My grandfather, Morris, as I knew him, was not a fashionable man. So much of his wardrobe came from Costco that when he died in 2018, my mother had to dig through his closet to find something to bury him in that didn’t have a Kirkland Signature label. After he died, we found an old box of Kodak slides that stretched from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s. There we found photos of my grandfather (or Papo, as we called him) dressed as I’d never seen him, wearing a stately black blazer with a gold button or—to my absolute delight—a very ’70s pair of high-waisted plaid trousers. But by the time I was born, Papo could almost always be found wearing his signature outfit: a pale yellow polo or baby blue button-down, khakis, New Balance sneakers, and a navy Polo Ralph Lauren windbreaker.
After my grandmother, Dolores, died in 2019, I inherited a few of her belongings—some jewelry, her lipstick holder, and her cherished Burberry trench coat that she bought on a trip to London. But I didn’t have anything of Papo’s to remember him by. I wanted something that reminded me that, for 19 years, we existed on earth together. I worried that without a physical memento to ground me, my memories of him would fade. I was afraid of losing the sound of his voice, the taste of his homemade minestrone, the weight of a Ziploc bag of loose change he would give my brother and me to sort through. I also knew that without him, there was so much of his story that would go forever untold because, more than a beloved grandfather, Morris was also a Holocaust survivor.
