Toronto Globe and Mail, August 21, 1990
Uncle Meyer died in his sleep on August 4. He was 82 and lived with his wife in a north Toronto high-rise. He worked as a volunteer at an animal shelter. He went for long walks. He was a truly sweet guy, but not a very candid one. He didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve. He didn’t regale you with the “Uncle Meyer” story.
Except once. One night after dinner, Uncle Meyer brought out his photographs. I froze. This is the relative’s great fear: caught without defenses when the photographs come out.
Uncle Meyer did it perfectly. He just materialized at the dinner table, photos in hand. I felt myself struggling for an excuse. Weren’t we double-parked in a fire zone on a traffic island? Didn’t the sitter need a drive home to Rochester? Uncle Meyer had us. We bowed to the hard dictates of good form.
And there it was. Lying under the photographs was a wine-colored canvas wallet, about the size of a paperback. It was stitched together boldly, and in places crudely with thick green thread. “What’s this?” I asked, already in the object’s thrall. Uncle Meyer looked up at me and then back at the wallet. “Oh, that,” he said and stopped.
I picked it up, anthropologist on alert. The wallet was what we might call, after Proust, a “Madeleine” object: an object charged with meaning and power.
Madeleine objects have lots of powers. Sometimes they cut away the present time and place, and transport us—in Proust’s case to the embrace of a childhood bed and maternal attentions. But sometimes they have a different character altogether. Sometimes they come at us airborne and night-flying.
Uncle Meyer’s wallet was one of these. It reached up and gave me a crack across the snout. The last time I’d seen anything like this, I’d been peering into a museum display case, a Yale University art historian beside me. We have been doing what academics tend to do, parading manners and theories.
We stopped to comment airily on something, and an Inuit mask came up out of the case like a shark from water. The voracious energy of the thing. Hah! We were suddenly little men in suits blinking stupidly. Uncle Meyer’s wallet opened a cut on the surface of reality. Something dangerous came spilling into life.
And tactile. So tactile. Somehow it managed to be both personal and completely traditional. You could see that it conformed to a traditional pattern to which generations had contributed. But it was also the work of an individual in the throes of a terrible emotion driving the stitches in one direction and then another. There was craft here and there was something craft couldn’t contain.
Uncle Meyer was slow to tell the story, but eventually he did. The wallet was stitched 65 years ago by his mother. She made it to hold his passport and the Canadian visa that would see him safely out of a land of terror, pogroms, and state-sanctioned anti-Semitism.
Meyer was then 17. He could leave Russia. His family could not. His father died of natural causes, he told me. “My mother, well, the Nazis… I don’t know what happened.”
Meyer arrived in Canada in 1925, going first to Montreal and then to Edmonton to work for a relative. He spent the early years moving back and forth across the country, a member of a team of Jewish roughnecks who worked on the construction of big buildings from Victoria to Kingston.
There was, after all, nothing dreary or domestic about Uncle Meyer’s photographs. They were taken from the dizzying heights of construction sites: the Banff Springs Hotel, the Vancouver Medical-Dental Building, grain elevators across the prairies. Meyer painted those elevators. He and his pals liked to ride the wooden platforms as they banged around in high winds.
Meyer’s canvas wallet brought him to another country and another life. He lived, despite his roughneck heroics, safe from harm. He escaped the holocaust that claimed his family.
He had come away from his home and his family with a few clothes and not much more. As his mother prepared him for his departure, as she prepared herself for the fact that she would likely never see him again, she took up thread and canvas. She made a wallet for his passport, so that her reckless, bounding son would not lose the paper that would see him into safety. She produced an envelope to see Meyer into the envelope of the new world. Meyer made it. The wallet worked.