This project seems to me both a gift from me to my grandmother - giving her the platform and voice she always wanted - but perhaps an even greater gift from her to me. Through her papers, photos, stories, and letters I am learning all about her life - all the stories I thought were lost after my mother and Harry died.
Perhaps because I share her name, I always felt close to my grandmother. I remember her as a sweet, kind woman who made me feel safe and loved when she was my babysitter.
While we were together, she would call me sweet pet names and talk to me for hours, sometimes unknowningly switching from English to German along the way. These days I imagine that the stories she told me are those I have (re)discovered among all her papers and letters.
My grandmother loved to bake, especially cookies to give to important people in her life at holiday time. My mother carried on that tradition, as do I. This year I found myself making Pfeffernusse - a German spice cookie my grandmother made every year. I haven’t made them in decades, but being immersed in my grandmother’s life inspired me to revisit the scent and taste of her kitchen.
Pfeffernusse
I don’t have very many memories of my grandmother after I was about ten years old. At that point she broke her hip. As often happens with elderly people (she was in her 80s at the time), her life was never the same. She lost most of her English and retreated into memories of pre-war Vienna. She could no longer live on her own and moved into what was then known as the Jewish Home for the Aged.
My last memory of my grandmother was visiting her at the Jewish Home a few months before she died. I had taken a course in German in college hoping it would help if my mother ever retreated to German as her mother did at the end of her life. During my visit, I was able to understand some of what my grandmother told me. She asked me if I had met her children and pointed to where she imagined them playing in the park. She was so happy in her reality. I have returned to that memory several times over the past few years - in letters my grandmother wrote several times about her happiest memories being the days when her children were young and she went with them to Stadtpark in Vienna. I feel honored to have “visited” with her there.
Young Eva and Harry in Vienna