Here’s a good piece by Elizabeth Rosner (Blue Nude, The Speed of Light) on Common Ties, about family history, and family heirlooms, and the way we carry our past with us into the present. Of her mother, Rosner writes:

And I can still remember the girlish pleasure on her face when she described riding on a horse-drawn sleigh through the deep snows to her grandparents’ house in the Polish countryside, where the table was always set with embroidered linens and cut crystal.

All of those luxuries my mother would have inherited — the finery that would have made up her dowry — everything was lost when the Nazis invaded Poland. My mother’s family was sent, with all of the other Jews of Vilna, into the ghetto. Overnight they were forced out of their elegant villa and onto the street, carrying only a mattress and some bare necessities. One of the few stories she ever managed to share about how she made it all the way through the war featured a bag of gold coins that she wore around her neck, along with some pieces of her family’s jewelry that she used to pay the Polish peasants who hid her in their cellar, after the ghetto had been liquidated. She was 13 years old.