Passover: A Festival of Cleaning That Marie Kondo Would Love

Passover is known as a holiday of liberation, salvation, even constipation, but to me, it was always a holiday of sanitation.

I grew up in a family of compulsive hoarders. My mom was born in 1945 in Kirgizia, on my grandparents’ postwar journey from a Siberian work camp back to Poland, a refugee before she ever knew what home was. Years later, in Montreal, both Bubbe and Mom stuffed their homes with bargain skirts, tuna cans, Russian whole-wheat loaves, obsolete fax machines—a disorganized morass that grew over the decades. Report cards were lost forever in the maelstrom of my mother’s old newspapers. Mom may have collected Dollar Store clocks, but our ultra-bohemian household was not regimented, everything running late, all of us eating meals at our own times and places.

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