Do you collect Ukrainian folk art? Is your house crammed with Hutsul rugs, ceramic cups and saucers, vases, carved and inlaid wooden bowls and boxes, pysanky, embroidered shirts and pillows?
Permit me, then, an indiscreet question. What will happen to it all when you die? Do you think your descendants will preserve it for eternity? With all due respect for your ability to imbue your progeny with your passion for all things Ukrainian – don’t count on it. Well before you leave this world, you may find yourself downsizing from house to condominium, from condo to assisted living, thence to a skilled nursing facility and finally a hospice. Along the way, your family may decide that all that “stuff” their eccentric elder has hoarded needs to be gotten rid of, the sooner the better. Or perhaps the movers will kindly relieve you of some of those burdensome boxes of junk. Once you’re gone, of course, the relics of happier times will likely be dumped as quickly as possible. There are plenty of stories of valuable artworks and even historical documents ending up on the trash heap.
You can, of course, prepare. You can specify in your will that your executor will donate certain items of artistic value to institutions like The Ukrainian Museum in New York or the Ukrainian Museum and Library of Stamford, Conn. Historically significant documents could go to the archive of the latter institution, to the Immigration History Research Center in Minneapolis, or to the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard. Of course, you should first check whether they are interested. Your will or trust could refer to a separate list of items, which should be kept together with your copy of the document. (Before making any such disposition, you should consult your attorney.)
But what of the other “stuff” you have collected – the Ukrainian kitsch, the statuettes, wooden dolls, whistles, nutcrackers, shot glasses, leaflets, beer coasters, postcards, theater programs, train and bus tickets, and such? Are they worth preserving? In his novel “The Museum of Innocence” (2008), Orhan Pamuk’s hero, Kemal, surreptitiously collects items connected with the object of his obsessive love, hoarding them in a spare apartment – hairpins, teacups, lottery tickets, matchbooks, even cigarette butts smeared with lipstick (4,213 of them) – and eventually opens a museum to exhibit them. Many items have labels specifying the dates, places and incidents with which they are connected. As one reads, one wonders how to reconcile the fictitiousness of the story with the fact that the author has actually opened a “Museum of Innocence” in Istanbul. The book even contains an admission ticket. Mr. Pamuk cleverly resolves this mystery at the end, though one is still left guessing…
If you are reluctant to pay good money to see someone’s collection of bric-a-brac, you may want to reconsider the value of your own. If you were to turn your garage, say, into a “Museum of Guilt,” exhibiting your collections of stamps, coins, bottle-corks, commemorative pins, concert programs, business cards and boarding passes, why would anyone want to visit it, besides the enforcers from the homeowners’ association? And yet, there is a compulsion to keep these trinkets, which help to preserve the past. “The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them,” writes Mr. Pamuk, “and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory…” (Chapter 58). They become a part of our lives, and thus of us. If someone throws them away, we feel hurt. We may even begin to perceive these objects as living things. Kemal becomes fascinated by the little china dogs that his ex-lover’s family place on their television set, and keeps track of their fate. “I get upset to see things thrown away and forgotten,” he says. “They say the Chinese used to believe that things had souls” (Chapter 65).
It is upsetting, indeed, to think of long-departed Ukrainian artifacts. One can at least hope that some are in good hands, such as that Carpathian carpet from Kosiv with decorative stags leaping in the forest, given to a Latino moving man who was reminded of his native designs. But what became of that Hutsul porcelain whistle in the guise of a winsome pony? And was your grandmother’s little wooden icon buried with her?
But it is not only folk art that we treasure as a part of our personal and collective histories. Where is that 1930s bronze and marble desk set engraved with a message of appreciation from your grandfather’s colleagues, or the engraved name plate from his office, last seen halfway around the world in a cabin in the Sierras? You still miss the coffee strainer from your grandparents’ household in Poland, bearing a rhyming 1920s advertising slogan for Francka coffee, which disappeared during one of your many moves.
And surely all those photographs were worth preserving too: your grandfather in wool cap and greatcoat in front of a painted studio background in Zolochiv in 1919, or your parents’ photo album of happy (if hungry) students promenading about bombed-out Vienna or hiking in the Alps. You wish you still had the little souvenir album from the Tatra mountains, commemorating your grandmother’s sojourn at a sanatorium for tuberculars sometime in the 1920s, each photo specifying in meters the altitude of a mountain or the depth of a lake. You long treasured your other grandfather’s General Gouvernement identity pass, stamped with swastikas that so fascinated your schoolmates (“Was your grandfather a Nazi?”). And what of ephemera like the postcards from Kamianets Podilskyi, or the program from a performance of “Don Giovanni” with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf at the Theater an der Wien in 1947 (the Opera House having been destroyed by Allied bombers)? Shouldn’t we keep such things?
Perhaps they will enjoy a secondary existence in antique stores or thrift shops, if not museums or archives. But in the long run, all such memorabilia are destined for the landfills of America – and, like ourselves, to oblivion.