At NDQ, we don’t do much to lobby for particular essays, stories, or poems when it comes to the various literary magazine and small press awards. This is mostly because we think all of our contributions deserve recognition and that the arts is an area where competition may do more to obscure the good work that does not receive accolades than to celebrate the good work that does.

That said, we’re always excited when an essay is recognized. Erica Goss’s essay “Talismans” which appeared in NDQ 89.1/2 received recognition as a “notable essay” in 2023 Best American Essays edited by Vivian Gornick. To celebrate this, we are posting the essay here for your appreciation!

Talismans

When I was growing up, my mother stashed little bits of food around our house: dried cheese rinds, heels of bread, and browning apple cores with a bite or two left. I’d find these tiny stockpiles hidden in the kitchen under a stack of napkins or in the glove compartment of our car, next to a rinsed-out pickle jar filled with water. Sometimes I found a single square of chocolate nibbled around the edges or a half-eaten piece of Brach’s taffy tucked behind the flour sack. My mother rarely hid fresh, new edibles—the food I found was almost ready for the trash, scraps that anyone else would have thrown away.

I didn’t question this behavior as a child; it was just a thing my mother did. A little weird, maybe, but harmless. For all I knew, everyone’s mother hid little snacks for later. Wasting food was forbidden in our house, and I internalized the message that nothing remotely edible, no matter how unappealing, should ever be discarded. More than once, my mother rescued and re-served food that I tried to sneak into the garbage. I wrote about that in a poem titled “Scraps,” which begins with the following lines:

When I was seven food I threw away

reappeared on my plate each day until I ate it,
blubbering, licking tears

from the corners of my mouth.

By the time I was a teenager, I’d been to enough friends’ homes to learn that my mother’s little food collections were, to say the least, unusual. At other people’s houses, I didn’t see a greasy paper bag with a lone French fry stuck to the bottom next to the toaster, or a half-cup of cold tea with a sliver of stale bread hardening in the saucer. I knew, albeit vaguely, that there was more to my mother’s behavior than staving off hunger. After all, we never lacked for food when I was growing up. Something deeper was going on, something I didn’t comprehend for many

*

In 1946, my mother was a nine-year-old child living in post-war Germany. The winter of 1946, nicknamed the “Hungerwinter,” delivered a cascade of misfortunes: a bad harvest, record low temperatures, and a coal shortage. In many large German cities, including Cologne, where my mother lived, daily caloric intake dropped to below one thousand calories per person per day. Many people died, and the survivors lived in a state of semi-starvation for years.

The humiliated, defeated German public could expect little sympathy from its conquerors. In 1945, General Lucius Clay echoed the world’s opinion: “I feel that the Germans should suffer from hunger and from cold, as I believe such suffering is necessary to make them realize the consequences of a war which they caused.” That same year, journalist Isaac Deutscher, writing for The Economist, made this observation about the Germans he saw on the street: “What is noticeable is not the leanness, not even the general tiredness, but the complexion. The faces of the babies in the strollers are deathly white; small children are yellow.”

During my childhood, my mother said little about those terrible years. Once, however, she shared a story from the Hungerwinter: as her grandmother divided up the family’s food portions for the day, she wept, saying that she would trade all of her jewelry for just one slice of bread. The family spent the winter of 1946 resting in bed, avoiding any excess, calorie-burning activities. My mother never forgot her grandmother’s hands, adorned with sparkling rings, tucking her in on freezing winter nights.

CARE (Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere) packages from the American Quakers supplemented the meager rations my mother’s family survived on during the Hungerwinter. Not everyone got CARE packages. My mother’s family received them because a friend of her father’s had written to the Quakers on the family’s behalf. My mother once told me of the time when she accompanied her father to the post office to retrieve one of the boxes of food. Weakened and gaunt from the Hungerwinter and the year he spent in an American prisoner-of-war camp, her father lost consciousness as he bent to hoist the box onto his shoulder. “He was embarrassed that he’d fallen down. He jumped right back up,” my mother told me. “The postmistress rushed over to help him, but he waved her off.”

*

In 2015, while on a trip to Cologne, I took the train east across Germany to visit my cousin, who lives just outside Berlin. We went to the Allied Museum in the Steglitz-Zehlendorf neighborhood, a favorite place of mine and one I always return to whenever I’m in Germany. Built in the former American sector, the museum sits on the Clayallee, or Clay Alley, named after the same General Lucius Clay quoted above. The museum’s courtyard features a Berlin Airlift-era British Hastings TG 503. This small plane and many others made hundreds of trips into Soviet-occupied Berlin as part of the Airlift (also known as “Operation Vittles”), providing 1,534 tons of food to two million people every day for more than a year.

General Clay gave the order for the Berlin Airlift in 1948. Perhaps his attitude towards starvation had softened, or maybe the threat of losing West Berlin to the Soviets changed his mind about letting people suffer. In any case, the Berlin Airlift remains one of history’s greatest acts of humanity.

A photograph in the museum shows a group of boys in short pants standing on a pile of rubble, hands lifted in the air, waving to a plane as it flies overhead.

*

As usual when I visited the museum, I headed to the back of the main exhibition room, past the enormous photographs of rubble-filled streets, preserved Wehrmacht fatigues, and maps of the occupation zones in yellow, pink, and blue. Finally I stood in front of the glass cases holding the museum’s collection of CARE packages. These were from the Berlin Airlift, but I felt sure that the ones my mother’s family received in 1946 looked exactly the same. Each package contained a sheet of paper with a message printed on it. I translated part of the message from the original German:

“A friend from America (or Canada or Brazil, etc.) sends you this package. This package is a gift. You are not to incur any costs, nor do you need to trade food stamps for it. We hope you enjoy it. The content is put together according to your needs. Your friend would like you to write to him and let him know that the package arrived, and how much you enjoyed it. We wish you much happiness!”

Next to these words, diagrams showed a stack of coins and a ration card booklet, both crossed out.

Nothing prepared me for the emotions I experienced when I saw, for the first time, those cardboard boxes with their rusting cans of powdered milk and Maxwell House coffee, along with waxed paper-wrapped boxes of Kirkman Borax Soap and Cream of Wheat cereal. An odd sensation, part relief, part recognition, washed over me as I stood there, the weapons of war on one side of me and these humble boxes, purchased for $10 apiece, on the other. Deep in my bones, I knew that I might very well be alive and standing here in this museum because of packages like these, paid for with donations from Americans (or Canadians or Brazilians) who wanted to help the starving children in Germany, including the nine-year-old girl who became my mother.

After my visit in 2015, I wrote these lines in a poem titled “At the Museum of the Western Allies”:

when I saw the contents

of a CARE package, the rusting cans

of meat, cheese, fruit, vegetables, coffee,

sugar, butter, condensed milk, cornflakes

I leaned against the glass display case

to hide my tears as my mouth watered.

At that moment, with tears stinging my eyes, the memory of my mother’s little food-hoards popped into my brain. Maybe they were CARE packages she sent to herself, assurances that she would live to see another day, would make it to a future where starvation no longer threatened. It didn’t matter that my mother had survived and emigrated to America, nor did it matter that she now had more than enough to eat. She kept hiding those bits of dry bread, squares of chocolate nibbled around the edges, and morsels of cheese curled inside red wax wrappers; just because there was plenty to eat now didn’t mean there would be later.

*

“Scraps,” the poem I wrote about my mother’s food hoarding, ends with these stanzas:

At seventeen I drove until I lost sight of you

and flung my lunch from the blue Toyota, watched
it burst open, orange rolling away from the dented

sandwich, the small box of raisins intact.

I did not see you pick up scraps of paper bag
and wet bread hours later.

Had I only known,

I might have been a better daughter.
I might still be your child.  

The poem encapsulates my teenage rebellion, my impatience at my mother’s relentless hoarding, and my ignorance of its origins. Had I only known, indeed. By then, the damage to our relationship, painful and permanent, was done. The years to come would be filled with misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and unkind comments, as my mother’s worsening PTSD occupied her mind and spirit, deepening the wounds between us. My flinging of the sack lunch, with its withered sandwich and sticky box of raisins, symbolized my wish to live my life free of her, unencumbered with the burden of those endless reminders, the meaning of which I didn’t yet comprehend.

I wanted, finally, to throw something away.

*

The Berlin Airlift’s last plane flew on October 6, 1949. The Soviet Blockade had failed, mass starvation was averted, and West Berlin remained in the Allies’ territory. On the other side of Germany, my mother’s family regained some small amounts of normalcy: schools reopened, the family house—destroyed by a phosphorus bomb in 1943—was almost ready for occupancy, and food supplies in most of Germany and the rest of Europe had increased.

The scars of hunger, however, remained. As Kathryn Hulme, deputy director of a displaced persons camp in Bavaria, wrote at the end of 1945:

“It is hard to believe that some shiny little tins of meat paste and sardines could almost start a riot…that bags of Lipton’s tea and tins of Varrington House coffee and bars of vitaminized chocolate could drive men almost insane with desire. But this is so. This is as much a part of the destruction of Europe as are those gaunt ruins of Frankfurt. Only this is the ruin of the human soul. It is a thousand times more painful to see.”

*

It’s taken me most of my life to accept my mother’s relationship with food, although I will never truly understand what she went through as a child. The children of war survivors know that much of what happened to our parents is simply too terrible for them to share, bringing up memories better left buried. Quite often, we learn more from our parents’ behavior than from what they say. Even if she said little about it in actual words,

those pieces of food my mother saved told the story about the starving she endured, a fact that eluded me for so long.

Starvation imprints itself in the human psyche, leaving indelible memories, the “ruin of the human soul,” as Hulme put it. My mother’s food stashes were her talismans, her lucky charms, with which she reenacted survival, over and over. Her hoarding was also a link to the past, a past lived minute by minute, morsel by morsel, calorie by calorie. Her survival meant my survival. Each little collection of random bits of food reaffirmed her persistence through the dark tunnel of her childhood.

I can never throw that away.

 

References

Ambrose, Stephen and Bischof, Günter. Eisenhower and the German POWS: Facts Against Falsehood. Louisiana State University Press, 1992: Quote from General Lucius Clay.

Bode, Sabina. Die vergessene Generation (The Forgotten Generation). Klett-Cotta, 2004.

Goss, Erica. “Scraps.” Innisfree Journal, 2010. http://authormark.com/artman2/publish/Innisfree_25ERICA_GOSS.shtml

Goss, Erica. “At the Museum of the Western Allies.” Consequence Literary Journal, 2017.

Lowe, Keith. Savage Continent, Europe in the Aftermath of World War II. Picador, 2012: Quote from Kathryn Hulme.

~

Erica Goss is the winner of the 2019 Zocalo Poetry Prize. Her collection, Night Court, won the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press. Her flash essay, “Just a Big Cat,” was one of Creative Nonfiction’s top-read stories for 2021. Recent and upcoming publications include Oregon Humanities, Creative Nonfiction, Spillway, A-Minor, Redactions, Consequence, The Sunlight Press, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review, and Critical Read. Erica served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California, from 2013-2016. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she teaches, writes and edits the newsletter Sticks & Stones.

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