By Barrett Holman Leak in San Diego
I needed to wash dishes after dinner the other day and took off my rings, laying them in the small blue dish by the sink. I smiled, thinking about the person who gave the dish to me. I remember the day I was given it a few years ago by a former neighbor. She was very insistent that I have it and I accepted it. She was not well at the time and did die a few months later. She was a fireball of a woman, often getting into harsh verbal exchanges with people and very opinionated and not afraid to share her views.
She disliked me for several months when we first met because I am a Democrat. But over time, we got to know one another and had good conversations, watched a game show and sometimes I grimaced through her evening FOX News broadcasts. I know what she gave me was something in which to put my rings (which I normally put in my pocket for dishwashing) but this week, I actually looked at it. It was something Jewish. This from a Roman Catholic woman.
And then I remembered her birth name and comments she made several times about hard times her family had escaped. She had become prickly because of it. I thought about her son, whom I also had spent time with….and I had brought the two of them to a Mission Bay Shabbat service once. She really enjoyed it, which I thought was great given that she was Roman Catholic. Her son’s profile and her face stuck in my mind. It sparked in my head that yes, she was likely related to actor Paul Reiser. They shared a family name. I realized that somewhere along the way her family did what they felt they had to do to survive a hard time and converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism to save their lives. I would never have bought this ring dish tchotchke for myself, but, as a memory of her, I will keep it forever.
We human beings are a species of curators, though our curation looks less like the Louvre and more like a crowded shelf at a neighborhood thrift store. In an era dominated by sleek Danish minimalism, beige aesthetic videos, and digital clouds that hold everything from our bank statements to our family photos, human beings remain stubbornly, beautifully attached to physical junk.
In American English, we call them knick-knacks. We call them bric-a-brac. But the most satisfying word for them—the one that feels exactly like the tactile, slightly dusty objects it describes—is tchotchkes.
The word tchotchke didn’t just appear on our shelves; it traveled across oceans and centuries to get there. It is a linguistic traveler, from Hebrew (טשאַטשקע), to Yiddish (tshatshke) adapted from old Slavic roots, including the Polish cacko, and meaning an elegant trinket or plaything. Because it was transliterated from an entirely different alphabet into English, it refuses to sit still on the page, happily dancing and wearing spellings from tsatske to chachke.
Historically, the word carries a delicious double edge. In early 20th-century immigrant communities, it could refer to a cheap, useless piece of plastic, but it was just as easily deployed as a term of endearment for a beautiful girl or a beloved, chubby-cheeked child. To call something a tchotchke is to acknowledge its lack of utility while simultaneously admitting a strange, almost helpless fondness for it. A little “crazy love”.
Why do we do it? Why do we allow these little dust magnets to occupy premium real estate on our mantels, drawers, cubbies and desks?
Psychologists who study material culture suggest that tchotchkes function as “externalized memory drives.” In a fast-moving world, our brains are notoriously unreliable narrators. We forget the exact smell of the salt air on a vacation from 2012; we forget the specific cadence of a late-night conversation with an old friend.
But a physical object—a smooth seashell, a chipped porcelain cat, a strange piece of pop-culture ephemera—acts as a sensory anchor.
“We don’t keep the object because we need the item,” says behavioral psychologist Dr. Jeanette Miller. “We keep it because we are terrified of dropping the memory. The object becomes the physical manifestation of a time, a place, or a version of ourselves that we aren’t ready to let go of.”
In other words, a tchotchke is an emotional insurance policy. It proves that a moment actually happened.
For the past decade, interior design culture has tried to shame us out of our trinkets. Purge! Purge! Purge! (I am guilty of it. A year ago my wardrobe had three times as many clothes. It was time to release them). We have been told to clear our surfaces, to “spark joy” by throwing things away, and to live in pristine, sterile environments that look like high-end hotel lobbies.
But there is a coldness to absolute minimalism. A room without tchotchkes is a room without a biography. A house entirely devoid of meaningless trinkets tells you absolutely nothing about the person who lives there, other than the fact that they own a vacuum cleaner and a subscription to a design magazine.
Tchotchkes are the prose of a home. They tell the story of where you’ve been, who you’ve loved, and the odd, unpredictable paths your life has taken. They are inherently democratic—a three-dollar plastic souvenir from a highway rest stop sits comfortably next to a piece of vintage glass, both valued not by their price tag, but by the weight of the stories they carry.
Ultimately, the items we rescue from the bin of uselessness are the ones that anchor us to our own histories. They are the small, physical monuments to our random encounters, our eccentric tastes, and the people who have crossed our paths.
So, perhaps remove the dust accumulated on the small plastic figurines, porcelain cats on a stand, the quirky mementos, and the odd bits of history sitting on your desk. They aren’t clutter. They are the physical map of the human heart, proven by the fact that the smallest or even the biggest, most useless objects are often the very last things we are willing to lose.
For me it is a large conch shell, heavy enough to hold open all the doors of our home so the breezes coming off the ocean floated through the screens of the Jersey shore summer hotel we owned. It brings memories of “shoebies”, (Philly girls in full makeup and high heels trying to mincingly walk on the beach sand), waiting in line with my Big Brother to get a half of a regular (Italian) hoagie with sweet roasted peppers from “The White House” and going out on the wild Atlantic Ocean with my grandfather in his fishing boat to catch Sunday breakfast.
I would watch him catch lots of fluke (I still love that name…it is however just a form of flounder), or sometimes he would need to put his pipe down and wrestle a rowdy Black Sea Bass and win. We brought home our catch, then I would watch Mommy filet, flour, and lightly bread it. Daddy fried it to a crispy coated meaty delight. It was the centerpiece of a brunch table filled with fish and cornbread. We feasted on tender flounder or thick, sweet, meaty Black Sea Bass accompanied by red beet horseradish and hot sauce, crispy peppery fried potatoes, creamy grits, scrambled eggs and fried apple rings coated with cinnamon.
I remember the summer rooming house tenant yelling on the floors upstairs, the ravenous seagulls circling outside, grandaddy telling his military, jazz, or hobo stories. And everything was just good.
One “useless” conch shell fills me with all that.
What is your favorite tchotchke? Or tsatske? Or chachke?
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Barrett Holman Leak is a freelance writer based in San Diego.