Objects of Affection by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough

       Objects of Affection is written by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough, an essayist, literary translator, and teacher at Emerson College. Ewa’s numerous essays have been published in The American Scholar, Ploughshares, and various other journals. This essay specifically, discusses Ewa’s attachment with antique objects. Ewa begins the essay by saying that such items, “Connect us to the past and its messy materiality by making the past more concrete”(167-168). Once this claim is made, Ewa recounts her time as a child in Communist Poland where due to the scarcity of items, everyone had to hold onto what was his or hers. In order to further substantiate her materiality Ewa provides an anecdote of her grandmother, whose possessions were all wiped away in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Ewa’s grandmother was shaped by the fact that all her possessions disappeared because along with them, memories were lost. Ewa uses this anecdote to show that she doesn’t want to lose everything as her grandmother did. Instead, Ewa now keeps things that her husband calls “junk” such as her, “Daughters’ newborn caps, their christening gowns…cards they wrote to me [her] on Mother’s Day”(174). Ewa’s purpose in writing about her attachment to objects is that she wants to inform the general public that keeping sentimental items can be rewarding. Ewa sums up the essay by pulling from story, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski. The story talks of a man who takes his personal items to a gas chamber despite knowing that he is going to get them taken from him. Ewa’s point in using this story is to show that, “Objects help us exorcise some of our fears...they give us semblance of permanence and grant a stay against chaos”(175). Pulling from this story helped me understand the power of objects. Overall, I think that this essay is well crafted and accomplishes its purpose of giving reason to keep sentimental items. After reading about Ewa’s grandmother, I realized how little I know about my family history and connected that to the fact that my family’s trinkets are in India. Moreover, the essay was insightful and Ewa accomplished her purpose.

Weird Cup By Carl Norwaydude

Some may see just a weird cup, however others may see a history of family memories encased in a small cup