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2001
Barnard/CBS Essay Contest -- First Prize Winner
Natalie
Buchinsky
Bronx High School of Science
A
Woman I Admire
I
watch Grandma's quick movements at the kitchen
counter, amazed at how skilled wrinkled hands
can be with a knife and potatoes. It is endless
peeling on the holidays; a world of onions, gefilte
fish, and brown potato skins. And year after year
we ask the same question. For which army is she
cooking? One year it is the American, the next
year it is the Russian. But never for the German,
someone says, and the joke goes sour. Grandma's
obsession with cooking and feeding is a universal
mystery that cannot ever be understood. She will
not sit down to eat herself, of course. Her obligation
is to the fish. And the chicken. And the salty,
yellow egg soup with a taste worth getting used
to. But after all the food has been served and
the conversation around the table drifts to things
I no longer understand, my eyes stumble upon a
lonely lump of clay sitting silently and unnoticed
in the seventh-story kitchen. It is Grandma, round
and misshapen as if molded by a five-year-old
child. Her soft, white hair strangely reflects
the kitchen's harsh fluorescent glow as she hunches
over a pot's one leftover potato. Not even privileging
herself to a knife and fork.
The
chairs are occupied by full, bulging stomachs
that rumble with laughter and recline as far back
as possible in the cramped apartment. But I am
no longer interested in how Cousin Stella gained
so much weight that Daddy thought she was pregnant.
Or how Cousin Melanie only married Eddie because
he drove a Porsche. Somehow, I maneuver around
the flailing arms, bobbing heads, and entanglement
of outstretched feet, and sneak away from the
table just as another burst of discordant laughter
cuts the hot, stale air. Drawn by curiosity into
the calm and quiet of an old-fashioned kitchen,
I find a little woman gently rocking back and
forth before an open window. A lively breeze fills
each crack in the wall with a cool, crisp September
air. A string of accented whispers that flows
from the small woman's parched lips is accompanied
by the rhythm of the refrigerator's soothing hum,
and I begin to wonder what it is she thinks about
in-between meals.
Hi
Ma, I say loudly since she refuses to wear the
hearing aid Uncle David got her last year. Startled,
the soft lump of clay instantly comes to life
as the curves of Grandma's body begin to take
on a familiar form in the shape of arms, and legs.
I cannot tell if it is the metal stepping-stool
she sits on or her worn body that creaks as she
frantically struggles to stand. Oh, Nana, my shayna
maydelah, she says, and an oddly-shaped smile
forms across her face as audacious wrinkles extend
it up to the corners of her eyes. She reaches
out to grab my hand and I am surprised to feel
the roughness of callused palms when the rest
of her skin is delicate as tissue paper. My shayna
maydelah, she repeats. How are you, my shayna
maydelah? I'm good, I tell her, but know it
is not enough and I watch as the smile melts upon
her face, drooping down to gather at the corners
of her chin. Her feather-like eyebrows arch upwards
wrinkling the worn skin above her nose and I know
she is worried because I am not sitting at the
table eating like everyone else. What's wrong
Nana, she says. The food is no good? No, Ma, I
say. The food is fine. The food is very good,
she says loudly, the watery-gray panic mounting
in her eyes. You don't like the food? No, Ma,
I say. The food is very good. It's very, very
good. What, she asks. It's good, I say. But Grandma
is not satisfied until I have let her prepare
for me my fifth helpings of potatoes, chicken,
cooked string beans and cauliflower, and fish.
She places the mountain before me on the table,
and there is nothing to do but eat. Eat, eat,
eat.
Grandma
is happy now, and seeing her eyes widen each time
I take a bite, I wonder if she can actually see
the potato being churned into little pieces inside
my mouth, and then pass down through my throat
to settle quietly in my stomach. You know I was
a famous cook, Grandma says suddenly. You know
that I was famous in this neighborhood? Yes, Ma,
I know. Sure, she continues; I was the best cook
on the whole Lower East Side. Everyone said my
chulent was the best there ever was on
the Lower East Side. My chulent is good,
isn't it. I nod and smile, remembering the time
a woman from the neighborhood begged my mom to
get her some of my grandmother's recipes. Yes,
my grandmother continues. I was beautiful too.
Sure. Very beautiful. But that was already before
the war. In Poyland, recalls the little old lady
with the Polish accent, who pronounces a "y" where
there shouldn't be one. And as I peer over the
slowly sinking mountain of chicken and potatoes,
I watch Grandma slip away for a short moment's
time as her eyes begin to wander, her eyebrows
flutter and twitch, and her mouth pinches up leaving
no distinction between her thin lips and the network
of wrinkles covering her face. I imagine she has
gone back to Poyland, and I think of a story my
mom once told me about Grandma's and Grandpa's
wedding day. It took place in a small town in
Warsaw, where Grandma was born. She was, supposedly,
the topic of gossip in Grandpa's small shtetl
because she was a working girl from the city whose
money was her own. And, as Grandma had told the
story, it was Grandpa who had fallen instantly
in love with her, though she had had many other
boyfriends. It just so happened that on the day
they were to be married, one of those other boyfriends
sent Grandma flowers with a letter, telling her
not to marry my grandfather and to marry him instead.
Ta got very jealous, Grandma would say. And he
must have, because I remember my mom telling me
he had run off when the letter came.
But
suddenly the image of a small village vanishes
and I am left staring at a mountain of cold potatoes
and a startled old woman who was, like me, thrown
back into the yellow kitchen by an explosion of
laughter invading from the room next door. Yes,
Grandma says with a sigh, picking up where she
left off. I was very beautiful. But that was all
before the war. I didn't used to look like this.
Not like this. But it was all before Hitler, you
know. Before I lost everything in the war. You
know how I was underground for two weeks, yes?
When the Germans were bombing the city? Yes, Ma,
I say; but she does not know this is my favorite
story. Sure, she continues. Two weeks buried in
an old candy cellar. With a priest, you know.
A crazy priest, and a woman with a baby. A little
baby. And the baby would cry, and cry, and cry.
You know this story? Yes, Ma, I know this story;
but she does not know I have it memorized and
know it by heart. And my sister and me, we dug
ourselves out. And the city was burning. Everything
on fire. And we had nothing left. My Grandma stops
here, her voice trailing off to mingle with the
refrigerator hum and the monotone buzzing of sounds
behind the wall. But I finish her story, and in
my mind I see her climbing over rubble and dead
bodies, avoiding the flames, sheltering her head
from fallen pieces of wood and metal, and covering
her ears from the roar of the German planes. She
had been separated from Grandpa when he heard
that the Germans were rounding up the city's Jewish
men. Grandpa had fled the city, but when Grandma
heard that he was alive and waiting for her outside
of Warsaw, she decided to follow him, promising
to send for her now only living sister when she
could. But she and Grandpa were never able to
do so, and Sara ended up somewhere in Russia after
the war. Mom says that Grandma never forgave herself
for leaving her sister behind. She never forgave
Grandpa either.
I look up and see Grandma smiling. She is happy
because I've finished eating. My shayna maydelah,
she says, and moistens her dried lips to kiss
me on the forehead. She reaches out to take my
plate, and the purple-blue veins striping her
arm remind me of narrow rivulets streaming down
from an unknown source. Carrying my plate, fork,
and knife she shuffles over to the kitchen sink
and stands on the tips of her toes to reach the
faucet. I begin to think about Grandma's obsession
with food. I think about how she survived without
very much of it for several years in labor camps
and DP camps. I think about how she got a job
in a bakery first thing when she came to America
in 1949. And I think about the dinner I was just
fed, the taste of fish and cooked string beans
still lingering on my tongue. Most of the time,
Grandma, to me, is simply the old woman who lives
downstairs, likes to talk about neighborhood gossip,
and listens to the news with the volume turned
all the way up. It is hard for me to see past
the wrinkly skin and to hear beyond the creaking
of old bones. But I am thankful for the stories
she has told me. For they allow me to connect
my small, old grandmother to a woman I never met
but that she once was, and to understand both
of them a little better.
I admire my grandmother. But not because she survived
the war and the persecution of the Nazis. Much
of this survival, I realize, was simply luck.
I admire her because she has survived the memories:
of a lost sister; a dead mother and brother; and
of a dead child, whom she calls Beryl, nisht
neboch dalaybt auf tzu vasksn, who never had
the chance to grow up. The pain of a torn family
did not stop my grandmother from building a new
one, and beginning her life again. I admire my
Grandma for staying up late to watch a television
series about World War II and a biography of Adolf
Hitler. For it is true that she had to begin a
new life, but she did not try to forget her lost
one. Despite its hurt and sadness. It is for this
strength that I admire my grandmother.
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