From My Parents. Published by Hamish Hamilton in 2019.

When I write about my parents I’m compelled to claim that their displacement is the central event of their lives, what split everything into the before and the after. Everything after the rupture took place in a damaged, incomplete time—some of it was forever lost, and forever it shall so remain. Upon their arrival in Hamilton, they at first lived in a two-bedroom rental apartment on the fifteenth floor of a non-descript building, paid for by the Ontario government. Until they furnished the apartment with donated secondhand furniture, there was nothing in it. They took English classes with other refugees and immigrants, acquiring words for things they lost, didn’t have, or couldn’t understand. The very scarcity of possessions reminded them that they were foreigners living in someone else’s space, relatively comfortable as it might have been, and that their home space was now in the before, forever beyond their reach.

Back in Bosnia, my family possessed property; we had spaces we called our own. Not only did we live in an apartment that was pretty big by the standards of socialist housing, but we also had the Jahorina cabins. My parents loved the mountain; nearly every weekend, they were there, with or without their children. They insisted it was nature (always good for you) that drew them to Jahorina, but the primary value of the cabins was that Mama and Tata could keep busy. They are the kind of people who are always doing something, ever in the middle of a number of short- and long-term projects, the kind of people who believe they’ll die the day they have nothing to do. Thus Mama cleaned and organized the cabins, pickled vegetables, roasted peppers on an outdoor grill my father built, etc. Meanwhile, Tata had a workshop in the cabin basement; he’d build a nailless table; he’d restore an old chair, extending its life span indefinitely; he’d construct shelves for our Sarajevo apartment; he’d design and develop the who-knows-whats of handymen, which his unhandy son could never truly comprehend, let alone appreciate. Upon the return from Jahorina on Sunday, Mama would often complain that Tata was in the basement the whole time, except to eat and sleep. To Tata, that meant the weekend had been well spent.

Now I understand that on the mountain as well as in Sarajevo, they were perpetually invested in constructing their lives, in continuously defining and refining the space in which their lives unfolded. In a country marked by many generations of abysmal poverty, where socialism was the ideology of the day, there was little money to get the goodies; there were in fact few goodies to get. The quality of life had to be built from scratch—construction was more important than consumption. The vague, distant goal of my parents’ lifetime project was to enjoy a modest retirement living on Jahorina, a theme park of their hard work, where everything around them would speak of their time in the world.

With their displacement, they lost all that. At the beginning of their life in Hamilton they had to find work and learn the basic ways of being in North America, with no family, friends, or neighbors, confronting the illogical vagaries of the English language, plus ubiquitous cars and malls, and long, dreary winters devoid of mountains.

After a while, though, things started to look up a bit. First, more family arrived: two of my father’s brothers with their broods, some cousins, and even some friends. Now they could get together to reminisce about their previous life and pool their knowledge of and kvetch about the weird ways in which Canadians conducted their lives. Moreover, my parents got hired as superintendents in a forty-apartment building, which included a modest salary plus rent-free lodging. Mama cleaned, collected rent, kept things in order, and chitchatted with tenants as she used to with her Sarajevo neighbors, her disassembled English notwithstanding, while Tata did repairs in the building and took care of the garbage, all the while working in a factory at a job well below his engineer qualifications but just above his English skills.

Most important, the vast basement of the building was big enough for my father to carve out some space and set up a workshop. He not only constructed hives and frames there, but also restored the pieces of furniture the wasteful Canadians commonly dumped in the garbage he was in charge of managing. He even experimented with drying meat in the basement: he hung some pork, lightly smoked elsewhere, near a window with a ventilator. It was edible, but far from impressive, or even enjoyable, although he insisted it was as good as any dried meat.

The meat-drying debacle, however, pointed to one of the crucial issues related to my family’s displacement. They, as many immigrants do, identified themselves by way of the food they ate—food was one of the few conduits of continuity between the before and the after. Among my family in Canada and their friends, much time was spent debating dietary and other differences between “them” (Canadians) and “us” (people from Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia): “Their” bacon was soggy; “they” didn’t know how to make sausage; “their” sour cream was not thick enough; “they” didn’t eat things we ate; “they” were fat and incapable of truly enjoying life because “they” worried about getting fat all the time.

My father would occasionally return from a simple mission of fetching milk with a couple of lamb heads he discovered in the remote corners of the supermarket. He’d demand that my mother boil them, which she outright refused to do. Much of the lamb heads’ beyond-dog-food-factory afterlife was spent in the fridge, their eyes bulging in morbid surprise whenever it was opened. Tata would finally deal with Mama’s boycott by boiling the heads himself and then sit defiantly at the table to pick lamb brains with the tip of a knife. As my mother scoffed, he relished not only the alleged taste, but also the fact that lamb heads, given the pleasure they provided, were ridiculously cheap in Canada.

Because my parents had worked hard for everything that they would eventually lose, they were tormented by Canadian wastefulness. To them, and to Tata in particular, there were always so many uses for things nobody seemed to want. Once, the real estate company that employed them decided to replace a large number of old refrigerators in the building, their warranty life span ending. My father was thus instructed to remove the fridges from the apartments and leave them by the garbage shed, where they’d be picked up and taken away to a dump. He could not get over all those good, perfectly functioning fridges ending up in a scrap heap—to his poverty-conditioned mind the waste was unimaginable. He talked to everyone he knew in Hamilton, beginning with his family, to ask if they needed another fridge; he called me in Chicago, only to be disappointed that I had no need for extra refrigeration. Mama, a pathologically honest person, was beside herself over his trying to give away someone else’s property. She begged me to interfere, but I couldn’t help, as I was not, I hasten to admit, up to the task of dealing with the difficult ethical conundrum the situation presented: Does waste still rightfully belong to someone who wasted it?

The fridge overabundance, however, offered a possible solution to the smoked meat problem. At a family get-together, my father and his brothers spontaneously brainstormed: suppose they take two of those old fridges, rip out the plastic lining, put them on top of each other, drill a hole in between and another one on top, attach an improvised tin chimney, then stick the chimney out the basement window—thus they could smoke meat in the basement! My mother was desperate, and complained to me that their obsession with smoking meat blinded them to the laws and civilized customs of Canada. There was nothing I could do. Fortunately, the project was canceled when they discovered a farm outside Hamilton owned by a Slovenian, where they could personally select their animal before it was slaughtered and smoked.