Personal Story, My Grandma's Hands
I’m ten. My sister is twelve and my brother is five. We all ride in a metallic gray Peugeot 605 to Kiryat Motzkin. Every Saturday we go visit our grandparents, leaving the same time every week. My sister asks my father to change the radio station. She doesn’t like that song. My little brother and I start fighting. Dad changes the station. Tension starts to build.
At some point the three of us create an unbearable racket that we don’t even notice, but Dad does. He pulls up on the side of the road, turns around and reaches his arm to the backseat. We each get a slap to the face, going by order of seating, clockwise, in the direction of the earth’s orbit.
Silence. The car is still. We have no idea where this came from.
The Peugeot slowly drives on. After two minutes of perfect quiet, we go back to our routine: three noisy children in the backseat.
I realized something at that moment: that the present is eternal, especially for kids. By the time the slaps stopped echoing against our cheeks we’d forgotten that we were meant to keep quiet.
We arrive at my grandparents’ house. Everybody says hello and gives kisses on both cheeks. My mother brings a gift—you can’t come empty-handed, even if it’s family, she would always say. There was a table covered in salads, a silver platter of fried cigars in the kitchen, and countless delicacies cooking on the stove. While the adults sit in the living room, chatting in whispered and shouted voices, I sneak into the kitchen and steal a cigar. The first one is so good that I have to go back for a second, a third, a fourth, a fif—
Grandma, who has eyes in the back of her head, shouts, “Shir-ly! Get out of the kitchen!”
After the voices speaking in different languages finish telling stories in the living room—about this man and that woman, what he said and, wait a minute, he said that?!—we finally sit down to eat. Out on the porch an oven stays on all night long, inside it an enormous pot with Saturday’s hamin. Next to it is a fridge with colorful sodas. My favorite is green soda.
At the end of the meal, all the wives of Grandma’s honorable sons retire to the kitchen to wash the dishes together, and the verbal traffic is fascinating to listen to. I come from a family that honors men, where women are sort of like servants with opinions.
The richness of the table was obvious. The coming together of the entire family every Saturday was also obvious. The fact that Grandpa took a nap was obvious. The stories, the gossip, the sporadic pretenses, were also obvious. The thing that wasn’t obvious was the life-long memories we formed, the time we got to spend together. The fact that Grandma would work for days, going to the greengrocer’s and the butcher shop, dragging around bags of groceries, spending hours in the kitchen, peeling, frying, stuffing, rinsing, and putting away, constantly in tune with her natural essence: to feed us all. The fact that Grandpa continued to lie down under cars so he could fix them and bring home money so she could continue to feed us. That’s how they got us all together around that table every Saturday, creating a regular occasion that became a memory.
Grandpa had a liquor cabinet. He liked to sip a glass of whiskey when he woke up from his nap. Then he would say a blessing to distinguish the holy Shabbat from the week ahead, kiss each child on the top of the head, and say, “Shavua tov.”
One Saturday, people started whispering about Grandpa being ill. A few days later, they cried out news of his death. Grandma left her home and moved in with another man. No one accepted him, and so no one accepted her anymore, either. She died soon afterwards. The Saturday table that brought us all together—four brothers, their wives, and thirteen grandchildren—was a thing of the past. Those aromas, those voices, the sound of her bracelets jangling as she rolled meatballs, that eternal moment, that connection—gone.
Now, years later, it’s our generation’s responsibility to make memories for our children. We’re the ones in charge of family connection, the ritual of the dining table that soothes and imbues our children with confidence, letting them know that everything is all right, everything is in its rightful place, and that the present moment is infinite.
