Grandma Taught Me Well

Grandmothers are easy to love because they love us so unselfishly. At least that was the case with my maternal grandmother.

Mary Klinman was born during “the year of the big flood,” some time in the late 1880s in the “Pale of Settlement.” That included what is now Lithuania, Moldova and Ukraine, an area that Jews were segregated into by Russia,

My mother inherited her blonde hair and blue eyes from Grandma who probably got hers from a cossack who raped my great-grandmother during a pogrom, one of the looting, burning and raping sprees visited frequently on Jewish settlements.

If I had to describe her in a couple of words they would be “courageous” and “pragmatic.”

During the time between my birth and Mom’s second marriage when I was 5 or so, Grandma took care of me while Mom was at work. She spoke Yiddish and “yinglish” ( a blend of yiddish and heavily accented English.) Living in a bilingual home was a blessing. It contributed to my ability to learn languages and to understand people who speak English with an accent. For Grandma, however, actions spoke louder than words. She modeled how to cope calmly and systematically with the tasks and challenges of daily life, handling one problem at a time with acceptance and calm perseverance. I never heard her utter a single complaint.

I shadowed her on her daily food shopping rounds and observed with great interest when she cooked. She owned not a single cookbook, couldn’t read one even if she had any. She never measured ingredients, yet the food was sublime. Thanks to her I developed an unusually sophisticated palate for my age and a love for cooking that has remained a key emotional connection with her memory to this day.

I never tired of her telling the story of how she and my grandfather, covered by hay in a wagon, were smuggled out of Russia in the early 1900s to evade his consignment into the Tsar’s army. They arrived in the US, like many immigrants such as they, in the steerage of a ship out of Germany. The details of how they settled into a large home behind my grandfather’s tailor shop were never made clear to me, but somehow they managed to make ends meet and to raise seven children to healthy adulthood.

My mother miraculously survived near fatal bouts of diphtheria and rheumatic fever as a young child. Grandma attributed that to her having changed Mom’s name from Toby to Matilda to confuse the angel of death. Understandably, Mom didn’t like her new name and, as an adult, went by “Kay” (derived from her surname’s first letter) after co-workers bestowed it, mercifully, upon her. Interestingly, I never heard Grandma address Mom by any name other than “Tobenu,” so I presume, having foiled the angel, she felt safe using that much prettier name.

Though I was not aware of it, finances were tight, but we had food in our mouths, a roof over our heads and the warmth of a large extended family steeped in Old World traditions. In her kitchen, Grandma worked with whatever ingredients she could afford and turned them into succulent dishes. Friday evenings, after the lighting of the sabbath candles, she served a delicious chicken casserole to up to a dozen relatives, reserving for me the special treat of the immature eggs from the chicken we’d picked out that day at the butcher shop —while it was still squawking. As my mother dished up my portion, grandma admonished her, “don’t jalava, Tobenu” (don’t be stingy.)

Like Grandma, I have enjoyed lavishing love on friends and family by cooking for them. Starting as a pre-teen I was entrusted by Mom to prepare simple family dinners. My first offering was steak and baked potatoes. Nobody complained.

As I got older, I came to appreciate the courage of my grandparents who, by virtue of bravely confronting adversity with practicality and pragmatism, forged the way for their progeny to actualize the American dream. I have done my best to emulate them.

When my friends, family and medical caretakers tell me how they admire my ability to handle my illness with grace and courage, I know who really deserves the praise. It’s Grandma. She taught me that you take the ingredients available to you and get down to work, cooking them up into the best dishes you can.