Geography Of The Heart: Memory Eternal To My Babushka Alexandra

Далеко. Далеко. (Pronounced “Daleko. Daleko,” it means “Far away. Far away.”)

From my early childhood until my maternal babushka (grandmother) Alexandra Dimitrievna (Dimitrieva) Grishaev lost her ability to speak and was bedridden for nine years until her death 21 years ago, she and I bantered about where she would go when she died. She’s buried alongside my maternal degushka (grandfather) Grigori Ustinovich Grishaev, at the largest of three cemeteries at Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, New York, where celebrated Russian composer and pianist Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich and his wife Nina Varzar lived and left a home to their son, conductor and pianist Maxim Dmitrievich Shostakovich.

Born March 3, 1913, in Dubrovka, a village in Vitebsk Oblast, Belarus, my babushka died one day after he 85th birthday on March 4, 1998, in Wilbraham, Massachusetts.

In stark contrast to all of my school and neighborhood peers, I attended countless funerals as a young girl, and visited my grandparents’ mostly older friends confined to some of the most dilapidated, under-staffed, and sometimes unsanitary nursing homes, municipal homes, and municipal and veteran’s hospitals, nearly every Sunday after Liturgy and Orthodox Holy Days. This was the fate of so many forced immigrants from German displaced persons camps who fell ill before they could save enough money working hard labor jobs around the clock to pay for more humane facilities.

Death wasn’t a taboo subject as it was for most of my non-church friends. It was an intrinsic part of daily life, and part of my childhood dialogue along with visceral stories of the countless murders, killings, and untimely deaths of my mother’s three infant brothers, dozens of close family members, and hundreds of dear friends, under Stalin, the Belorussian Partisans, and Hitler. My mother, her parents, and family and friends, were trucked “like cattle,” by my mother’s recollection, from labor camp to labor camp, with the fortunate few surviving to find access to food, clothing, education, and church services at the DP camps in Germany.

Holy Trinity Monastery was some three hours without traffic from my childhood home, mostly along a desolate stretch of I-90. To me that ride always was the future route of my babushka’s final resting place. Somehow, referring to it being “Далеко. Далеко.” made it easier to think about that last drive following a speeding hearse on the fiercely policed interstate.

I was days shy of my 27^th birthday when my babushka died at my parents’ home, and thereby expected to drive the car. The Ukrainian-American funeral director, who respected Slavic customs, illegally agreed not to embalm her and not to seal the casket, which would remain open overnight at the Monastery. I feared a State Trooper pulling over the hearse and discovering this carefully rehearsed crime.

Bringing my babushka “home” to Jordanville didn’t seem “Далеко. Далеко.” It seemed endless. She’d been waked, in an open casket, at my parents’ home where she spent the night in my parents’ dining room ahead of the voyage to a hamlet in the town of Warren, Herkimer County, New York, at the intersection of New York State Route 167 and County Route 155. It’s nowhere to most people, but a sacred destination to thousands of Russian Orthodox Christians. Settled by European Americans after the Revolutionary War, the name was derived from the nearby Ocquionis Creek, which was used by settlers for baptisms and likened to the Jordan River. Jordanville is now best known for the Monastery. Most Russians from my grandparents’ and my mother’s wave of immigration in 1950 refer to the Monastery and cemeteries simply as Jordanville.

When taking our son Michael Alexander to his first sleepaway camp on Lake Oneida this summer, I drove past the exit to Jordanville. Guilt poured over me, even as my focus was the pending lifetime adventure for my son and the complex emotions that accompany leaving your child alone for the first time. I had to fight an impulse to make that left-hand turn. It’s been too long since I’ve been to Jordanville. I’ve taken my husband Mike to see the graves of my father and my maternal grandparents, but haven’t, in nearly nine years, taken my son.

Далеко. Далеко. Jordanville is about four hours from my home of two decades in New York City, as I-90 cuts through western Massachusetts making the route from there an hour shorter. It may be far, especially for a family that has to rent a car, but it’s forever close, imprinted on my psyche.

“Tsar Mikhail” and the Passion for Old World Techniques and Caviar

In Memory of Alexandra Dimitrievna (Dimitrieva) Grishaev: March 3, 1913 (born) March 4, 1998

My 6-year-old son Michael Alexander can crack an egg in one action without scattering a single shell fragment. He knows how to judge a batter’s consistency, and that every effort may require slightly different proportions of ingredients added gradually to attain it.

Yes, he’s very fortunate to attend a school and other programs that recognize the need for children of all genders to learn the vital life skill of cooking from natural, whole ingredients. However, his talents emerged the very first time he begged to assist me in the kitchen. City kids have the benefit of witnessing every household task rather than being holed away in a basement. He had a knack for basic culinary and baking techniques that instantly reminded me of my own youth.

That innate ability is handed down from the great-babushka (grandmother) he never met.

My babushka, Alexandra Dimitrievna (Dimitrieva) Grishaev, was a professional baker and her culinary excellence is lauded nearly two decades after her death by the hundreds of people she served during huge parties, memorials, and other special events in her own home, my parents’ home, and other peoples’ homes for some 40 years. At the first major memorial after her death on March 4, 1998, I helped my mother serve dozens of people at home, preparing a fresh salmon dish that went from pan to table within seconds to retain the interior succulence and the exterior crust of the fish. I also helped my mother prepare hundreds of filled and folded blinchiki (Russian crêpes) for the post-funeral meal at the monastery where she’s buried. Any stress that normally comes preparing such delicate foods in volume was absent, as if my babushka was watching over me.

When my son helps in the kitchen, I am draped in memories of baking and cooking with my babushka and degushka (grandfather), as these were not activities assigned to one gender in my childhood home. My degushka, Grigori Ustinovich Grishaev, hand ground all the grains for his proprietary black and rye breads. The two of them made sausage from select meats and casings they bought from a German delicatessen by using a hand grinder clamped to the countertop. He took the fish he caught to a local smoker. They brought home five-gallon containers of raw milk from the monastery where they’re now buried, and made their own smetana (sour cream), masla (butter), and pakhta (buttermilk.)

As foodies, celebrated chefs, and other conscious eaters now relish to these old world ways, I lament how many Americans were raised with food products from boxes and cans. I am forever grateful to my babushka and degushka for passing down these traditions that have manifested in the правнук (pravnuk) they would have surely called Tsar Mikhail.

My maternal grandparents lost all three of their infant sons, the eldest named Mikhail (Michael), to starvation and disease. Survivors of wars and terror regimes who were unable to scrap food for their own children do not take for granted the gift of foraging and preparing their own food. Even if my son is undergoing a stage of rejecting certain (if not most foods that aren’t comprised of the finest raw fish and caviar) I take comfort in his ability to create foods from real ingredients just like his grand-babushka.

Life Lessons From Babushka: Why I Bake Like I’m Blind and I Swim Like a Fish

I ignore recipes, even for baking. (Unless I am trying to execute something with a high failure rate like flourless chocolate cake for guests.) I'm able to understand most non-English speakers enough to determine whether they are in eminent peril and whether I can and should try to help. I've long been a tireless advocate for teaching infants and toddlers to swim without any floatation device. Even if I still panic when I see it, I know that head injuries can create a massive pool of blood without being life-threatening.

IMAGE: My mother and my babushka, 1949.

All of this, and much, much more I owe to my babushka who played one of the most critical and influential roles in my early childhood.

My mother’s mother, Alexandra Dimitrievna (Dimitrieva) Grishaev, was born March 3, 1913, in Dubrovka, a village in Vitebsk Oblast, Belarus. She died one day after he 85^th birthday on March 4, 1998, in Wilbraham, Massachusetts. (You can grasp why this week is the toughest for my mother.) After decades of suffering, including losing all three of her sons as infants in the 1930s, watching many of her closest relatives and friends brutally murdered, toiling on the verge of starvation in various prison camps, and nearly drowning after being forced to walk a plank en route from Germany to England, she spent her last decade invalid, unable to speak or walk. My mother was her primary caregiver, after the two of them spent more than two years caring for my dying maternal grandfather, who also was bedridden.

Nobody escapes reigns of terror and mass murders without suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, but my babushka was generally able to repress any obvious psychological impact throughout my early childhood. I was a toddler, maybe 2-years-old, the first time I’d witnessed her in an emotionally fragile state. My mother, father, and degushka (maternal grandfather), had gone to the maternity hospital, and I was home with babushka. She was giving me a bath. Always eager to be in water, I recall babushka signing to me in a joyful, buoyant voice. The telephone rang, and she ran to answer it, in the days before cordless phones were ubiquitous in suburban homes. She returned, kneeled down beside the tub, continued washing my hair, and resumed signing. But the tune had become funerary, something anyone, even a very young child, who has experienced Russian Orthodox mourning would immediately recognize. My mother had lost the baby. Of course my babushka mourned properly and purposefully at burials and memorial services, but with a powerful voice that conveyed respect for tradition and the deceased. This was different. It wasn’t until fluid had filled her brain and dementia went undiagnosed beyond treatment that she would revert to that desperate, rote, haunting sound.

Because of my babushka’s unflappable resilience and adoration of children, I lived a blithe childhood, owed to her tenderness and unconditional love. I recall the intensity of her smile, knowing she was there to nurture and protect me.

One of my fondest and most vivid memories is kneeling on a high stool to reach the counter while making blinchiki (crepes not to be confused with blini, which are more like pancakes). (Legally) blind, likely from a combination of typhoid fever and near-drowning, my babushka didn’t rely on recipes, even when working in a bakery or preparing feasts for hundreds of people. She taught me how to measure and add ingredients gradually by judging the texture of the batter, a skill that I’ve gratefully carried down to my son.

Babushka made the cakes when we celebrated my “burzdays.” Raised speaking mostly Russian and reading and writing mostly English, I’ve always been proficient in what I joke is “Immigrant” or “first-generation English.” Russian-speaking women have approached me countless times on subway platforms asking in Russian how to get Corbin Place. I’d have to apologize in Russian, saying I only know that the B train goes to Brighton Beach. A couple months ago, an elderly Chinese woman who spoke no English, walked directly to me as I exited a downtown 6 train at Spring Street. Somehow, I figured out she needed to get uptown, so I walked her to the proper entrance and had the attendant scan her MetroCard to prove that she’d just swiped at the wrong platform. She smiled, nodded, and clenched my hand, reminding me so much of my babushka. Tourists seem to sense this, as I’ve somehow directed people to their destination without speaking the same language. About 20 years ago, I interjected when I heard emergency room staff say they needed a German translator for a newly-immigrated Polish family. Without fluency, even proficiency, in Polish, I managed to translate enough to ensure the elderly patriarch saw an orthopedist for the leg and hip injuries he’d sustained in a fall, rather than the cardiologist the staff suspected he needed.

Because they didn’t have YMCAs in prison camps and displaced persons camps, my mother never learned to swim, though she loves and does not fear the ocean. Knowledge of my babushka’s near-drowning (along with my affinity with immersion in all bodies of water) were enough to convince me that swimming is one of the most vital life skills. My babushka would be gratified to see my son swim with great confidence and zeal. I started taking him to public swimming pools when he was just a couple months old, much to the criticism of other mothers, caregivers, and city park employees, including one who asked for name and contact information.

One of the most terrifying memories from my adolescence was finding my babushka lying in a pool of her blood at the bottom of her basement stairs. While she assured me she would be fine as she vigorously grasped my hand, I called my father, who – based on his experience growing up in a rough Newark, New Jersey slum and fighting in two major wars -- reassured me that “all head injuries are like that. There’s always a lot of blood.” While I always worry, I am not squeamish and can pull it together enough to seek proper medical attention at the sight of vast quantities of spilled blood.

My babushka is with us in spirit. Her exuberance and unrivaled talents couldn’t be squashed by a generation or two subjected to Americanization. Oh, how she and Michael Alexander would enjoy each other. And my husband Mike would never get enough of her piroshki, as my humble version needs practice. I’m sure Mike would advise me that with practice, I could master the art and do hers justice. Maybe I’ll make that a goal once Michael Alexander accepts that dumplings are a food just like sushi.

The Specialist and The Undertaker

“I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there's a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don't treat left nostrils, it's not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there's a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

It seems finding the right medical attention would have been easier in 1880 Russia than it is now for my mother in 2015 Western Massachusetts. At least 135 years ago, there was some humor to be culled from the absurdity of the process.

My mother has been ill with a few possibly related symptoms. It’s easy to jump to conclusions, and naturally the worst-case scenarios plague me day and night.

I’m not a doctor, so I cannot diagnose and treat her. The problem is the person “treating” her isn’t a doctor either. Trapped in Western Massachusetts, she is limited by the number of medical practitioners she can chose from without having to travel to Boston or New York, or Paris or Vienna, which she doesn’t want to do, at least not for repeat visits.

The utter incompetence wrangled in outright arrogance of the Western Massachusetts “medical community” astounds me. My mother has been mistreated in so many ways. I’m often tempted to find a lawyer to make the case for medical negligence, even abuse.

Whether it’s personal or just the way this small-town system disrespects the elderly, my mother sees a physician’s assistant rather than a medical doctor. The practice claims this is all she deserves, despite have Medicare along with a pricy state plan my father had paid into for decades as a state university professor. My mother says this non-MD is “nice,” but yet every time she leaves that office her health continues to decline.

Meantime, my mother has been banned from one of the few specialist offices in this insular community, because she went to see another specialist, one time. It is against the “office policy” to “allow patients back after they have left the practice,” say the churlish staff who command the phones and act as gatekeepers for anyone with any potential intelligence.

For my mother, the challenge of finding doctors to treat her among these parochial confines, is complicated and restricted by an abundance of those who have failed to diagnose and properly treat both my mother’s parents, and my father. All three arguably suffered more than required and died prematurely due to a lack of proper medical attention, even negligence. My mother had been encouraged to file negligence claims. If only for fear of being further ostracized from the Western Massachusetts pond of medical professionals, she refused to take any legal action.

Yesterday, when I called her from my office to check on her latest and most alarming symptom, I asked if she’d made a specialist appointment. After enduring inane phone calls with the office that refuses to allow patients who have “left the practice” back, I embarked on a search for an office with any semblance of compassion.

I finally found another specialist practice, with a far less surly receptionist who heard my plea for my mother’s immediate health woes. Her symptoms constitute what merits a 911 call, but she’ll never make the trip to the ER or consider the post-insurance expense of an ambulance. Meantime, her “primary care” office, by denying her visits with a physician, repeatedly dismisses these critical red flags.

In the midst of this painful conversation -- she was choking back tears and riddled with anxiety and I was mustering any ounce of emotional strength to not openly and loudly weep, instead gnawing the insides of my mouth to keep mum – she shifts gears.

“I know you don’t like taking about funerals,” she opens her new train of thought. This has begun many conversations that have lead along a somber path in my mind and heart, and she knows that.

“But I have to make a decision about a pre-payment I made …”

I’ll abort the conversation, as the minutae of this doesn’t add any substance to the story.

Many hours after my unsuccessful attempts to answer her financial advice query, my husband -- who is far wiser and better equipped to advise her on such matters – managed to elicit her sardonic humor as he explained that her pre-payment was “safe.” She joked that perhaps she’d selected the wrong coffin color, as her eyes are blue, and they’d be closed anyway. I lack the disarming charm to win her jest.

As my husband puts it, “all she knows is death.”

From her early childhood, as the sole surviving sibling, watching her youngest peers, family, and other loved ones, shot down, blown up, brutally murdered, or die from starvation or exposure to elements, it’s no wonder this obsession with death seems “normal” to her. Moreover, none of the lives taken during her early years in prison and work camps, and on the run from various enemy factions, have any real existence after death. There are no marked graves. She has vague recollections of which oblast (region) some were dumped into mass graves. There was no opportunity to mourn properly, to practice any ritual, to honor the dead in any way, at the time of their death.

Even in her “free” life as an American, she has witnessed decades of anguish and torment, especially with the extended illnesses of her parents and her husband, all of whom she cared for alone, at home. She spared no expense for their funerals, but is frugal planning hers, aside from wanted to be sure limo services, taking her survivors 180 miles to and from her home to the monastery, are paid for.

To her, the right of burial is a great honor. I just wish I could make it easier for her. Coming from a very different perspective – one of weakness and a lack of the real-life experience that most people in a violent world must endure -- I empathize, but so detest the business of death in the United States, and want no part of it. For her, even the most gruesome of “parlors” offers a dignity that doesn’t exist during war or in death camps.

By the time I was my son’s age, 5½, I’d attended dozens of funerals with open caskets. After all, it’s just an extension of Russia’s death-laden folktales or skazki. And those are for children.

Vladimir Propp's The Historical Roots of the Magic Tale (1946) was criticized for being too dependent on Western scholarship and, worse yet, placing Russian narrative in a global context. Written 18 years after his Morphology of the Folktale, which was panned for being too formalist, Propp aimed to prove that folktales originated in ritual, especially initiation and funeral rites. In order to avoid prison and losing his professorship, Propp’s subsequent work, Russian Heroic Epic (1958), would take on a more Marxian, even Marxist, tone. But seven years before his own funeral, Propp returned to the acceptance and explanation of calendrical ritual in Russian Agrarian Holidays (1963).

To this day, I dream of mass graves I have never seen, but was told about as a young child, as well as funerals, past and future. My science-focused son speaks frankly and openly about death and dying, even as it relates to humans. But he has yet to ask me about a funeral. Trust that with my own myth-steeped experience, that’s the “big talk” I most dread as a mother.

The Binds of Birthplace and Social Aspiration

Certainly I cannot compare my early childhood with my mother’s, as by all human standards I have been extremely fortunate. Yet we both were plagued by very similar social pressures, brought on by our very different circumstances of birth, manifesting in stereotypical opposites.

A first generation American born into the middle class, only because my maternal grandparents and my parents worked around the clock at menial jobs and spent as little money as possible, I envied the new money spendthrift heyday of the 1980s and loathed the old money elitism of established New England.

Constantly reminded that I was not like the other kids, whether it was shopkeepers claiming I had a German accent or girls teasing me for wearing off-label clothes, I quickly developed a complex further exacerbating my abnormal behavior. My early attempts at embracing a preppy look were thwarted by my inability to convert prominent Eastern European features into generic Waspiness. My Sperry Top-Siders from Marshalls were “irreugular” (the wrong shade of stone) and my whale print raincoat wasn’t reversible and maybe not even real vinyl.

I was barely a tween when I learned about David Bowie, and from the son of a Russian Orthodox priest. I’d found my real cultural identity, the one I still embrace, before I understood many of the concepts that defined it. As I learned everything I could about the history of counter culture, I was baffled at how my mother escaped any brushes with the celebrated 1960s youth movement. How could she choose to become a social conformist over a free spirit? It made no sense to me that someone who’d been persecuted and oppressed from birth would opt out of the counter-culture and drop into the normative.

Not to undermine all her struggles of assimilating into American society, as her first years in the United States brought on suicidal thoughts. But owing to a regulation hottie status maintained by a daily diet of three hard-boiled eggs and three small oranges, my mother blossomed into the prototypical high school sweetheart with movie star looks. She ruled the workplace in high fashion and perfectly coiffed hair, her bosses inviting her on their family getaways, gifting her with golf clubs and pardoning her days off. She effortlessly switched careers, without worry of scoring her next job in a hetero-normative marketplace where a bright, educated woman with an exotic name and a flawless complexion would always be hired.

For years I’d be told by people, mostly men, my mother had worked with, studied with or socialized with in her younger years, that “she was so beautiful,” even “the most beautiful woman,” and of course with a “figure to die for.” This often was punctuated by “and you look just like your father.” It was exactly what an insecure, self-conscious teenage girl did not need to be told.

Somehow I was, by my physical imperfections, cursed by my Eastern European heritage while my mother had transcended the ideal of American beauty.

It’s taken me decades of feeling inadequate and inferior to my mother’s enviable appearance in her younger years (she lost weight during her pregnancy with me due to illness and complications and was stunning and slender immediately after my birth), to realize how we could have chosen such different social aspirations.

My mother’s desire to be a typical American teenager is born from her lack of any identity, any access to clothing or amenities of any kind and any connection to a society, as a young child. My exposure to the 1980s stock- and real estate-market wealth explosion (and implosion), as well as the old guard New England mainstay, would fuel my ongoing passion for a pop art, post-punk rebellion.

I am ashamed when I curse America, knowing how being born here is a privilege, particularly for someone of my family background. Still, I see how this country continues to force outsiders into assimilation and how my mother’s success at gaining one-time social prominence has made it more difficult for her to cope with the struggles of post-traumatic stress and survivor guilt as she now lives in (largely self-imposed) isolation. After giving up her own life to care for at home her sick father and then her ailing mother and then my cancer-stricken father, she never has regained any ambition to live the American dream.