Sascha Feinstein is the co-founder and director of Lycoming College's Creative Writing Program. He is a poet himself, and a jazz historian; his father and mother were both artists, as was another of his father's wives; the people he met growing up included painters, sculptors, teachers, musicians. Aside from whatever genetic gifts were his legacy, he must have absorbed every shred of the brilliance that surrounded him during his early years, because it shines from his prose, his poetry and his personality. (Having met him I can attest to the latter. I urge you to sample the writing for yourself.) I was amazed to realize that he could describe one of his father’s abstract paintings with such clarity that my mind formed an image of the work. I’ve no idea if it’s an accurate image, (the book has no photos) but it’s pretty real to me.

Growing up in New York City, Sascha did not find his father’s proclivity for "collecting" to be strange. His mother, he says, was a moderating influence, and since any excursion with his father was a treat, the odd things they might find and bring home were secondary to the experience for Sascha. His father didn’t hoard newspapers, canned goods or household products. There's no suggestion that he let the kitchen garbage pile up inside the house. But he did often squirrel away new things, like shirts and pocket knives, because they were "too good" to use, and never threw away anything "that might someday be useful". He was a dumpster diver who had art in mind when he gathered broken furniture, cast-off industrial equipment and discarded pipe fragments; once when the sidewalk was being torn up down the street, he talked the workmen into depositing a truckload of the broken-up concrete at the entrance to their courtyard. Apparently his wives were able to keep him from filling the actual living spaces with his "collections" for most of his life. By the time he died, however, he had three properties---five buildings altogether---stashed to the rafters with mostly trash. The brownstone Sascha grew up in had four floors, two of which were solid with junk even during his childhood. We don’t really learn what condition the rest of it was in when his father died, because his stepmother was still living in it, and it was not Sascha’s responsibility. The two properties he did inherit were not full-time residences, and one of the buildings was an otherwise unused barn. He assures us that he moved, and mostly discarded, several tons of "legacy" in his quest to return a Cape Cod vacation property to livable condition.

Wreckage is a son's memoir of clearing out layers and layers of raw material for unrealized projects both practical and artistic; of rediscovering and salvaging neglected paintings, sculptures, pottery and textile art created by his parents; of bringing his own vision to bear on what seemed to be hopelessly derelict properties, and as he said, of "taking on my father". Inevitably I found myself comparing Sam Feinstein's hoarding to that described in E. L. Doctorow's Homer and Langley. In fact, Sascha Feinstein makes reference to the parallels himself. But Sam was no recluse. He was a well-recognized abstract impressionist, a revered art teacher, and a beloved, if somewhat difficult, parent. The book is as much about the father-son relationship, and the son’s coming to terms with it in order to preserve his own past, as it is about the nitty-gritty of dealing with decades of debris and decay. ( )

Local poet and professor Feinstein is the son of Sam Feinstein, a noted abstract expressionist painter and, as it turns out, a hoarder. This is a memoir about the relationship between Sascha and Sam is explored through memory and through the author’s experience of clearing Sam’s Cape Cod house and garden. Did Sam’s hoarding feed his art? Or did his art inform his hoarding? What is the relationship between creativity and destruction, both physical and emotional? ( )