Yesterday was my grandmother's 100th birthday
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Twenty-five years ago, my grandmother had just immigrated to Israel from Ukraine and was searching for an apartment to rent. She didn’t know any Hebrew, so she took me with her as an interpreter.
In our family, my grandmother was a strange fruit—unlike the rest of us, she was decidedly an extrovert. I always thought one couldn’t be an extrovert without knowing the language, but that apartment-hunting trip proved me wrong.
“I know this neighborhood so well,” she said, in Russian, to one landlady, and I reluctantly translated (and also privately wondered when she had the time to get to know the neighbourhood in the two weeks that she’d been in the country).
She continued: “Sima Korolyova lives here, right in this building!” Then, seeing that I wasn’t translating that last part, turned to me, “Tell her that!”
“Babushka… she has no idea who that is…”
“It doesn’t matter, tell her that!!!” she insisted, so I turned to the lady and totally failing to impart the enthusiasm of this message, reluctantly translated into Hebrew… “Ummmm… Sima Korolyova gara po… “
When she settled in that neighborhood, still without much Hebrew, she became known there as simply “babushka.”
She died last month, just three weeks short of her 100th birthday.
My ‘other’ babushka
We were not close, my babushka and I. When I was growing up, she was my ‘other’ babushka1.
My ‘main’ grandmother (my father’s mom) lived with us in Russia. It is in her room that my brother and I hid precious candy bars under the floorboards. It is she who supervised my piano practice, read me books, and played Mozart sonatas all day. It is to her that I referred as simply ‘babushka’.
My ‘other’ babushka lived in the distant Nykolaev, in Ukraine, and I called her ‘babushka Olya’, always with her first name as a sign of the physical distance between us, the distance of a two-day train ride.
I was not used to babushka Olya’s ways. Outside, she held my hand in an unfamiliar, nervous way when we crossed the street to go to the bakery to buy a loaf of foreign-looking white Ukrainian bread (instead of the familiar dark rye bread we ate in Russia).
Instead of Mozart sonatas, she played cringy Soviet WWII songs on the piano, slamming the keyboard unceremoniously, and making my sophisticated classical pianist dad slap his forehead in desperation.
Her two-room apartment was too foreign, too tidy — in striking contrast to our messy apartment in Russia that contained four kids and a distracted musician father who never got around to fixing anything broken. It didn’t have any loose floorboards to hide candy bars under. No toys on the floor. No giant laundry piles to make slides from. Where do you play hide-and-seek in this house?
95
At 95, she started losing her memory, so every time I talked to her, I had to introduce myself with an ever-increasing number of details, and still, I could never be sure she knew who I was.
When I called her that year to wish her happy birthday (we couldn’t celebrate because of COVID), I told her my name and that I was her granddaughter. She asked how old I was and if I was still unmarried. I said yes, still unmarried, not knowing what that question meant: did she remember that I was recently divorced, or did she think I was never married, or was she confusing me with someone else entirely?
That year, her birthday fell on Holocaust Remembrance Day (in Israel, it’s in April).
She had to be reminded it was her birthday, but she didn’t need an explanation when two teenage girls showed up at her doorstep – masked, of course – to give her a potted plant and an Israeli flag. She led them to the piano in her spare room and played them the same cringy Soviet songs that she played for us every time we visited.
I bet if they’d shown up on any other day, she wouldn’t be surprised. To her, especially when she started forgetting everything else, every day was Holocaust Remembrance Day.
She remembered in great detail the day WWII started in Ukraine. She was fifteen and visiting her older brother in Odessa. When the news of the war broke out, she tried to get back to her hometown, Nikolayev, but most trains were either cancelled or full, so she had to make her way back (a distance of 130 km) on foot.
“Ya byla moloden’kaya” (“I was a young girl”) she’d say, emphasizing every word, “blondinochka…” (“and I was blonde”)… In most of her stories about the war, being young and blonde played a big role. In that story, according to her, she didn’t have to walk all 130km back because people offered her rides, seeing how young and blonde she was.
It only recently struck me that most people were blonde in the Ukraine, so that didn’t afford her any special treatment, only helped avoid antisemitic harassment.
95.5
The next time I saw her (and the last time she recognized me) would be in the fall of 2020. Back then, she still lived alone two blocks away from my parents’ in Jerusalem, and every day, a sitter, my mom, or my aunt would come to take her out for a walk.
During the pandemic, she got used to staying indoors, so it became harder to take her out (“Kuda my idjom! Nikovo zhe netu!” “Where are we going? There is no one outside!!” she’d say). Still, at 95, she refused to walk with a cane (“Stydno s palochkoy!” “That would be embarrassing!”) or to leave the house without wearing bright red lipstick.
One weekend, when I was visiting my parents, I went for my morning run, and on the way back, I heard someone calling my name: my mom and my grandma were taking their Saturday morning walk.
By that time, I hadn’t seen Babushka for several months because of COVID. Several months is a long time for an old person, just like for a baby. It is enough time for her to shrink, and certainly enough time to forget who I am again.
“This is Tanechka,” my mom says to my grandma as I approach. ‘Privet, Babushka,’ I say (“Hi grandma!”) and wave. We don’t hug and kiss because pandemic.
Grandma’s blue eyes shine between her mask and her sun hat. It’s October, the pleasant warm period just after the end of the brutally hot summer and before the beginning of the windy Jerusalem winter, and she is fittingly wearing both a sunhat and a grey long-sleeved cardigan. She looks like a child who has been lovingly dressed before leaving the house.
She looks at me and past me, with a perpetually lost look of very old people who don’t know where they are anymore.
“Remember Tanechka?” my mom asks her when Babushka doesn’t respond, and adjusts the facemask on her face so that it properly covers her nose. I catch myself wondering if she is wearing lipstick under that mask.
“Tanechka, Tanechka… “ my grandma repeats, anxiously looking around like a person whose bus can come any minute, only she’s not sure from which direction. My mom doesn’t give up: “Who is Tanechka?”
“Tanechka, Tanechka…. Tanechka is your daughter…” she throws as if it was the most boring thing ever, and keeps looking around, “Where is my house??”
I’m impressed she remembers me, and I’m not in the least offended that finding her house, just about 200 meters away, is more important.
yob tvoyu mat’
It was during the second year of the pandemic that she started swearing.
We were sitting shiva for my father, who just died of COVID, and one day my mom came back from her visit with grandma (shiva or no shiva, babushka needed to be taken out for a walk) and reported that babushka swore now when people try to take her out for a walk. (“Matom rugaeyetsa,” she said).
“What did she say? What did she say?” My sister and I wanted to know. We crave any lively news, anything funny or scandalous, to pierce our foggy bubble of grief.
My mom hesitates (we’re a severely non-swearing family), looks around to make sure there are no kids nearby, then whispers the words I never heard her say, before or after: ”Yob tvoyu mat’.”
the funeral
Babushka died. Babushka umerla. I felt the plates of time shift. I don’t have any babushkas and dedushkas anymore. Like in a creepy computer game, we all moved one level closer to the end.
The rabbi who led Babushka’s funeral service had dishevelled red hair and a long red beard, and wore a green hoodie under his black suit. He looked a little bit like a clown, but maybe you’re bound to look a little weird if you do this work all day.
In Israel, marriage, divorce, and death for Jewish citizens are governed by Orthodox Judaism (the most stringent kind of Judaism). It’s a very rigid system that may be annoying and outdated when it comes to marriages and divorces, but I’m mostly grateful for it when it comes to funerals.
That is, I’m grateful that there are clear rules for what needs to be said and done during the ritual, so you don’t have to make any decisions, because decision-making is not something you can do very well at the moment.
“She must have been such a happy woman, wasn’t she, your grandmother?” said the rabbi.
“She was,” we said, “She still played the piano until very recently.”
He continued: “I will say a blessing for her, then a prayer for the hostages and the whole Am Israel [‘the people of Israel’], and then a prayer for the whole world,” he explained. “Because that’s what we do,” he said with a smile, “Jewish people are a paradox. Despite everything, we always say a prayer for the whole world.”
I felt a little bitter because Am Israel has been very divided lately, particularly along the lines of Orthodox Jews vs Secular/Conservative/Moderate Jews, one of the biggest sticking points being that the Orthodox are the only group (apart from Israeli Arabs) who are exempt from the army service.
And even without this latest controversy, we have very different ideas about what this country should be like. We live in completely different worlds, go to different schools, listen to different news, and even speak different languages (Orthodox Jews often speak Yiddish at home).
But then it occurred to me that if Babushka magically came back to life now and back to her lucid self, she somehow would find a common language with him and everybody else there.
And she’d want to urgently tell them about Sima Korolyova and all her other friends with embarrassingly Russian last names.
Babushka playing an old Yiddish song at 98:
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Stress on the first syllable, PLEAASE, we’re not in a Kate Bush song.
Oh my heart.
My condolences to you and your family. This is such a wonderful remembrance. The video is so sweet. Thank you for sharing this with us, Tanya.