I received the news of my grandmother’s passing on Sunday while I was at work. One of the kids had just had his hand run over by a toy truck and of course was having an emotional breakdown. My phone rang, I answered, my mom immediately told me that she died, and I said I would call back in an hour and hung up. I was working with a sub, so I could not leave the room. Okay, I told myself, suck it up, hold it in, and get through this next hour. I acted as if nothing had happened. I doubt even my expression gave anything away. As I left my brother called. I told him to give me time to go home and let the news sink in. When I got home I broke down for maybe ten minutes. Then I got up, sent some important overdue emails, emailed my professor for the class I was supposed to be at today, sent my lead teacher at gan a text message telling her I might disappear over the next 24 hours, and shortly after that went to my brother’s apartment.
I haven’t really cried since then. Once in awhile I get teary-eyed thinking about something my Grandma Elka said or did, but it always seems like I simultaneously have a huge grin on my face. And no, thinking back on yesterday’s events, I’m all smiles. Yesterday was an incredibly special day. My parents got into Philadelphia Monday afternoon. Sam and I took an overnight flight Monday night to Newark and got to my grandmother’s house shortly after 9am. An hour or so later my sister arrived from Washington, DC. This was the first time the five of us were together in two years. Next my cousins arrived. My Aunt Cookie and Uncle John arrived with my cousin Dan and his wife Xhen who came in from California. I saw both of them last summer before they moved. Then my cousin Seth arrived and shortly thereafter my Aunt Rena and Uncle David arrived with my cousin Josh. I had not seen Seth in maybe ten years (I think I saw Josh since then). In any case, it was the first time all six of us cousins were together since Seth’s bar mitzvah. Seth graduated college last year.
Before my parents left Boston, my Grandma Rose told my mom that it’s a shame my Grandma Elka wouldn’t be around to see her grandchildren all together. My mom’s response was “How do you know that she didn’t orchestrate all this?”. Within minutes of being reunited each other we were busy getting things ready (in Philadelphia they throw rather lavish “after parties” for funerals) but also chatting and laughing about our Grandma. Grandma Elka always had stories to tell, and she left no shortage of stories to be told about her. The fun continued to the funeral home, where as we waiting for the funeral to start we continued the story telling. The funeral director gave us a look as he told us that it was time to quiet down and move into the chapel. Once seated in the first two rows, he had to tell us again to calm down as people were beginning to arrive. It wasn’t so easy - we were enjoying each other’s company so much. The place filled up with more relatives, Grandma Elka’s friends of all ages, her gardener, my dad’s 7th grade math teacher, and a couple friends of mine and my siblings who were so wonderful to come. My cousins and I were given the incredible honor of escorting Grandma Elka to her final resting place. In my mind I gave her a kiss and got one of her classic and strong Grandma Elka hugs in return.
But enough about that. Funerals are boring. Well, when my Aunt Rena ended her eulogy of Grandma Elka with one of her dirty jokes it was certainly not boring, but I will leave that one for the end as well. It will certainly make you remember my grandma and speak of her more (which is what I’m going for). Lets start with the beginning of her life. We would always say she’s so old that she was there when they invented the wheel. She would always insist that she was the one who gave them the idea. Okay, so maybe that wasn’t REALLY what happened. She was born while there was legislation in the works for giving women the right to vote (which they got shortly after Grandma Elka was born). This event was never lost on my Grandma.
I think that any one at any time can be considered a part of history in the making, and that living through the Great Depression, World War II, and everything thereafter won’t in another hundred years be considered a bigger deal than the great events I am living through now. But wow, what a time to be growing up then. Furthermore, what a time to be growing up in when your father is one of the founders of the Zionist congress in Chicago. Grandma Elka was frequently surrounded by the stars of the Zionist movement and the State of Israel. At age 3 she sat on Chaim Wiezmann’s lap and he recited the shema with her before she went to bed. At age 6 she met Rav Avraham Kook on one of his visits to Chicago. When she was older she met Golda Meir and Louis Brandeis, a friend of her father’s. When I think about all this, I realize that my decision to make aliyah to Israel didn’t come out of nowhere. Grandma Elka was ready to do so herself in 1951, but then she suddenly found herself taking care of aging relatives. Her role as caregiver never ended as my grandfather became ill with Parkinson’s and she spent years caring for him. She insisted, in her practically and then completely bedridden condition, that if my parents decided to make aliyah she would be right behind them.
Grandma Elka was the keeper of the treasure trove of family stories. Most of the stories she told were probably even true. She was best for the skeleton-in-the closet ones - stories we thought only happened in the movies. She was also the one in the family who best took care of the children of those skeletons, welcoming them into her home and at her holiday dinner tables and often being the parent they never really had. I am grateful for my cousin Stuart, Grandma Elka’s nephew, who just over ten years ago began recording many of these stories. While she told the same ones over and over... and over and over again, I definitely did not inherit her phenomenal memory and I am glad someone took the time to preserve our family history. Whenever I came to visit, I had to be prepared to sit and listen, but what a treat it often was to do so.
Grandma Elka mostly reserved her lectures for phone calls. She even said that when I visited, she felt bad spending all my time with her telling me what I’m doing wrong. Also despite thousands of lectures about how to do my hair, what to wear, and the fifty year old pink shirt with blue sequins I must wear that she got on a trip to London that I MUST spend an hour searching the upstairs closet for, she would often pause and exclaim what a nice smile I had. On any visit she would inevitably tell me how much I looked like her grandmother (whose picture hung on the wall in the dining room) and then launch into a story about her.... which would usually lead into a story about how some other relative eloped, ran off to the West, or tried to bribe their brother into letting them adopt their niece (Grandma Elka being the niece, but lets leave that for another day). So as I said lectures were mainly for phone calls, which were at best once a week. She definitely had the attitude that she must get it all in while she can. Thank goodness for Skype and low call rates. I believe on my last phone call with her a week or two ago she told me that when I find a good guy I must grab him by the neck and reel him in. She then reminded me that as she did, I should only say yes to the third guy that proposes to me. I’ll see what I can do about that. At the cemetery the rabbi mentioned how funerals are a time to ask for forgiveness from the person who has just passed. I said to Grandma Elka’s lifelong friend Nita then I’m just sorry I couldn’t help her with her goal to catch up with Nita’s number of great-grandchildren (there are a lot of them).
Grandma Elka only had one great-grandchild, my niece Rinat Hodaya who was born just over a year ago. Grandma Elka met Hodaya last summer and was excited to see her again in a few weeks before Pesach. That she got to meet Hodaya at all was nothing short of a miracle. Last May we were told that Grandma Elka had taken a turn for the worse, and that while we had no reason to fly in we should be prepared for her to be gone by the end of the week. Somehow she made it through. She even agreed to finally start taking care of herself. Finally she had almost around the clock care, and health aides in addition to the ones who had been serving the family for over twenty years (and were grandmothers themselves). Perhaps it was too little too late, but what kept her going was the anticipation of finally meeting Hodaya, the great-grandchild born in a country she had once dreamed of living in herself.
Grandma Elka by that time was pretty much entirely bedridden. The surfaces in her room were covered with pictures of Hodaya. There is one picture there were two copies of - one on each side of the room so she could always see it. Grandma Elka claimed that Hodaya had an expression that said “Hello world, what are we going to do today?” and that attitude was what got her through these past through months. Nothing was ever going to slow my grandmother down. She spent her entire life planning events and looking towards the future, even during times she was sick at the hospital or in bed at home, and that was never going to change. Just a month ago she threw one of her famous post-birthday parties. These parties always took place a few weeks after her birthday because they were not just birthday parties, they were celebrations of life. She called this last party, the one following her 91st birthday, a celebration for the first day of the rest of her life. I believe it. Also just to tell a bit of what these parties entailed, they were held in her home, using fine china, a full setting of silverware for each guest, and usually involved a grandchild or two frantically running around, defrosting salmon she only remembered about minutes before guests started arriving, and having old ladies yell at her grandchild helpers for bringing luke warm water. Keep in mind that her guests were in their eighties and nineties and sat on folding chairs one up against the other. I had the, erm, pleasure of attending a few of these parties while in college. But who knows? Maybe in sixty years I’ll be inspired to do the same. I can only hope that I have the type of wonderful friends Grandma Elka had her entire life. Of course at my party I would probably just skip the fine china and bring out the fingerpaint.
Among the many other life lessons I learned from Grandma Elka, I learned to cherish my friends. Even when her health was declining she would find rides from friends to go visit friends who were in worst shape than her, and when she could no longer make it out she was still always good for a phone call. One of my favorite lines from her, in response to me commenting on how many friends she had, was “Well, there are friends, there are acquaintances, and then there are the relatives.” Maybe she really made these distinctions, but anyone from any of those groups (and anyone who could claim two or three degrees of separation from anyone) was always welcome at her Pesach seder or just to sleep over on a random night of the week.
My cousins and I are so fortunate to have had our grandmother in our lives for so long. I think it is so appropriate that she lived just past her 91st birthday. When she was 90 we thought we had lost her, but she snapped back and pushed herself those extra few months. They were months during which we all got to see her again, hear more stories, get more life advice, and months that gave her time for frequent Skype conversations with her great-granddaughter in Israel. Her friends say that she could never stop talking about us (although Hodaya kinda stole the show this past year!). She was proud of each and every one of us for our individual accomplishments and life goals. While on one hand she loved telling us what to do, she never doubted any decisions we made. While we knew she was always right, we knew she would love us no matter what.
Tuesday was exactly how it was supposed to be. Her children and grandchildren came together to laugh and celebrate her life. My cousin Dan said he had a dream the night after finding out she passed and in the dream Grandma Elka was running her own funeral and yelling at everyone for doing things wrong. She had, in fact, made her wishes very clear and they were being followed to the best of our abilities. However we knew exactly what Dan meant about his dream. I am sure she was shouting down from heaven that we were using the wrong napkins and that we should have used real dishes for when everyone came back to the house after the burial. My mom commented that all those years she made comments like “if anyone dares does X after I die I will haunt them” suddenly seems like a real threat as we wandered around her house putting sticky notes on the things we each wanted to keep and discussing how the house would be cleaned out. Before we went to bed we took out the last bits of Scotch we found in the liquor cabinet and made toasts to our grandmother, mostly about the individualized lectures we had all received over the course of our lives. I have no doubt that I will be hearing her voice in my head for years. Sometimes I feel like every time I get dressed for shul and look in the mirror I see her looking back at me frowning and contemplating what to tell me is wrong with my outfit before launching into a lecture about how fashion is not how it once was (Grandma Elka was a fashion designer in her day).
Grandma Elka’s influence on my life is visible every day. After years of family stories and history lectures (she read a few books a day ranging from history to sci-fi to trashy romance novels) I believe she was the driving force in me switching to be a History major my junior year. She instilled in me a love of learning and reading that I appreciate every single day. I am grateful for her treasure trove of family stories. It is an unbelievable thing to know so much about where I came from, where the family has been, and how our family history is tied into the history of everyone else. She once sat on Chaim Weizmann’s and recited shema with him, and now she has a great-granddaughter living in the country Weizmann’s helped create and learning to say shema every night. She believed so strongly in the State of Israel and while it meant only seeing her twice a year for two to three days at a time, she was so proud that two of her grandchildren had decided to make their home there. I admire her for giving up on a life dream to take care of her family, and while being so far away makes it very difficult sometimes I hope I can live up to her example even if I live 6,000 miles away.
Grandma Elka, we will speak your name for years to come, and your memory will live strongly in our hearts for the rest of our lives.
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A 10-year-old boy goes up to his mother and asks, “Mommy, what’s fornication?”. The mother goes beet red and quickly says “Go ask your father!”. The boy finds his father and asks, “Daddy, what’s fornication?”. His father shifts uncomfortably from foot and foot and says, “Go ask your grandmother!”. The boy goes to his grandmother and asks, “Grandma, what’s fornication?”. The grandmother says “Follow me.” and leads the boy upstairs to her room. She opens the door and motions for him to come in. The boy enters, and the grandmother beckons him towards her closet. He walks cautiously over to her and she opens the closet. The closet is full of all sorts of dresses and gowns from weddings, bar mitzvahs and gala dinners. She motions him even closer, pulls out one of the gowns, shoves it up close to the boy’s face and says, “See this? THIS is for-an-occasion.”
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יהיה זכרונה ברוך
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