Part II: My Baggage Starts Rumbling

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1968.

My brown valise, the one you met in one of my early tales of immigration, kept quiet for a long time. It had been my trusted companion when in 1968 I arrived alone on a hot summer day in Troy, upstate New York. It was next to me waiting to climb the steep hill to the Rensselaer Polytechnic campus. As we stood at the foothill it sensed the wave of loneliness and existential angst that almost drowned me. It must have heard me thinking, What am I doing? . . . How did I get here? But it said nothing. It was my silent mate as I carried it up the hill toward my new life.

The road from that first day, when I swallowed my anxiety, gritted my teeth, and climbed the hill, to my becoming an American fifteen years later, was paved with one accomplishment after another: a Bachelor’s from RPI, a PhD from Harvard, a law degree and license, a firm with my name on it. Heady successes.

And for years the hushed valise kept watching me from down in the basement. It and I were far away from Buenos Aires, from my childhood home, my country, my friends. Far away from the graves where my parents were buried. The stoic valise, filled with childhood pain, remained quiet for a long time. Until it didn’t.

So far I have told you little of my childhood in BA, my early life with my parents, and their premature death when I was barely out of boyhood. I still have plenty of stories of my 40 years as a US biotech lawyer and I have written a separate book that collects many of them. It’s called Patenting Life: Tales from the Front Lines of Intellectual Property and the New Biology and it will be coming out in January 2025. But for now, let’s go back to Buenos Aires and let me start telling you about what I left behind – and what I brought with me.

My parents had escaped the Old World, Dad from Ottoman Smyrna in the 1920s and Mom from Austro-Hungarian Vienna in the 1930s. The two empires where they were born and raised had collapsed after the First War. For Mom, things were dangerous when, ahead of the Nazi Anschluss, the annexation of Austria into Germany, she escaped Vienna in 1938. Dad had left Smyrna earlier, a few years after its destruction in 1922 by the armies of Kemal Pasha Atatürk.

They found refuge and met in BA, a pretend European city near the ends of the Earth. There, alone, they married late in life, brought me into the world in the 1940s, and there they both died in the 1960s, she when I was eleven, and he when I was eighteen.  They left me in BA with no relatives and a meager knowledge of their history. There I buried them, in Tablada, the Jewish Cemetery outside the city. And a month after my nineteenth birthday, I went off to America to study chemistry.

In the Queen of the River Plate, la Reina del Plata, as we porteños call the city,  my parents left behind the home they had created and, in it, a whole bunch of things. Some things were tangible, like photos, rings, or silverware, and some were intangible, like the melody of a Viennese waltz or the taste of a meal. With adolescent shortsightedness, I got rid of most objects before leaving. I gave them away, threw them out, or, in a few instances, kept them - but out of sight for many years. The few meager things that I kept or remembered, or that I have recovered over time, have marked my attempt as a grown man, decades after their deaths, to get to better know my parents and to remember my childhood.

In one of my last weeks in Buenos Aires, now alone in my childhood apartment, I was perched on a ladder, rummaging through my parents' bedroom upper closet, a space that had always been off limits. I saw, way in the back, an oversized cylindrical hatbox containing two feathered hats like those that women wore in the 1940s and, as I pulled this box away, behind it, two smaller square boxes that appeared to contain papers and photos. I had seen the hatbox before, years earlier when Mom was still alive and she had tried the hats on for me. I must have been nine or ten years old then. One hat was in the shape of a medium-sized cake, covered in dark green satin, its brim decorated all around with shiny jewels. It had a black veil that could be lowered over the wearer’s eyes to make her appear mysterious, like a dame in a Bogart movie. The other hat was black, and I remembered a photo where Mom wore it with a smile. It had a large red and orange feather from a bird of paradise sticking straight up at the front. I touched and smelled both hats trying to recapture the feel of Mom’s skin and of her smell. Then, with nary a thought as to why Dad had kept it hidden up there since her death six years earlier, I closed the box and tossed it from the ladder to my parents’ bed below.

The second box caught my attention. I brought it down the ladder with me, sat on the bed and examined its contents. Inside was an old album. I turned its brown pages slowly. Some of them contained photos of people I didn’t know and photos of what appeared to be graves in a cemetery that I had never seen. The few writings seemed to be in Greek, which I recognized from math class. Following the photos were pages with newspaper clippings, mostly of La Nación, the Argentine daily that Dad liked to read. The dates were from the early forties and the clippings were mostly about the second world war, especially of military campaigns and Allies’ victories. Another one of those things Dad didn’t talk about, I thought, annoyed, and tossed the album aside. It went straight into the trash, together with the hatbox.

I then went through every nook and cranny of our apartment – by then, my apartment – and got rid of whatever stuff I didn’t want to save or take abroad. Now that Dad had also died, I was alone in BA, with no family. I had no brothers or sisters, no grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins in Argentina. Only Nilda remained, our live-in maid of fifteen years. I had made up my mind that I would sell the apartment, take no more than a few clothes and books, and emigrate to America. I would give away or trash most of my home. I was in a great hurry: to empty out and close the place, to erase my past eighteen years, to pack my bags, and fly off as far away as possible. Mine was an adolescent haste to re-set my life and start again.

With great detachment, I picked what would stay and what would go. I condemned this object to the trash, Left, and that one to go with me, Right. I created a third pile, used for objects I would give away to my friends or to my extended “family” of Tantes and Onkels, the expat Austro-Hungarian Aunties and Uncles who had been my parents’ friends.

An oil painting that Mom loved? Left, to the trash, together with her hats.

Dad’s mate gourds? Left. Except for two that would go into the valise and with me to Troy. 

Kitchen dishes? A needlepointed tablecloth? Center. For Nilda.

Dad’s shiny Turkish coffee pots? Left. Too bulky.

His Emerson transistor radio? Right. To Troy. It was now mine and went into the valise.

My chemistry books? Left.

Dad’s pipes and tobacco humidors? Center. For my friend Rodolfo, a collector of exotic things.  

The Periodic Table from my first year at the University School of Sciences? Right.

And thus, item by item, went my thoughtless rush to riddance.

Mom’s tea set and silver tongs? Center. For Mom’s best friend Tante Rosl.

Dad’s cufflinks and key chains? Right. They were small; so, into the valise.

My Revell airplanes and ships? My shiny red accordion? Dad’s favorite Parker pen? Left.

It was mostly Left, Left, Left. Very little came along.

Dad’s Radius kerosene stove? Center. To my friend Micky for his camping trips.

Mom’s little ceramic kittens? Right. Into a velvet bag with her engagement ring and the rest of their jewelry.

Everything that had been theirs, mine, ours, that had been my childhood, their lives, my life: all of it was organized roughly into three corners of the emptying apartment. No one said to me, “Put it all in storage, someday you'll want to hold these things. You'll want to again hold your parents in your hands.” No one said it, certainly not I.

Looking back, it all feels like a blaze, like my own private bonfire. I was determined to expunge all that pain from memory. That day in Buenos Aires started an erasure that went on for many years. It lasted until the day when my trusted brown valise, still carrying the objects from years earlier, started rumbling. The rumble woke me up to the futility of running from the past and the damage that it was causing me and those around me. By then I was lucky to have even faint memories of the objects’ existence . . . if I remembered them at all.

***

The one thing that I did bring to the US was a box of photos. Mom and Dad had several albums so, before leaving BA I extracted the photos, put them in a box, and the box went Right, into the valise. The ghostly books, filled only with neatly arranged corner stickies holding up shadows, went to the trash. Left.

I’m glad I brought the box of photos. They and the objects would eventually become the core of my life-long quest to remember my parents, to get to know them better, and, through them, to bring back my childhood. The photos and objects took me, piece by piece, from the adolescent frenzy of that bonfire to a deep and adult love for the folks who gave me life. And they also created a profound empathy for the kid who tried to run away from it all.

The things I unearthed from the valise, or that I recovered, are tiny: a lock of baby hair; a pair of ceramic kittens; Mom’s engagement ring and her sugar tongs; Dad’s cufflinks and his pipes. But it’s not their size or their material value that matters. It’s the stories they tell me that matter. Cormac McCarthy said it best in The Crossing: “Things separate from their stories have no meaning.” Through these small things I will now tell you some of the stories and share with you the joy of again holding my parents in my hands.