friend’s family, it didn’t make a difference.

Often, I will find myself listening to the news and sitting on the couch with the dog and the cats and Susan, surrounded by books and guitars and furniture and all the things we love and that make our home and history what they are, and I wonder: what would we take. The tiny Italian filigree candlestick we bought ourselves to mark our commitment to each other, and to building a family together? A guitar? Which one? Our beloved animals? Of course. But would we have time?

Do we have time?