Archives and history: A sextet

The Archive and the Uncanny My first archive and special collections room was a cold, windowless basement storage chamber lined with three-foot deep shelves built by my father in our Edmonton home. On one wall were shelves of preserved pickles, beets, apple sauce, and jam-my mother's garden bou...

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Published inCanadian literature no. 178; p. 6
Main Authors Deer, Glenn, Fisher, Susan, Higgins, Iain, Eva-Marie Kroller
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Vancouver Pacific Affairs. The University of British Columbia 01.10.2003
Subjects
Archives & records
Autobiographies
Canadian history
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Summary:The Archive and the Uncanny My first archive and special collections room was a cold, windowless basement storage chamber lined with three-foot deep shelves built by my father in our Edmonton home. On one wall were shelves of preserved pickles, beets, apple sauce, and jam-my mother's garden bounty-and on another wall was a metal shelving system with two decades worth of Life magazines, the National Geographic, and boxes of old school assignments. Another shadowy crevasse of the room held two enormous brown steamer trunks and one blue metal one: these held my parents' "special collections" of memorabilia from the Old Country-old suits, wall hangings, and a secret photo of my father's Chinese family; books, boots, and feather comforters filled with the furniture polish smell of my mother's native Berlin. At a symposium in Vienna, Pierre's eyebrows shot up in alarm as the moderator-a gentleman of the old school-introduced me as "still charming after all these years," but he also undertook some rapid research in cultural mores by glancing round the room and comparing the reactions of North Americans and Europeans (a brilliant repartee covering all bases occurred to me 24 hours later).
ISSN:0008-4360