R.I.P. grandma

Grandma went and died yesterday. Rather surprisingly so, she was quite fine the day before. I mean, she'd been saying that she is gonna die real soon now for as long as I remember her, first rarely and lately a lot more often, but I didn't expect her to actually do it. She was 91.

One should not write bad things about dead people, and I am coming up short on good ones, but I feel like writing anyway. Well, for one thing she was fairly bright. She was not very nice, was very deficient in social skills and even more so in moral fiber, and never had anything good to say about anyone, but she was mine. She loved us all (her family) very much, but she never liked us. I think that for the most part the feeling was mutual.

I have always wondered what's going on in her head, kind of tried to understand her point of view, but never could. What was it like to grow up as the seventh and youngest child in a family where nobody had much time to pay any attention to children, and then watch that family being ripped apart by various fluctuations of Polish-Russian border? If we are concerned about what children learn from violence on TV, then what does a 6-year-old child learn from watching Polish officers torture her brother in front of her?

She spent her childhood in a border zone on the Russian side, in a village called Kublichi. Her older brother and sister lived just a few kilometers away in other villages, but then the border came between them and she never saw them again. Her other four siblings eventually went to study to various cities and always needed a special permission to come home to visit their own family, because it was too close to the border.

I guess harsh times often make harsh people. Places, too.

She went to St. Petersburg to try to get into the university to study physics. Why physics, she has never managed to explain to me. It's not like she ever expressed any interest in physics during my lifetime. She did not get in, but was offered a place in the department of biology, which she didn't take. She worked for a year and then applied to the university of technology to study economics, and got in. (In Russia there is a M. Eng. economics degree for some reason; I am not sure if there is anything like that in any English-speaking countries; I suppose the closest Finnish equivalent would be tuotantotalous in TKK).

She had a boyfriend. I know very little of him. I know they lived together for seven years, and then he was killed during the war.

The Russian-Polish border moved again in the beginning of WWII, and after that nobody ever saw grandma's mother or four oldest siblings. All that remained of them was the two oldest children of the two oldest sisters, who somehow made it over the border under the cover of the night.

Grandma worked, was evecuated somewhere (somewhere fairly close to where her only two surviving sisters were avacuated), came back to St. Petersburg, married my grandfather, and started what was a very impressive career for someone who is female, Jewish and from a very wrong kind of a family. She had my mom, and was disappointed that the kid did not turn out exactly like she wanted. Not that my mom turned out badly in any way, grandma was just a bit of a control freak.

When I was born she retired, and wanted a second try at raising a perfect child. I turned out to be even more of a disappointment than mom. Mom would nod reassuringly to whatever grandma said and cheerfully trot off to do whatever the hell she wanted; I would actually argue with grandma all the time, and then do whatever I wanted, too.

She had a very strong mental picture of what is proper and right and how the world should work, and then tried to bend the world to her influence. It did not necessarily work. When I was a kid I liked to put a lot of salt on my tomatoes. Grandma always chewed me out for that, because that much salt is unhealthy. At the same time she tried to make me put salt on my cucumbers, although I did not want any salt on them. My attempts to explain to her that putting double salt on tomatoes and none on cucumbers would result in an accpetable total, but she did not quite get it (the difficult part being how can anyone eat cucumbers without salt). That was grandma at her most classic. "You do this like this, and that like that because it's the right way".

When I was a kid grandma lived with grandpa and her sister Musya. Musya deserves a separate post, which I will write someday. She was everything that grandma was not, and had a rather big formative influence on my mother and myself. Musya, I think, was the only person that grandma could talk with about abstract things and life in general. After Musya died when I was 13 grandma gradually learned to talk with me, but I am afraid I was a rather poor substitute.

I remember talking about God with her (not sure why, because neither of us believed in him). She said that she does not believe in God, because if a God existed he would never let her mother and four siblings and their families be murdered. I found this to be a rather weak argument against the supposed existence of an omnipotent being and said: "But haven't you considered that maybe a God exists and maybe he just hates you?". (Yes, grandma was not the only one lacking social skills in our family.)

She was an extrovert with poor social skills, which is an unfortunate combination. She also sort of did not believe in friends, even though she had some. In the last few years she kept telling me how family is very important, and friends are not at all, and simultaneously complained about how lonely she was in spite of being constantly visited by all the family and how nice it would be to have somebody to hang out with. I urged her to call her friends, but she would say that they surely have something better to do and that she does not want to be forward and force herself on them.

Her friends (the few that she had) were, of course, self-selected from the kind of people who would keep calling and visiting you even if you never call them back, and were in fact pretty nice.

She was all for sexual morality and often claimed not to have had sex ever. (Mom was apparently born with the help of the Holy Spirit.) She was much against premarital sex and premarital relationships too, which was kind of funny from a person who lived with a guy for seven years in the thirties without the benefit of visiting the marriage office. I suspect that for her living together was sort of like being married, so she did not regard that as premarital sex. When I turned 23 or 24 she suddenly turned from being concerned about me spending too much time with men to being concerned about spending too little. She disapproved of all my boyfriends on general principle, although she has only ever met one of them, and tried to set me up with other guys, to the point of giving my phone number to strange young guys that she happened to like (Russian interpreters in hospitals and suchlike).

She was passionate and vengeful. She hated Germans to the point where I would not trust her with a gun in Germany. She also hated German shepherds for some reason. She also hated Communists, but less so, because they have managed to kill only a few of her family members whereas Nazis killed a lot more.

She had a strong anti-intellectual and even anti-abstract streak in her, which grandpa shared. They did not own a lot of books, and grandma has often suggested that we should burn most of ours, too. When they borrowed books to read, grandma wanted to read only about the things that she knew already, and read only the books set in Russia during the time she lived there. She scoffed at my suggestions that she try to read for example Shakespeare. "But this has nothing to do with our life," she said.

In spite of mostly not being interested in things outside of her normal realm she liked to travel. Too bad she was too old to see much of the world after she left Russia, because she would have liked to. She's been to Israel and Canada and New York and Florida and California, though.

In a strange contrast to her usual anti-intellectualism she was quite interested in all sorts of new inventions. She liked to surf the Net. She asked me how TCP/IP works a few years ago, and mostly understood the explanation. She talked quite often about how one of the main reasons for her to live now is to see what kind of new things will be invented in her lifetime. She also often told me how the first radio came to their village when she was 10, and how far we have come from there.

Now I pretty much know that something really important that she would have liked to see will be invented in the next few month. Murphy's law or whatever.

Rest in peace, grandma. Although, knowing you, it's extremely unlikely.