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 Great Date Debate and What’s in a Name?

My mother was born in somewhere in Vitebsk Oblast in Belarus. A birth certificate later issued in Germany lists Lagi, the village where her father was born, as her place of birth. But my mother says she was born in another nearby village where her maternal grandmother lived at the time. (I’ll get into the geographic significance later.) To the best of her recollection, she was born June 21st or 23rd by the Gregorian calendar (now internationally the most widely used civil calendar) in either 1936 or 1938. As a Russian Orthodox Christian, my mother observes holy days, or moveable and immovable feasts, by the Julian calendar, a reform of the Roman calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC. The Julian calendar served as the civil calendar in some countries until as late as the 20th century. But her birthday, for all practical intents and purposes, has been July 5th since she immigrated to the United States in 1950. It has nothing to do with the differences between the two calendars. “When my father was interrogated, when we were prisoners in Germany (circa 1946), he had made a mistake about (some other fact) and he got scared and that's what he gave as my date of birth,” she explains.

The notion of a birthday being a movable feast would be social sacrilege to the typical American today. As a first-generation American who was raised Russian Orthodox, I’ve long been bewildered by the American obsession with one’s own birthday after age 10 or so. That some people promote their “birthday week” on social media, inviting all their Facebook “friends” to attend multiple celebrations in their honor is at odds with how I was taught to treat that day. It wasn’t until I moved to New York that I encountered the very common practice of inviting out other people with the expectation that “friends” will pay not only for their own food, drink and entertainment, but also pick up the tab for the person celebrating a birthday. I’d known only the social custom of treating the people you invite out as guests, regardless of the occasion. This behavior has now extended even into business relationships. A recent interaction with a wealthy (“I’m more mass affluent than upper affluent, by New York standards,” he bragged) work “source,” who invited me to meet for drinks and then made it a point to say he “relies on reporters to buy him drinks,” rattled my roots in etiquette and egoism. In the tradition carried down by my mother, it is self-centered and self-congratulatory to focus on one’s own birthday. It’s the Saint’s Day which is feted, but as a religious feast, not as an opportunity to receive gifts.

Luba is short for Lubov (more commonly transliterated as Lyubov), and means Love. Along with Faith (Vera) and Hope (Nadezhda), Love is the youngest of three daughters of Saint Sophia the Martyr. The girls were named after virtues mentioned by Saint Paul in 1 Corinthians 13. Born in Italy, Sophia is venerated by all the Eastern Orthodox churches. The story goes that Roman Emperor Hadrian (117-138) ordered the three young girls to be tortured by being burned over an iron grating, then thrown into a hot oven and finally into a cauldron with boiling tar. Lubov was tied to a wheel and beaten with rods until her body was covered with bloody welts. Sofia was forced to watch as her three daughters were beheaded. During my mother’s own lifetime, her father watched as his sister and mother were brutally tortured and killed. My mother herself witnessed countless brutal murders and sudden deaths of many of her loved ones and fellow ethnic Russian friends throughout her early child. My mother still lives her life as a martyr, sacrificing everything for her own daughters. This, after caring at home for her father, her mother and her husband, while all three suffered debilitating and consecutive illnesses over a period of decades.

I, too, was named after a martyr, or holy sufferer, Natalia (Natasha is the most common Russian diminutive and is my legal first name), the wife of Saint Adrian, also known as Hadrian, or Adrian of Nicomedia, a Herculean Guard of the Roman Emperor Galerius Maximian. They were married for a year before being martyred March 4, 306. March 4 (by the Gregorian or as my mother calls it “American” calendar) is the day my maternal grandmother died.

Such details have been a prominent part of my life, and often the topic of ridicule by those who shun any such coincidence as evidence of some greater force in the universe. This is why I rarely speak publicly about mysticism or other spiritual pursuits for conscious awareness of an ultimate reality. My study of Russian literature was one of the few periods of my life when I could indulge such ideas and examine, from a scholarly perspective, the deep, layered meaning of names, dates and anything that can be tied to a person’s destiny. Readers of 18th and 19th century Russian literature know that names are extremely significant and are chosen deliberately and carefully. Perhaps the most blatant name symbolism is found in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Kara come from the Turkish meaning "black" and maz in Russian means "paint" or "smear,” so the name is loosely (or tightly, if you choose to make the argument I did in undergraduate essays on the novel) means smeared in black or, more symbolically and obviously, just destined to darkness or cursed. Though in the years since I left grad school I’ve meet a shocking few people who have read this literary masterpiece, it is interwoven into the cultural fabric of all our lives via its influence on a cross-disciplinary group od highly influential figures including Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Cormac McCarthy and Kurt Vonnegut. The Brothers Karamazov is one of the most profound and complex ethical debates of God, free will and morality, and the meaning behind each name is an intrinsic part of the intricate story that frames the intellectual discourse. The exploration of the dialectic is not undermined, but enhanced, by an appreciation of and respect for the chosen names.

 “I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.” _ Part II, Book V (Pro and Contra), Chapter 3 (The Brothers Make Friends.)

Oh, if only.

More like this:

"I'm a Karamazov... when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn. Let me be cursed, let me be base and vile, but let me also kiss the hem of that garment in which my God is clothed; let me be following the devil at the same time, but still I am also your son, Lord, and I love you, and I feel a joy without which the world cannot stand and be." _ Dmitri (Mitya) to Alyosha, saying he has fallen in love with a "low woman,” Grushenka, Book III (The Sensualists), Chapter 3 (The Confession of a Passionate Heart.)

Now for a little comic relief. In her single years, my mother had a male admirer who called her Grushenka. She took great offense, because the lusty character is a depicted as a contemporary Mary Magdalene. My mother, a virgin until she married my father, viewed herself as the opposite of a Grushenka. Most women might have considered the comparison a compliment. Dostoyevsky’s Grushenka evolves from a free spirit to a faithful companion who accepts her role in the murder of Fyodor and agrees to share the guilt with Dmitri, only to become the personification of the ideal Russian woman. No wonder Marilyn Monroe wanted to play her in the movie.