Opinion: Learning to carry my grandmother’s story of loss and pain
I am small in the kitchen of my family cottage by a river I love more than any other.
In this kitchen, worn and warm, my grandmother Anne is going to bake blueberry buns. We (my brothers and I) call her Grandma Dave. Her husband’s name is Dave. This is how we distinguish her from our other grandmother, whom we call Mimi.
But Grandma Dave’s “real” name is Anne. Dave, her husband, is a difficult character. It is not fair perhaps to call her Grandma Dave, but grandchildren invent names and are rarely held accountable for their missteps. Anne, as legacy has it, throws Dave out when both are in their 70s. He wanders. She finds comfort on her own in her freedom.
My Grandma Dave is one of the finest cooks that ever lived. This is how I remember her Friday night dinners. The memory is vague insofar as the light in her tiny dining room is clouded, the pattern on the dinner plates obscured by time. There is the shimmer of the Shabbat candles and the steam rising from a platter that holds brisket, roasted potatoes and carrots, an aroma wafting through the haze of a long ago I can bring easily into any present.
I am happy. Small in the adult chair I am sitting on, proud of her, of the platter she carries, the girth of her arms, the crepey skin underneath, though the muscle in her forearms flexes: the platter is heavy, but her hold secure. I know that. I love her.
In the cottage kitchen, I revel in loving her, in watching her. She will be making blueberry buns. They are renowned. Cottagers from miles around will drift toward us as the buns cool on the speckled Formica kitchen table with the kitchen window wide, the screen open in the back hall. I know that she will bask in this glory, that I will too.
We have picked the blueberries together, my Grandma Dave and me, and other babas, in babushkas, with sweaters though it is sweltering, and baskets of provisions, though the walk is but 10 minutes away (anything can happen).
We have pails for the picking and the babas, wearing slippers and support hose, are full of superstition (if there is lightning, hide under the dining room table), and bounty (every one who comes to their door leaves with everything they can think of to ease their way).
I get picked to go picking. Just me. It must be because I am the only girl. I am picked to learn the arts of the picker and the baker so that I might become a balebosta, a Yiddish word for the perfect mother, the efficient homemaker.
I am proud to be called by these old women — proud of their fingers, nimble even if arthritic, their camaraderie (though Mrs. Portnoy who owns a samovar, carried all the way from Russia, dominates); fascinated by the bow legs and drooping bosoms loosely fastened by ancient undergarments inside frayed day dresses (except Mrs. Portnoy, who might, I think, have accessed a 1950s brassiere and thus boasts breasts that defy the laws of gravity the others’ yield to without protest).
They have fed their children and scoured their kitchens, stood for hours in front of stoves curing tongue, spicing and stuffing kishkes at the height of summer. Once, perhaps twice, they have gone to the beach in swimming costumes, reclining on hills by the shore, moored, whales in my child’s mind, top heavy, short legged, laughing at the one taking the picture who must have been a husband, who must have thought them beautiful, precious. And they are.
We pick. Twenty minutes. We take our break. Tea, buns, bread, pickles, cheese, a cookie or two. I am in their circle, covered by their attentiveness, my straw hat with its little white flower, my browning legs and feet inside sandals, a shawl my Grandma Dave thinks I ought to use so that I will not be exposed to the sun. I am sweating. They are sweating. I do not complain.
They let me have tea with sugar. They let me have another cookie. They would let me have anything I want because they have come from dark and faraway places, each one of them, and a child, a girl child in their midst in a country that welcomes them, has space for generations sitting together, safe and secure, holds possibilities I believe they did not think they might ever experience.
When we return from picking, each one going to her kitchen to concoct perfections, I sit with my Grandma Dave. We sort berries together. She pulls out the yeast, the milk, the sugar, the butter, salt and the flour. Her hands deft, the whisk merry, the big yellow Pyrex bowl holds the dough, perfectly rounded, resting.
And then she fills a second green bowl with berries and flour and sugar and I snatch as many as I can before she swats my hand. She laughs. She is a very good swatter, but I am quick.
She flours the table, and her story begins. As she tells it, the dough is rolled into lengths, a sharp knife cuts them into buns, each shaped as a little boat she fills with berries, flour and sugar flying, her voice rising, English and Yiddish knocking against one another, motes of floured air swirling in the sunlight, the knife blade glinting, flour on the floor, the chairs, in her hair, in my hair. Her voice louder and louder.
My grandmother is telling me about growing up in Odesa and about the Cossacks on horses racing through the streets where Jews lived, brandishing their swords, striking people dead, raping women and killing children.
She is yelling and she is crying. Her voice is like a siren, her face is wet.
I am not afraid. I know the word Cossack, I understand the English words, I can figure out the Yiddish. I would never leave the kitchen table. My grandmother always forgets that I am five or six or seven.
My mother might come to the doorway, lean against it, observe the falling flour and Grandma Dave’s rising voice, but she will not intervene. Grandma Dave must tell me this story. I must learn how to carry it with her and for her when she is gone. The word “baleboste” grows in me, comes to include this reality my grandmother is free to express.
My grandmother is an honourable woman.
If her history is silenced — lost, denied, defeated by ignorance and hate — then we are all condemned.
Credit: Opinion: Learning to carry my grandmother’s story of loss and pain
