In this intimate memoir, Ruth Rosengarten explores the subject of memory and how it attaches to objects. Such objects serve as relics or tokens, souvenirs or keepsakes, becoming memorials to past selves and lost loves. But if what we call a self is constituted by memory, it is also the cracks and flaws in our memory, Rosengarten urges, that certain objects address.

Deploying the notion of evocative objects as things through which to think and feel, Ruth Rosengarten touches on her family’s migrations, her experiences of loss, the relationship between the two facets of her work as a visual artist and writer, and what the idea of legacy might mean for a woman without descendants. Memory work, she argues, entails an excavation and bricolage of documentary evidence, material traces, speculation and invention. Practicing a form of free association, Rosengarten brings her readings of works of literature and visual art into the mix.

Addressing love, loss and longing, these essays offer an interdisciplinary approach to collecting and compiling life fragments through the material entities that come to embody them. This book is sure to engage anyone stimulated by memory work and the compulsion both to collect and to declutter.

endorsements

Photographs, shopping lists, cigarette lighters, locks of hair, glasses, dentures— the stuff of a life lived and remembered across the times and spaces of exile and migration. Second Chance invites us to go back to the things we have saved, enriched by Rosengarten’s deep reflections on our lives with things.

Marianne Hirsch, Author of The Generation of Postmemory

Exquisite, expansive and achingly tender, Rosengarten navigates memory, loss and human consciousness in a way which is both deeply original and entirely lacking in sentimentality. I loved it.

Julie Myerson, Author of Nonfiction

I have been reading this melancholy and life-enhancing book at a time of mourning in my own life. Ruth Rosengarten has beamed rays of solace and solidarity into my heart and mind. The process Freud called cathexis is illuminated by a writer whose hard-won lucidity and mature wisdom shine out on page after page. In a book saturated with love and sorrow, something like hope emerges from the author’s ability—an uncanny dialectic of reason and emotion as well as a synthesis of her remarkable visual and verbal gifts—to recover the past from evocative objects, synecdoches for loved ones whose future is literally in our hands. The author’s own recovery depends on the recovery of objects. Even so, time never stops not passing, in the phrase of Lanzmann, who would have loved this book. Absence and presence are one. Ruth Rosengarten’s beautiful work is what Paul Celan called a Zeitgehöft, a homestead of time, indeed a Timestead. In the land of lost content, Barthes and Sontag, Sebald and Boltanski, Hiller and Bourgeois smile their approval at this work of love, a making of distinctiveness and distinction.

Anthony Rudolf, Author of Journey Around my Apartment and Silent Conversations

The opening words…

SITUATING

I was a child, perhaps eleven or twelve years old, when it occurred to me that there existed a link between things—I mean physical things, material objects—and grief. That realisation seeped through me like a blooming of ink when I understood that the cat had gone but the water bowl remained. Imbued with a no-longer-usefulness, that water bowl was imprinted with absence. Previously a mute and unexceptional object, it had been transformed into an emblem of sorrow, a fetish occupying the site of loss.

This was maybe two or three years after I realised for the first time that one day, not only would my parents be dead, but also: my younger brother, my newly born sister and I myself. We would all, one day, be dead. There would be no 'I' to think thoughts or fret or know things. How to think about nothing, an absence in the place of this vital knot of feelings that was me?

Thinking of my future deadness (and of course, this is me, now, thinking of my past-future deadness), I knew (I know) that what mattered to me about that cat’s water bowl—about all my future dogs’ bowls and chewed toys (the ones that look like roadkill), the special pencil stub and musty handkerchief with its stencil of my mother’s lipstick lips; boxes of letters and photographs; my father’s hairbrush and Seven Star diary; that battered edition of The Mersey Sound, with its too-long, childish dedication in the hand of a  friend who was my idol and my rival; the talismanic trinkets (a brooch in the shape of a pig, a tin St Christopher) given by lovers and now signifying nothing so much as the loss of love, as though one could ever have really possessed it—what mattered about those things would evaporate with the extinguishing of my consciousness. Someone will one day throw all that away.

Without me, it will become mere stuff, junk.