my grandmother: 4 posts

I was enchanted by the premise of “Grandmas Project” as soon as I read about it in the New York Times. It is a web series in which film directors document their grandmothers as they cook. The women also share their stories, dreams, aspirations and give advice, and these short 8-minute films are so tender and heartwarming that watching them makes me feel as if I’m cooking with my grandmother Valentina. Although my cooking lessons come from diverse sources, learning from Valentina gave me a deeper understanding of food as a way of connecting with others, and that’s exactly what makes “Grandmas Project” so compelling.

Valentina learned cooking a young woman married to an army officer and stationed in a military town in eastern Ukraine. Living in the shared housing, she met other “army wives,” who hailed from different parts of the Soviet Unions and whose lessons gave her cooking a multicultural flair. Some of Valentina’s signature dishes were Georgian spicy soups, Armenian stewed vegetables and Tatar meat pies. She also had a big collection of pickled vegetables, which in her recipe books were marked as “from Zulia, Dagestan” or “Natalya, Saratov.” When we prepared these pickles together, Valentina told me about her friends, and even though she had no news from these women for many years, it felt as if they were present.

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It was a few days before Easter when I arrived in Ukraine in 2014 to stay with my grandmother, Valentina. Taking advantage of being together for the first time in years for this holiday, we prepared a large feast, colored eggs with onion peels and baked paska, a brioche-like Easter bread.  I became obsessed with photographing every part of our preparations, making my grandmother laugh. She didn’t understand what was interesting about recording everything. I didn’t understand it myself at the time, but I felt that I had to capture as many of my impressions as possible. Ukraine was going through a painful period as Russia had annexed Crimea and was also supporting various separatist movements in the eastern part of the country. We lived with the sounds of gunfire from the military training grounds nearby and with bitter news from the front.

Yet, as we celebrated Easter with its powerful message of renewal and rebirth, we felt hopeful. We planted vegetables and flowers in the garden. We whitewashed our cherry trees. We waited for the blossoms to burst.

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Happy Nowruz! Happy Persian New Year! Happy Spring! Two days ago I recorded a short film for my Instagram stories about something I learned from my great-grandmother, Asya, but some of you asked me to put it into text format to be able to re-read it. Since Asya’s message is inspiring and uplifting, I thought that today would be ideal for sharing it here. You can watch the film in my Instagram highlights.

My great-grandmother Asya was born in 1915. She was a beautiful woman, with wavy dark hair, almond-shaped eyes and a Rubenesque figure. A rose-scented red lipstick was always in her purse as was a bottle of perfume. I don’t recall her using them, but she loved these items as she did her carved tortoise combs and lace collars. She was the most vivacious person I knew, always ready to crack a joke or make light of things. That trait of hers might have served her well, because being born in 1915, she lived through the dawn and dusk of the Soviet Union, with the Bolshevik Revolution, several famines and two wars in between.

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“Do you remember the scene from Anna Karenina about making jam?” asked my grandmother as we stood over a pan of raspberries slowly melting into sugar. The passage my grandmother recalled was about a newly wed Kitty introducing a new method to Levin’s household, with somewhat tense results.

“Agafea Mihalovna, to whom the task of jam-making had always been entrusted, considering that what had been done in the Levin household could not be amiss, had nevertheless put water with the strawberries, maintaining that the jam could not be made without it. She had been caught in the act, and was now making jam before everyone, and it was to be proved to her conclusively that jam could be very well made without water….Agafea Mihalovna, her face heated and angry, her hair untidy, and her thin arms bare to the elbows, was turning the preserving-pan over the charcoal stove, looking darkly at the raspberries and devoutly hoping they would stick and not cook properly.”*

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